Learning environments of the past and present

My parents and those of their generation remember a dark and gloomy place
called school. The classrooms were filled and stank of chalk dust. The students
sat at battered, old wooden individual desks and the teacher stood on an
elevated platform. The teacher did not have a familiar name. He/she was
Miss.....or Mr......, come to think of it the students' first names were also inexistent. "Robinson come out to the blackboard.." Boomed the teacher's voice.
This was a system based on fear. A student dare not speak in class, let alone
fidget or stand up without permission, furthermore it was unthinkable to question
the teacher's authority. One had to learn "the lesson" by memory and recite it to
the class. The punishment for not knowing the lesson would range from
kneeling in the corner to having the back of your hand slapped with a ruler or a
cane.
To speak about advantages of such a system has to be regarded as nonsense
but of course under such controlled discipline and authority, bullying, which is
an example of a problem in modern schools, would be unable to flourish. Things
like mental arythmatic, multiplication tables and spelling rules were known to
perfection by every student. Something that, in the diverse modern classroom of
today is unfortunately untrue.
Nowadays, the classroom is a playground or a playground is a classroom, I'm
not sure which, and I believe the students are sometimes confused. The walls
are filled with colourful stimuli and shiny technology beams. The laptops, the
digital whiteboards, desktop computers. The furnishings are funky and colourful.
Everything seems to be aimed at the fact that a pupil must never be bored. This
of course makes school a beautiful place to be and as we spend so many years
of our lives in this institution, surely it cannot be made to feel like a prison.
Perhaps though, we should take into account that the more stimuli available, the
more difficult it is for a person to concentrate on one particular thing, whatever
the task at hand may be. And the more activities available to do, the shorter
becomes the attention span of a child. They're never actually giving one
hundred per-cent to something because they are always thinking about the next
fun thing to do.
Now I'm not saying we should go back a century to the good old fashioned fear
system but I do believe we have something to learn from that system,
something that is missing from today's education. What about respect for
teachers and for fellow pupils? How many times have you felt that pupils lack
basic manners and polite forms? What about the attitude of "I can't do this, it's
boring, hard and I don't have time.." Have they really tried doing it? Have they
sat down long enough to do it? What are the consequences if they don't do it?
The answer to the latter is that in the early stages of education there are no
consequences or punishments, anything goes. It's curious because it's in the
early stages of education that all the moral principles have to be taught, the
fundamental programming of the robot, if you like.

An athlete cannot be an athlete without discipline, a doctor cannot become a

doctor without studying, so why are we bent on not disciplining children, on not
conditioning them to behave. After all I thought that the principle of education
was to prepare a child for the future, for adult life. What kind of adults will hold
the future of our world?