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500
Elder Sophists - 500 BCE
"Sophist" has become a much maligned term; however, Sophists were forerunners of modern mass education. While Sophists did not educate on the scale that we associate today with mass education, they opened the door for the common man to pursue education. Due to their itinerant nature and belief that any man can be educated regardless of social status, sophists were the mass educators of their day. Protagoras (shown here) is an example of one of the elder sophists. -
Sep 19, 1436
Gutenberg Press
Without innovations like the Gutenberg Press, books such as Orbus Pictus would be unavailable to the masses. The history of mass education is as much about the enabling technology as it is about people and ideas. -
Comenius
Much like the Sophists, Comenius was an ideological and practical forerunner of mass education. He believed that education should be open to everyone, despite their social or economic status. He also introduced 13 instructional principles that built the frame work for modern mass education. His most notable and enduring work, the Orbus Pictus, influenced western thought for centuries after its initial publication. -
Orbus Pictus
The groundbreaking work, Orbus Pictus, paved the way for mass education through the inventive use of pictures and descriptions that provided a template for modern textbooks. Organized by topics and illustrated with over 150 pictures, Orbus was the first to associate concrete pictorial representations with abstract verbal concepts. -
Industrial Revolution
Philosophically, the industrial revolution was instrumental to the development of mass education. To summarize and simplify - "Eureka! If we can produce 50 spinning wheels in 50 minutes, why don't we apply these same principles to education. How different can educating children be from manufacturing spinning wheels?" The impact of this mindset on western society and thinking can not be overstated. This mindset is still prevalent in educational thought to this day. -
Joseph Lancaster
Low costs and industrialized, systematic education were hallmarks of the Lancastrian Monitorial schools founded by Joseph Lancaster. A high water mark in the history of mass education, Lancastrian Monitorial schools were truly a direct predecessor of mass education as we think of it today. His innovative use of master tutors are clearly echoed by some of today's mass educational paradigms such as MOOCs. His innovations made the economics of educating the masses possible. -
Johann Pestalozzi
If Lancaster made the logistics of the physical classroom experience possible, it was Pestalozzi that made the education more understandable to the masses by "psychologizing instruction." His work supplemented Lancaster by applying the psychological principles of the day to educational coursework. In essence, he addressed the question, "What good is education if its freely available yet poorly understood?” -
First Correspondence Course
The idea of remote teaching was first introduced by the University of London with the advent of the first correspondence course. Interestingly enough, this first stab at distance education had many of the same downsides of modern MOOCs with only 2-3% of participants completing the course work. -
Catalog of Instructional Films
The first catalog of instructional films was published in 1910. Having the potential to reach the masses, Things started off well with Thomas Edison's proclamation that "Books will be obsolete in the schools...."; however, the movement sputtered and never gained the traction necessary to revolutionize mass education until the advent of WWII. -
Instructional Radio
Much like film, radio was heralded as the wave of the future. Even important governmental agencies such as the NEA stated that radio "will be as common as the book...." Despite the proliferation of radio among American households, these predictions of a mass education panacea failed to come to fruition. -
WWII
With the advent of WWII, mass education came into a more contemporary form, using some of the underutilized yet effective mediums of the past such as film. Large numbers of soldiers were trained en masse and at a rate that was partially responsible for winning the war. With WWII success behind them, behaviorists would dominate educational thought for years. -
Instructional Television
Although educationa TV was heralded with as much hype as the film and radio mediums that preceeded it, TV was as equally as unsuccesful at gaining traction as a medium to deliver mass instruction. -
Early Computers
In the 1950s, researchers at IBM designed the first CAI programs to be used in public schools. Due to high cost and many of the other factors that plagued similar technologies, computers were not widely used in education until many decades after their initial introduction. -
Early MOOC
The first MOOCs were a result of the Open Educational Resource movement. These MOOCs involved only a handful of universities but were the immediate forerunners of the MOOCs we know today. -
Current MOOCs
The New York Times labeled 2012 the year of the MOOC. There are currently numerous MOOC platforms such as Coursera and Udacity that reaches millions of students around the world. Despite an unprecedented audience, many of the teaching methods are hundreds of years old, and MOOCs in general have a reputation for an abysmal attrition rate.
