Castro, T

It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

Has education really evolved throughout the years?

Since prehistory, varied educational approaches have been used from generation to generation

to train others in knowledge, moral values, and skills deemed necessary to subsist in a society.

Looking back into history is a core element to understand how some of the highlights in

education from the ancient world to the XXI century can provide an insight into how far we

have progressed and how outdated some of the teaching tools and habits are.

Ancient period

Taking the ancient Greeks and Romans as the starting point, bring up the tradition of

writing and reading which have almost remained unchanged as an educational model, even

for modern-day institutions (Dhesi, 2015). Secular education in the ancient world fostered the

dominant understanding of critical thinking in academic and popular discourses mainly

originated from Greece and Rome (Tan, 2016). Between 551 and 322 BC, education was of

paramount importance as a result of the influence of ancient Greek polymath scholars

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who laid much of the groundwork in education with their well-

structured maieutic method based upon critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaborative

work, through a dialogic and intersubjective instruction.

Similarly, Leigh (2007) acknowledges that Plato and Socrates provided a model of

inquiry designed to instruct the learner in critical thinking and active learning since the person

being questioned was engaged in the questioning process and knowledge acquisition in which
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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

either the instructor or the learner possessed an open-ended question putting forth a claim or

counterclaim of the examined topic and make the students wonder about it (Grondin, 2018).

Lynch (1972) also recognized not only that learners discussed information and

research in an informal setting, rather than sitting in a classroom being lectured but also

Aristotle’s advancement in using previous collections of work to teach accurate information

and research new conclusions. This perspective enlightened the XXI century about recovering

critical thinking, autonomy, problem-solving and collaborative work as skills to survive and

succeed in current society.

First century

Although controversial, the major approach in education during the I century was

certainly the three year-ministry instruction through parables carried out by Jesus Christ, the

Master of all times, he taught a variety of people with unique talents, abilities, life skills, and

gifts; sharing lessons that could be understood by either adult or children. The account

registered in Matthew 7:28 affirms that when Jesus had finished saying those things, people

were amazed at his teachings and eventually, his teaching style with such authority really held

attention of those listening to him. Similarly, White (2000) acknowledged that the world has

always had its great teachers, erudite men whose discourses have been thought-provoking and

opened to view ample fields of knowledge, but only One stands higher than them.
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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

Medieval period

During the long period spanning from V to XV centuries, Medieval age education

came with a change of the existing academies and lyceums in the Greco-Roman world from

secular education to a dogmatic approach, kind of learners, and textbooks. What is more, the

Medieval Greek and Latin periods were based upon teaching people to use foreign languages.

The classical languages, first Greek and then Latin, were used as lingua francas (Celce-

Murcia, 1991). Although no traumatic rupture with the Greco-Roman heritage was evident, it

evolved as a result of the triumph of Christianity either by persuasion or physical force

(Walsham, 2014). Furthermore, the establishment of universities since the XIII century was

an agent of culture and education considering the empowerment of the scholastic method

(Lázaro, 2018) of teaching liberal arts, philosophy, theology, medicine, and law; which

constituted the instruction of Europe for a long time.

According to Serrano (2007), the Medieval age was a consolidation era of educational

institutions and learning academies; besides the advent of different resources aimed to diffuse

cultural affairs. It also reflected how manuscripts, codices, volumes, books, embossments,

illustrations, and libraries permeated and projected Middle Ages into the Renaissance, the

Modern Age, and the Contemporary era. Similarly, Boorstin (1997) found that because of

Latin, teachers, and students could go from Bologna to Heidelberg, from Heidelberg to

Prague and from Prague to Paris and find themselves as if they were in their hometown

classrooms; students moved from one learning community to another, without any difficulty

in communicating concepts despite the different languages. The fact that the European
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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

continent had a unique language for learning, seemed to be the first attempt of the

implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) back in the Medieval

age, due to the fact that the provision of an educational curriculum in a vehicle language

happened as the Roman Empire widened and absorbed Greek’s territory, language and culture

(Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010).

The Renaissance

Education during the Renaissance covered the span between XV and XVI centuries,

emphasizing the intellectual basis of Humanism, inductive reasoning and empirical evidence

which refashioned science, politics, art, architecture, and literature. According to Cordua

(2013), Humanism soon becomes a well-defined curriculum of study: which included

disciplines dedicated to critical thinking and secular matters such as grammar, rhetoric,

poetry, history and moral philosophy; in contrast to the disciplines of the previous era. The

main goal of Humanism was to create a universal man combined with intellectual and

physical excellence, able to function honorably in virtually any situation; concept borrowed

from the ancient polymath Greco-Roman ideal (Hause & Maltby, 2001, p. 245).

Modern period

Education in the Modern period was conveyed by many tendencies taking place in the

educational system from XVI to XVIII. During this era, the grammar-translation method, a

byproduct of the traditional teaching of Latin and Greek, was the way language was taught

during the XVIII and XIX century (Kim, 2008), with special focus on reading and writing.
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considering our present

Furthermore, three outstanding, yet definitely conflicting, approaches in education were

considered. According to Shaw (1937), the first approach corresponded to traditional

education, said to be subject-matter centered as an effort to transmit the ideals from the past;

the second approach corresponded to scientific education also called society-centered;

determined by testing and measurement of learners skills to group them homogenously in

sections for instructional aim; without considering that a heterogeneous society was waiting

for improved citizens with developed skills able to contribute to a demanding society. The

third approach, considered as the progressive education or child-centered was characterized

by learners’ spontaneity and creativeness; based mainly upon Pestalozzi, Rousseau, and

Fröbel’s early active learning pedagogy.

During this period, kindergartens took a stronghold in the United States. Vandewalker

(1918) registered the first formal English-speaking kindergarten in Boston opened by Peabody

in 1860 after visiting the first informal kindergarten in Wisconsin conducted in German as the

vehicle language; ten years later kindergartens were first instituted in Missouri as part of the

public school education system as a result of immigrants of the United States who were not

able to educate their children within the house yet they needed to integrate their children with

various language and cultural backgrounds into society (Baader, 2004). This particular event

seems to be the second attempt to implement CLIL, this time at the earliest stage of education

relaying on Fröbel’s groundwork. The supporting statement for such claim is stated by Marsh

(2000, p. 3) as “the reason why very young children seem so good at picking up language is

often to do with the naturalness of the environment around them”

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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

Contemporary era

Finally, the Contemporary era from XIX to the present time has developed at least six

opposing views about philosophies of education that are currently used in classrooms abroad.

These philosophies are mainly based upon a new generation of accredited pedagogues such as

Dewey, Montessori, Freire, Steiner, Piaget, Gardner, and Vygotsky, who have lately evolved

every facet of education from curriculum development, teaching methods, classroom

management and assessment methods (Brennen, 1999). In this sense, essentialism, (teacher-

centered), perennialism (subject-matter), existentialism (child-centered), progressivism (child-

centered), behaviorism (teacher-centered), and constructivism (learner-centered) have to be

adopted according to different teaching settings because no one method is perfect for every

teaching situation. There has been a serious shift within the field of language learning over the

last twenty years. Today the emphasis is on learners and learning instead of the teacher-

centered approach (Dinçay, 2010).

Likewise, different approaches to language teaching have been lately adopted to

compensate failures in learning the target language. Dinçay (Dinçay, 2010), Tejada, Pérez and

Luque (2013), as well as Zhou and Niu(2015) have analyzed the assets and shortcomings of

the grammar-translation method, direct method, reading method, audiolingual method,

audiovisual method, natural approach, total physical response, suggestopedia, communicative

language teaching, task-based language learning, lexical approach, neurolinguistic

programming, cooperative learning and content based instruction among others yet they have

not solved the issues regarding acquisition of target language.(Zúñiga, 2015)

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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

Current educational work is different from that of two or three decades ago, mainly

because of the development of hardware devices that emerged in 1960. Teachers now benefit

from multimedia and remote resources in the classroom, while students transform their

handwritten notes with multimedia courseware and electronic devices (Han, 2016).

Technology truly offers XXI century teachers the opportunity to create a learning

environment where language and communication are relevant, meaningful, and authentic.

Although technological advances during the Contemporary era, Matukhin, and Bolgova

(2015), acknowledge that it is unreal to achieve the level of proficiency if an insufficient

number of training hours are devoted to foreign language training. Furthermore, technology

illiteracy, lack of students’ autonomy, dissatisfaction with foreign language traditional

teaching, non-authentic material, too much formalism, lack of subject knowledge and

teaching materials, subjective or inadequate evaluation lead to a drastic reduction in

motivation and self-esteem of students, which in turn challenges the quality of mastering the

target language (Islam, 2015).

After considering all the approaches, methods, assets, and shortcomings mentioned

since prehistory, CLIL has derived with solid foundations since 1994 not as a trendy approach

but as a “panoramic x-ray” that shows a two-dimensional view of language and content

sharing the same relevance. Similarly, Coyle, Hood, and Marsh (Coyle et al., 2010) envisaged

CLIL as an innovative fusion of both content and language that involve varied models and

curricula that fits a specific context, applied in a variety of teaching strategies, with diverse

learners and levels of motivation, opposed to the split teaching and learning of language and

content carried out in a traditional classroom by the “ideological values of modernism over
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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

the past several centuries” (Mcdougald, 2018a, p. 10) that National Boards of Education are

reluctant to restructure.

The integration of contextualized content, cognition, communication, and culture

namely the four principles of CLIL, might present some challenges while mind mapping,

planning a complete CLIL lesson that includes aims, criteria for assessment, teaching

objectives, 4C’s, resources, and learning outcomes, as well as the auditing of the CLIL matrix

for effective learning, scaffolding and evaluating processes, since it requires an even inclusion

of the revised Bloom’s cognitive dimension process of lower-order thinking skills and higher-

order thinking skills (Krathwohl, 2002) as well as the equal distribution of the Basic

Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency

(CALP) (Cummins, 2008). Although these challenges can be diminished, the operational

factors described by Coyle, Hood, and Marsh (Coyle et al., 2010) could still be an obstacle if

there is lack of teacher availability, lack of teachers and students language proficiency,

number of hours devoted to first language as well as the target language, efficient integration

of language and content, and connections between curriculum and school extracurricular

activities. Furthermore, Anderson, Cuesta, and Mcdougald (2015), highlight the paramount

importance of analyzing at which developmental stage young learners are, when considering

what kind of CLIL model to implement. This suggests that the implementation of CLIL

requires more than open-minded stakeholders to switch the way content and language is

taught in a traditional classroom structure. In this sense, teacher training, careful

consideration, and commitment is compulsory in order to succeed in such an endeavor

(Mcdougald, 2015).
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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

Another relevant aspect also considered in the XXI century is the development of

human capital as an instrument to improve the production capacity of a nation in a globalized

world (Olaniyan & Okemakinde, 2008a). The knowledge and skills needed to compete in

today’s global economy with new communication styles and cultural perspectives

(Mcdougald, 2018b) are different from those upon which the XIX and XX centuries education

systems had traditionally targeted. According to Coyle, Hood, and Marsh (Coyle et al., 2010),

more changes in the world economy were also seen in several large countries such as Brazil,

Russia, India, and China which have developed a rapid increase in their economies, they have

also become connected with other worldwide communities. Meanwhile, In Colombia the

controversial law 115 of 1994 issued by the Ministry of National Education (MEN, for its

acronym in Spanish) promotes not only the development of human capital in its Article 33

item B, stating that education will generate equal opportunities and economic growth,

allowing its social transformation, but also the proclamations of communication, culture,

content and cognition throughout the articles and paragraphs, as spare pieces of CLIL and its

top purpose of 2025 placing Colombia as the most educated country in Latin America

(Ministerio de Educacion Nacional, 1994). This globalization means that communication

through lingua franca is becoming a prerequisite for the development of human capital. Suto

(2013, p. 2), also supports that “life has become much more international, multicultural and

interconnected”. In this sense, human capital demands to go hand in hand with today’s global

economy. Seidlhofer (2004) also acknowledges that the members of the expanding circle that

use English as lingua franca, are a significant expanded group who operate in an empowered

global economy which has an impact on the economy in all countries; this situation augments
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It is time to evolve education by looking to the past to construct the future yet
considering our present

human capital’s chances of job mobility and enhanced earnings (Olaniyan & Okemakinde,

2008b).

In conclusion, a walk-through history has brought up a panoramic view of the need to

evaluate some of the traditional and contemporary education system regarding its assets and

shortcomings; taking into consideration the diversified philosophic educational theories,

language learning methods, and teaching approaches based upon erudite pedagogues and

philosophers that took a stand to consolidate the effectiveness of their methods until the

release of CLIL as an innovative fusion of content and language of the XXI century,

acknowledging the principles of communication, content, cognition, and culture, as well as

the analysis of the operational factors in order to overcome the traditional, split teaching and

learning of language and content. Likewise, the scientific outlook popularized by Aristotle is

still used in today’s instruction, but the way most current classroom structure is run remains in

the same way as centuries ago. Therefore, there is a need to comply with the law starting from

the local revision of curricula and standards of the MEN, besides the empowerment of

teachers’ dedication, change of mindset, and freedom to adjust the classroom with regard to

the implementation of CLIL to learners of the XXI century and beyond.

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considering our present

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