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What is school actually for? Most of us never stop to ask. This lecture from Academy of Ideas does — and the answer it uncovers is uncomfortable. Tracing compulsory schooling from Sparta through Martin Luther and Prussia to the reformers who brought the factory model to America, it shows the system was designed less to enlighten than to fix belief and manage populations. Drawing on Peirce and John Taylor Gatto, it exposes the hidden curriculum — and contrasts it with what real education could be: the making of a unique, original individual.
Full Video Transcript
The advent of compulsory public schooling in the West is often viewed as a sign of progress,
a development which granted all individuals an equal opportunity to become educated,
cultivate one’s cognitive faculties, and improve one’s position in life.
But this optimistic view is not shared by all.
Rather, many who have studied the history of public education have concluded that its primary role from the beginning
was not to uplift and enlighten, but to act as a form of social control.
The great American writer H.L. Mencken encapsulated this view.
that is its aim in the united states whatever the pretensions of politicians and that is its aim
everywhere else the roots of compulsory education reach back to ancient greece where spartan
children were taken from their parents and housed in military schools under the ideal of cultivating
total obedience to the spartan state the more modern form of compulsory public schooling however
originated in the 16th century in 1524 martin luther a primary figure in the protestant
revolution which amounted to a rejection of the roman catholic church in favor of the bible as
the sole authority of truth wrote a letter to the german leaders of the time urging them to
institute a mandatory schooling system luther’s letter reads as follows i maintain that the civil
authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school
if the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle
and perform other martial duties in time of war,
how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school?
Because in this case we are warring with the devil,
whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.”
Luther understood that compulsory schooling could be used to indoctrinate young minds
into the Lutheran church and sought to use state power to achieve this end.
As a result of his pleadings, numerous German states created the first modern public schools.
In many ways, Martin Luther can be thought of marking the birth of the modern schooling system.
Not only was he the first advocate of compulsory schooling, but his conviction that the state
should use its power to indoctrinate its citizens into a specific worldview helped stimulate in
Germany a climate of increasing subjugation to the state. The great historian Lord Acton
wrote of Martin Luther that he impressed on his party that character of political dependence
that habit of passive obedience to the state. Another important step in the rise
of modern public schooling arose under King William the first of Prussia who
ruled from 1713 to 1740. Integral to the maintenance of Prussia’s powerful army
during his reign was the national compulsory schooling system he
established in 1717, the first of its kind in Europe. Subsequent schooling
reforms throughout the 18th century built on this foundation and paved the
way towards the development of what came to be known as the factory model of schooling.
In her book Raising a School, Rina Eupaitis, the former Dean of Education at Queen’s University
in Canada, explained some of the features of the factory model of schooling, which continues to be
the dominant model of public schooling in the West today. In factory schools, teaching, like
the buildings, tends to be box-like and linear. Transmission teaching dominates. Standing at the
front of the classroom, the teacher transmits knowledge to the students. This kind of teaching
works best when the teacher can see everyone at once, and so, classrooms are created as a series
of boxes, the most pervasive example being one of double-loaded classrooms down a single long
hallway. The factory model of schooling emphasizes standardization of teaching, testing, and learning
rates, respect for authority over the exploration of truth, and uniformity and orthodoxy over
innovation and progress. This schooling model developed by the Prussians was so efficient at
inculcating into its citizens a worldview which benefited the Prussian state that in the 19th
century, educational reformers in the United States caught wind of it and quickly sought to
implement it in their home country. Both Calvin Stowe, one of the leading American professional
educationists in the 19th century, and Horace Mann, dubbed by historians as the father of the
American public school system, traveled to Prussia to investigate their schooling system
firsthand. Upon their return, both lobbied heavily, and successfully, for the adoption
of factory-modeled schools in the United States. Under the influence of Mann, Stowe, and other
educational reformers, many American states quickly began to develop state-sponsored compulsory
schooling systems, which crowded out the prevailing system of private and philanthropic schools
already in existence. In 1852, Massachusetts was the first to adopt such a system, and by 1900,
practically all the states had followed. Compulsory schooling elsewhere in the West
followed a similar trajectory and timeline. In 1900, every country in Europe had established
compulsory schooling except for Belgium, which followed in 1920. England, after much opposition,
implemented compulsory schooling in the late 19th century, and Canada quickly accompanied America
in implementing a system based on the factory model developed in Prussia.
Many of the educational reformers who influenced the development of compulsory schooling
were not looking to stimulate innovation, invention, and the development of ideas to
promote social prosperity, but were in search of an effective means of social control and
social engineering.
Elwood Cumberley, head of Stanford’s School of Education and influential reformer, for
example, wrote in his 1916 book, Public School Administration,
Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products, children, are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.
The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
William Torrey Harris, the United States Commissioner of Education in the late 19th century, and steadfast believer that the child was the absolute property of the government, wrote in his book The Philosophy of Education,
99 students out of 100 are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the
prescribed custom. This is not an accident, but the result of substantial education which,
scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual. Frederick Taylor Gates,
business advisor to John D. Rockefeller, who in 1903 founded the General Education Board,
which provided major funding for schools and was a big supporter of state-controlled
compulsory schooling wrote in his 1913 book the country school of tomorrow in our dream the people
yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand we shall not try to make these people
or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science we are not to raise up
from among them authors orators poets or men of letters we shall not search for embryo great
artists painters musicians nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among
them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.
For the task that we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful
one.
To train these people as we find them for a perfectly ideal life just where they are.
An idyllic life under the skies and within the horizon, however narrow, where they first
open their eyes.
To keep the student confined to a narrow horizon, or in the words of Mencken, to use compulsory
schooling to breed and train a standardized citizenry to put down dissent and originality
was the goal of many of the most influential educational reformers. To understand just how
efficient the factory model of schooling was and continues to be, at achieving this goal on a mass
scale, we can turn to an interesting essay titled The Fixation of Belief by the prominent 20th
century philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In the essay, Peirce explained how it was possible
to fix belief, not in the individual, but in the community, via what he called the method of
authority. Let the will of the state act, then, instead of that of the individual. Let an institution
be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of
the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young, having at the same time
power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated, or expressed. Let all possible
causes of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant lest
they should learn of some reasons to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be
enlisted so that they may regard private and unusual opinions with hatred and horror. One would
be hard-pressed to think of a better system for fixing belief for the purpose of breeding and
training a standardized citizenry than the factory model schooling system in existence in the west
since the late 19th century. As Ivan Illich wrote in his book, Deschooling Society,
school is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
It is not surprising that a study of 400 eminent 20th century men and women,
detailed in the book Cradles of Eminence, found that three out of every five of them
had serious school problems. Those individuals who yearn to push boundaries,
explore and create ideas invent and innovate will not easily bend to a system which attempts to put
down dissent and originality albert einstein for example found a school so suffocating requiring
in his words the obedience of a corpse that upon passing an exam he had previously failed
he found he had no desire to think about scientific problems for an entire year ignoring for a moment
the sinister motives which lay behind the development of factory model schooling in the
West, its inadequacy as an institution is conditioned upon its tendency to not only
fail to stimulate curiosity, but to inhibit or even stamp out altogether the natural curiosity
exhibited by all children. Stuck within the confines of what Reniupitis described as
windowless concrete containers surrounded by barbed wire fences looking more like prisons
than schools, students are for the most part not encouraged to explore, create, and cultivate
independence, but to sit down, listen, and accept at face value whatever is being taught. We’ll
conclude with a passage from John Taylor Gatto, former New York City and New York State Teacher
of the Year, who upon resigning out of frustration over the faults he believed to be embedded in the
very essence of modern schooling, wrote a series of books on the history and nature of compulsory
schooling. The following is a short passage from his book Dumbing Us Down, the hidden curriculum
of compulsory schooling, in which he makes a sharp distinction between what today is called schooling
and what an education should really consist of. Whatever an education is, it should make you a
unique individual, not a conformist. It should furnish you with an original spirit with which
to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap
through life. It should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing.
It should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.
Source: Academy of Ideas