How and Why Formal Education Originated in the Emergence of Civilization

Eskelson, Tyrel C.

doi:10.5539/jel.v9n2p29

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…In other words, formal educational practices only emerged when human societies increased in size and in social and economic complexity relative to that found in traditional cultures. These practices developed (or at least increased in frequency) with the emergence of early empires and date back at least 5000 years (Eskelson, 2020 ). In these contexts, formal education was focused on training a small number of scribes in literacy and numeracy, who in turn supported the bureaucratic management of these societies.…”

Section: Cultural Emergence Of Formal Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Academic self-concepts are a feature of Neisser’s ( 1988 ) conceptual self and should be important in contexts where formal schooling is the norm and there are strong expectations for academic achievement. These are certainly the case for children and adolescents in highly developed nations today, but these are historically recent (especially where extended universal education is the norm; Eskelson, 2020 ; Goldin, 1999 ) and thus are not universally available in some developing nations and not relevant at all in traditional contexts. Some combination of culture-specific and universal self-concepts will contribute to ones’ overall global self-concept or self-esteem, but the mechanisms linking self-concepts in specific areas to overall self-concept are debated (Harter, 2006 ; Marsh & Shavelson, 1985 ).…”

Section: Academic Self-conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evolution of Self-Awareness and the Cultural Emergence of Academic and Non-academic Self-Concepts

Geary

2022

Educ Psychol Rev

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Schooling is ubiquitous in the modern world and academic development is now a critical aspect of preparation for adulthood. A step back in time to pre-modern societies and an examination of life in remaining traditional societies today reveals that universal formal schooling is an historically recent phenomenon. This evolutionary and historical recency has profound implications for understanding academic development, including how instructional practices modify evolved or biological primary abilities (e.g., spoken language) to create evolutionarily novel or biologically secondary academic competencies (e.g., reading). We propose the development of secondary abilities promotes the emergence of academic self-concepts that in turn are supported by evolved systems for self-awareness and self-knowledge. Unlike some forms of self-knowledge (e.g., relative physical abilities) that appear to be universal and central to many people’s overall self-concept, the relative importance of academic self-concepts are expected to be dependent on explicit social and cultural supports for their valuation. These culturally contingent self-concepts are contrasted with universal social and physical self-concepts, with implications for understanding variation students’ relative valuation of academic competencies and their motivations to engage in academic learning.

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Section: Cultural Emergence Of Formal Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Academic Self-conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of Self-Awareness and the Cultural Emergence of Academic and Non-academic Self-Concepts

Geary

2022

Educ Psychol Rev

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“…This led to the creation of formal education to pass literacy and numeracy skills on to the next generation of administrators. (Eskelson, 2020). Historically, the structure of formal institutions, specifically the bureaucracy, administrations, and legal systems of states, as well as religious or spiritual institutions, have had a direct relationship to what formal education is needed in a society.…”

Section: Institutions and Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Formal education is conceptualized as goal-directed instruction of evolutionarily novel concepts, skills, and abstract ideas. This definition encompasses any learning related to literacy, numeracy, scientific concept change, abstract rules and ideas, and certain forms of human coordination such as military training or using time to order society (Carey, 2000;Geary, 2007;Lancy, 2010Lancy, , 2012Lancy, , 2016Eskelson, 2020). This paper uses these conceptualizations to analyze early-modern Europe.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

States, Institutions, and Literacy Rates in Early-Modern Western Europe

Eskelson¹

2021

JEL

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The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in Western European countries during the Middle Ages were below twenty percent of the population. For most countries, literacy rates did not experience significant increases until the Enlightenment and industrialization. Two early exceptions to this broad trend were the Netherlands and England, which had achieved literacy rates above fifty percent of their populations by the mid-seventeenth century. The explanations for these divergent trends are the structural changes in formal institutions that embodied capital markets, protected private property, and overall established the initial steps in developing modern political institutions. This created incentives to invest more in schools per capita as well as incentives for a middle class to invest more in literacy and numeracy skills for a market-exchange economy that was becoming more specialized in division of labor.

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“…The first people in the region to reach the complexity that historians today call civilization. They had done this around 3100 BC and developed a civilization in which city-states formed over the next 7 centuries [24]. Before them, several independent city states existed simultaneously, some of which were in fierce competition with each other.…”

Section: Cities As a Symbol Of The High-level Form Of Human Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a smart city information system

et al. 2021

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This paper is centred around the development of a smart city information system. Smart cities use the framework of information and communications technologies to create, deploy and promote practices that address urban challenges and create, connect and enable sustainable infrastructure. This definition focuses on network deployment, transport, ICT investment, human and social capital to support sustainable community goals and quality of life by involving users of certain technologies and community-based applications in social participation. In this paper, we show that a multi-disciplinary approach is needed to address these issues, combining expertise from distributed systems, software and services engineering, network and data management and processing, crowdsourcing, sensor and update methods, social computing, as well as the collective intelligence.

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How and Why Formal Education Originated in the Emergence of Civilization

Cited by 16 publications

References 59 publications

Evolution of Self-Awareness and the Cultural Emergence of Academic and Non-academic Self-Concepts

Evolution of Self-Awareness and the Cultural Emergence of Academic and Non-academic Self-Concepts

States, Institutions, and Literacy Rates in Early-Modern Western Europe

Development of a smart city information system

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