Have we all gone through what is essentially a 'Prussian' education system?
Jay Doubleyou: the purpose of education: from china to prussia to the united states
And has the purpose of that been to make us stupid?
Jay Doubleyou: education: dumbing us down
And to prepare us for the factory system?
Jay Doubleyou: human resources as social engineering
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This is a very provocative idea.
Here's it is challenged - but the author still suggests we are being socially engineered:
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The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education'
Audrey Watters on 25 Apr 2015
“What do I mean when I talk about transformational productivity reforms that can also boost student outcomes? Our K–12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools. But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century.” – US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2010)
One of the most common ways to criticize our current system of education is to suggest that it’s based on a “factory model.” An alternative condemnation: “industrial era.” The implication is the same: schools are woefully outmoded.
As edX CEO Anant Agarwal puts it, “It is pathetic that the education system has not changed in hundreds of years.” The Clayton Christensen Institute’s Michael Horn and Meg Evan argue something similar: “a factory model for schools no longer works.” “How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System,” advises Joel Rose, the co-founder of the New Classrooms Innovation Partners. Education Next’s Joanne Jacobs points us “Beyond the Factory Model.” “The single best idea for reforming K–12 education,” writes Forbes contributor Steve Denning, ending the “factory model of management.” “There’s Nothing Especially Educational About Factory-Style Management,” according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess.
I’d like to add: there’s nothing especially historical about these diagnoses either. ...
Despite these accounts offered by Toffler, Brooks, Khan, Gatto, and others, the history of schools doesn’t map so neatly onto the history of factories (and visa versa). As education historian Sherman Dorn has argued, “it makes no sense to talk about either ‘the industrial era’ or the development of public school systems as a single, coherent phase of national history.” ...
As Dorn notes, phrases like “the industrial model of education,” “the factory model of education,” and “the Prussian model of education” are used as a “rhetorical foil” in order make a particular political point – not so much to explain the history of education, as to try to shape its future. ...
Many education reformers today denounce the “factory model of education” with an appeal to new machinery and new practices that will supposedly modernize the system. That argument is now and has been for a century the rationale for education technology. As Sidney Pressey, one of the inventors of the earliest “teaching machines” wrote in 1932 predicting "The Coming Industrial Revolution in Education," ...
Pressey, much like Sal Khan and other education technologists today, believed that teaching machines could personalize and “revolutionize” education by allowing students to move at their own pace through the curriculum. The automation of the menial tasks of instruction would enable education to scale, Pressey – presaging MOOC proponents – asserted.
We tend to not see automation today as mechanization as much as algorithmization – the promise and potential in artificial intelligence and virtualization, as if this magically makes these new systems of standardization and control lighter and liberatory.
And so too we’ve invented a history of “the factory model of education” in order to justify an “upgrade” – to new software and hardware that will do much of the same thing schools have done for generations now, just (supposedly) more efficiently, with control moved out of the hands of labor (teachers) and into the hands of a new class of engineers, out of the realm of the government and into the realm of the market.The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education'
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This is the potted history from Wikipedia:
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The Prussian educational reforms inspired other countries and remains important as a biopower in the Foucaultian sense for nation-building.[1]Prussian education system - Wikipedia
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Here's another view:
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How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System
JOEL ROSE MAY 9, 2012
A technology and education entrepreneur gazes into the future of the classroom
More than 150 years ago, Massachusetts became the first state to provide all of its citizens access to a free public education. Over the next 66 years, every other state made the same guarantee. The result was a publicly-funded system where, in every American classroom, groups of about 28 students of roughly the same age are taught by one teacher, usually in an 800 square-foot room. This model has been the dominant archetype ever since.
It's a factory-model classroom. Inspired in part by the approach Horace Mann saw in Prussia in 1843, it seemed to adequately prepare American youth for the 20th century industrialized economy. But in 1983, the federal government declared in A Nation At Risk that our system was starting to slide.
The year 1983 was also seminal for the technology industry. Microsoft released MS Word and Apple introduced the new Apple IIe. Some predicted that the demand for better schools, coupled with the supply of computers and new software, would soon revolutionize our nation's classrooms.
It didn't quite happen.
Schools did move to adopt new technologies -- computers and software, increased bandwidth, and infrastructure. But there is scant research-based evidence that these tools have had the exponential impact on public education many anticipated.
Given the enormous impact that technology has had on nearly every other aspect of our society, how can that be?
WITH LOVE FROM PRUSSIA
Perhaps it is because educational tools that have come into our classrooms over the last couple of decades, whether technology or otherwise, continue to be used within a school structure that is virtually unchanged since the mid-nineteenth century.
That model was imported from Prussia with a different purpose in mind. Horace Mann's free school movement stemmed less from a belief in the economic or moral imperative of education for all children and more from a desire to simply create a tolerant, civilized society.
Mann grew up in Massachusetts during the early part of the 19th century, where religious tension between Protestants and Catholics dominated public life. Parochial schools, in his view, only reinforced these divisions. The Prussian model, on the other hand, was designed to build a common sense of national identity.
Applied back home, Mann thought, large groups of students learning together would help to blur the divisions among religious groups and establish a more unified and egalitarian society. And as that model became the American blueprint, Mann's vision ultimately became the foundation for our national system of schooling.
Mann's vision also made sense for the industrial age in which he lived. The factory line was simply the most efficient way to scale production in general, and the analog factory-model classroom was the most sensible way to rapidly scale a system of schools. Factories weren't designed to support personalization. Neither were schools.
TOOLS AREN'T ENOUGH
Today our collective vision for education is broader, our nation is more complex and diverse, and our technical capabilities are more powerful. But we continue to assume the factory-model classroom and its rigid bell schedules, credit requirements, age-based grade levels, and physical specifications when we talk about school reform.
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How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System - The Atlantic
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And finally:
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The modern education system was designed to teach future factory workers to be “punctual, docile, and sober”
June 29, 2018
The education system as we know it is only about 200 years old. Before that, formal education was mostly reserved for the elite. But as industrialization changed the way we work, it created the need for universal schooling.
Factory owners required a docile, agreeable workers who would show up on time and do what their managers told them. Sitting in a classroom all day with a teacher was good training for that. Early industrialists were instrumental, then, in creating and promoting universal education. Now that we are moving into a new, post-industrial era, it is worth reflecting on how our education evolved to suit factory work, and if this model still makes sense.
“Factory schools,” as they are now called, originated in early 19th-century Prussia. For the first time, education was provided by the state and learning was regimented. Dozens of students at a time were placed in grades according to their age, and moved through successive grades as they mastered the curriculum. They took an industrialized approach to education: impersonal, efficient, and standardized.
As Northwestern University economist Joel Mokyr explains it (pdf):
"Much of this education, however, was not technical in nature but social and moral. Workers who had always spent their working days in a domestic setting, had to be taught to follow orders, to respect the space and property rights of others, be punctual, docile, and sober. The early industrial capitalists spent a great deal of effort and time in the social conditioning of their labor force, especially in Sunday schools which were designed to inculcate middle class values and attitudes, so as to make the workers more susceptible to the incentives that the factory needed."
The industrial revolution created jobs that had ever existed before. For previous generations, Mokyr describes, artisans and farmers mostly worked out of their homes and set their own hours.
The transition to factory work was unpleasant, to put it mildly. The idea that men had to show up and take orders from a boss—someone they were not even related to—was demeaning and emasculating. Factory conditions were often terrible and completely changed how people organized their days. Time was no longer their own.
Economists Oded Galor and Omer Moav argue (pdf) that Prussian factory-style schools caught on across the West as the spread of industrialization created a need for compliant, literate workers. Industrialists led the charge to adopt universal education in the US, UK, and elsewhere in Europe. Factory owners were among the biggest champions for the Elementary Education Act 1870, which made education universally available in England.
In a post-industrial world, education may require an equally bold rethink. It might mean more comprehensive adult education, or regular retraining, to keep skills sharp as old jobs disappear and new ones appear that require vastly different responsibilities. Or it may involve integrating technology to create more personalized learning experiences.
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Firstly, there is the contention that free societies produce innovation – from Matt Ridley, aka Viscount Ridley, disrupter, former chair of Northern Rock, and a ‘master raconteur’:
On the other hand, another book fresh off the press pushes for the same sort of interventions we have seen over the current health crisis: