Literature: The Industrial Revolution: Social Changes and Education

The Industrial Revolution started, not with the industrial machine installations in England, but with trade agreements. The bourgeoisie wanted that their activities were governed by themselves, and obtained that the government couldn’t have so much intervention. They believed that this will bring a prosperous and virtuous society. Moreover, they wanted to eliminate the privileges of corporations, the tariffs and barriers to the traffics of goods and eventually the differences in legislation, languages and customs.

This indicates that the freedom of trade was an essential issue for the bourgeoisie, as it also was the free trade of beliefs and ideas. That is how, the domination of the bourgeoisie was consolidated over the other social classes. Whit this situation, “armies of free workers”, who has just their hands to live, were forced to offer their hands to the bourgeois.

With all the acceleration in production and trade expansion, The Capitalist Appropriation appeared. This means, that the capitalist gave a salary to the worker, for what he did in the labor. Several times, less than the value of the produced by him. Obviously, the capitalist earned thanks to the hard-work of others.

With all these sociial and economical changes, a new educational system started. In that time, there should be two classes of schools, “The Big scchools” for poor, and the “Small Schools” for rich. With this, we can realized how huge was the gap in differences and habits between classes.

High class’ children were forced to begin their education process early, because, as rich boys they should go farther than poor children, that’s why, they have to study more. However, children of the “Big Schools”, were taught to learn how they should work with the brain and not with hands. Capitalists knew that in few years machines and tools would became more sophisticated and they would need people with high quality of labor to operate the new machines.

This situation favored the technical education, which quickly became in a vital condition for capitalism. Polytechnics schools began. Thanks to this, the student who entered in hig school institutes, were able to start earning and living as citizens at the age of 22 or 23. But, these students could only come from the better classes.

Thus, education was defined by the needs of the dominant classes and the vision of the future in the world. In twentieth century, the Bourgeoisie found how to disguse the contradiction of classes in conflict gave in the educational field. This way, they brought the school into a technical criteria, based on the psychology of; the poor has to learn to produce and the rich has to learn to order and manage.

It’s incredible how, this situation is still working in our times. It’s clear that our educational system was design to rich and poor in different ways. However, we can not see this clearly, because the government would never recognize that they implemented this underneath the curriculum of schools. Richs, have to order poors and poors have to obey them. I could observed this very close, because I was in a private school in Vitacura and in a social risk school in Pedro Aguirre Cerda. In Vitacura children are educated to go to University, to travel and to think that they are in the top of the society triangle. They are teach to think independently and to criticized what is not fear for them. In terms of English, most of them learned it without problem, because they know they will use it. Maybe in their future job or just because they have to travel to an English speaker country. In the other hand, Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s school is educated in a completely different way. First, teachers have the wrong idea of that students cannot be more than bus drivers or garbage collectors, and so on. Students here, are educated to obey and not to discuss if something is wrong, they have to comply with what is ordered. With English, they are not very interested in learning it, because they think, when am I going to use it? But, the saddest thing here is, that our society works like this. I think our role as future teachers is to change that gap and give the opportunity to every student. This way, they could dream with go to university, with traveling and have a better life, because they CAN DO IT!