Most teachers believe that education is supposed to:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
But our public school system as envisioned by its creator (Alexander Inglis) in the early 20th century was to simply to reduce as many individuals as much as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry and establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.
Inglis, in his speeches, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling is intended to halt a worldwide democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice and unity. Compulsory schooling was to thwart the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means to stop the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood from ever reintegrating into a dangerous whole.
Yep. Educators refer to this as the 'Factory model of education'. Imported from Northern Europe in the late 1800s with heavy influence from industrial Germany.
In the case of such schools (for the unwashed masses, of course), the medium is definitely the message. Uptight. Neat rows of assigned seating in non-nonsense, screwed-down desks with steel frames and hardwood tops. 'Workbooks', authoritarian teaching by rote (to a model, not to individuals), elected school boards, daily pledges of allegiance, lockstep curriculum, nearly invisible boards of accreditation, etc.
The division chair of the school of education at my niece's alma mater, Augsburg University, fully believes in the factory model of education. My niece almost switched majors over it.
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
But our public school system as envisioned by its creator (Alexander Inglis) in the early 20th century was to simply to reduce as many individuals as much as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry and establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.
Inglis, in his speeches, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling is intended to halt a worldwide democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice and unity. Compulsory schooling was to thwart the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means to stop the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood from ever reintegrating into a dangerous whole.