The start of a school year seems a good time to look at the education system. The industrialized origins of the current model of education have been well discussed and documented. But if you don’t read about educational history, you may not be aware of it. The U.S. education system developed an operational model in the late 1800s and early 1900s as concerns grew about children, especially children of color and immigrants, needing to be prepared to be complacent workers in the industrial workforce of that era. School was a place to bring compliancy to the growing population. To meet that aim, large-scale schooling modeled itself after the industrialization that defined the workplace of that era. The system has gotten more refined over the part 130 years, and it uses less crude expressions to explain its purposes. But those purposes haven’t changed much as we focus on teaching children to acquiesce to the drudgery they’ll eventually find themselves performing for their adult lives.
In the early 1900s, that drudgery meant repeating the same physical task hundreds of times daily as each worker contributed a small component to whatever was being manufactured. Now, workers stare at monitors writing code or resolving customer complaints or managing spreadsheets – as they fit their small tasks into a soul-grinding whole. The environment has changed, but we still want to prepare workers for often de-skilled labor that requires their time and little original thought – hence the society’s need for a system of schooling that continues to emphasize compliance over creativity. It’s a system that ensures that economic and racial groups stay in their place. Wealthier children attend schools where they learn how to explore, create, and lead while poorer children are taught to follow rules.
Bleak? Yep. Accurate? Absolutely, when you think about this as a system instead of what happens in individual classrooms or schools. Some teachers or schools work hard against the mechanized system, but the system isn’t something that those teachers and schools control. It’s even more bleakly accurate for what are termed “low-performing” schools – those schools that don’t meet the testing outcomes established by regulations and legislation that reify the system and its purposes. That’s especially bleak when considering that these labeled schools are where people in poverty and most people of color live.
The entire system is a perpetual motion machine that swallows learners’ innate curiosity and creativity and runs them through a conveyor belt of stultifying sitting and listening and pointless drudgery. If learners ask why, they’re told that it’s for their good because their future economic selves will need what schooling provides. The result is that most children in most schools will tell you that they hate learning – which they come to equate with schooling. And the response makes sense. I worry about anyone who doesn’t feel that way after being subjected to that process.
Let’s get something clear: This isn’t a conspiracy to keep people subservient – even though it has the effect that planned action would have. No secret billionaire’s group annually flies their private jets to a clandestine rendezvous in Jackson Hole to plot how schools and schooling will keep the masses in line. The truth is more complex and insidious than a planned conspiracy. The system maintains itself through a web of beliefs that focus on students as products that need molding, oversight that privileges only certain people and groups to establish policies and practices, an allocation of resources that keeps education as a low-funded afterthought, an over-reliance on traditional, ineffective practices, and misunderstandings about the ways in which people learn. The resulting practices favor only certain styles of learners. That all gets mixed with political pressures that drive everything from the rules for how educators are prepared to what methods teachers use to how textbooks are selected.
Think of it like an old-fashioned steam engine driving a train. That process begins with water that’s heated with a wood- or coal-fired boiler. Once the water boils, it produces steam that’s then pushed into an engine that takes the steam pressure and converts it to motion. All the parts work together as the process continues. Once in motion, it’s hard to stop a steam engine as it converts water, fuel, and heat into action. A train engineer doesn’t just shut off the steam building process, and the engineer doesn’t immediately stop a moving train. It takes intentional actions to reduce the pressure slowly to stop the engine, and the train can take a long time after that to stop the resulting motion. Trains keep running on the track for a long time after they start moving. And so it is with education.
However, education is unlike the natural laws of thermodynamics where motion eventually leads to atrophy. Once started, the education machine’s motion is perpetual as its components feed themselves. Legislators with little or no understanding of learning and teaching pass laws that encourage only certain types of people to work in education; educational systems look to hire those people who can compliantly work within a structure that is defined and regulated externally; educators who are compliant to the system are promoted to leadership roles where they ensure the continuance of the system in which they have excelled. Over the past 130 years, the system has built itself to run and to move in a specific direction that few people question and few attempt to stop. During that 130 years, it’s kept going because there are plenty of reasons to keep the machine going, and few incentives to stop or change it.
The closest we’ve come to the potential for major change came during the COVID-19 pandemic. That created a challenge for the education machine that forced it to think differently. Schools could not operate as they always had because they were forced to use models where students couldn’t be forced to sit and listen for hours. However, as the events of time since have shown, the system made modifications that allowed it to return quickly to its prior practices. The educational system saw the pandemic as a distraction where it couldn’t do what it was built to do; and the system sought to find ways to return to its traditional operations as soon as possible. The pandemic was a moment metaphorically to ask if we really need a train and whether maybe building a boat would be better. Rather than questioning if the direction it had been heading was the best one, education saw the moment as a temporary derailment from which it needed to recover. The machine continued on its tracks.
Technologists saw the pandemic as a time to push their agenda for more technology in schools. But a steam engine with fancier features is still a steam engine. Those places that have now adapted to employing more technologies are in no better shape than their less technologically proficient predecessors. The question of how content is delivered (which is where most discussions that focus on technology begin and end) misses the point. A system that doesn’t encourage all learners to become explorers and creators is still a substandard system.
People’s beliefs about how learning happens drives what they support in schools and schooling. If the purpose is to liberate each learner to develop a sense of wonder and exploration, then you begin with the belief that each learner is unique and each learner needs to be treated uniquely for that person to achieve their goals. If, in contrast, you believe that education’s singular purpose is to prepare students to fit within the economic roles that the society needs, then you think less about students’ individuals needs and more about them as eventual components of the economy. The system’s actions that evolve from that view has little to do with the ability of a learner to explore and create. Instead, the centering of economic purpose to learning means that individual needs are less important than societal ones. Any encouragement toward creativity or exploration comes from seeing creation as a utilitarian experience that furthers learners’ ability to become eventually more useful to the society. Instead of each moment being grounded in creativity and exploration, the system creates disconnected, unique exercises and activities to mimic creativity and exploration.
But wait a minute. Does this suggest that schools and schooling shouldn’t focus on preparing children for their economic future? Does it suggest that all kids need to do is to follow their natural instincts to explore and create? Won’t that lead to children only learning what they’re willing to explore and, as a result, learn nothing of value? Those would be valid questions and concerns if we continued with the same narrow perspective that demands only one purpose. But what if we looked at children’s needs as being occupational and…? Yes, a society needs its children to be ready to assume the work that the society will require. But in order for future opportunities to be equitably available, it also needs all children to develop self-efficacy, curiosity, ethical values, and a sense of civic responsibility. Our future citizens need to understand the importance of a democracy and how to preserve it. They need to understand how to live and thrive in a diverse community. There’s so much more beyond the narrow, economic goals that currently drive education’s purpose. It’s not that education should ignore children’s need to participate in the future economically. It’s that the many additional purposes can’t be lost to the service of such a narrow purpose. If education addressed a broader set of needs in its framework, it would go further in supporting the more complex needs that learners bring for their present and future selves.
If you’re familiar with liberationist, progressive, constructivist, or similar educational movements, the above argument is familiar to you. Nothing I’m suggesting here is new or radically original – it’s all been said and written before. However, I write it again because we’re trapped in an educational system that acts as if those ideas and the research behind them don’t exist. So to those reading this who understand and believe in these ideas, I have a simple question: What are you doing to impact this machine? If you know something to be true and you’re not working toward changing that, even in a small way, it seems to me that you’re complicit in the problem.
I don’t know what being active in change means for you. At different times in my career, it meant the way I taught my classes (whether that was ninth grade English or graduate students learning to teach), the curriculum I helped to write, the focus of the research I conducted and published, my advocacy at local and national levels, the models I helped to build – different roles and circumstances allowed me have a different impact. But at the heart of whatever I was doing was an intentional desire to create education so that it didn’t support the dehumanization of learners in a singular emphasis on economic aims. If you believe in a liberationist, progressive, etc. perspective, what are you doing daily to make that more than an ideal? In other words, stop saying that you want something else and do something about what you see.
If you haven’t been exposed to these ideas, especially if you’re not an educator, you’re actually the person I’m most addressing here. For you, this is the time to explore. It’s only as people outside the education system see these issues that the machine will be challenged. When parents and students demand something else, it can help force the machine to slow and consider its impacts. If the argument here has you wondering how true all this is, do some reading. There are some great books that aren’t written just for educators and avoid jargon so that they’re accessible. Here’s a partial list of foundational works. And I’d bet that some educators I know can add even more, so I encourage them to add other readings as comments:
The Having of Wonderful Ideas by Eleanor Duckworth
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freiré
Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose
The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol
The Manufactured Crisis by Biddle and Berliner
Read these and more if you don’t like what you see in schooling. Educate yourself and then look for allies who also understand what you understand. Then start making demands of the education systems and institutions that impact your life. I’m convinced that collective demands for something different can create needed change. I’ve seen that happen in my lifetime as the society evolved from serving very narrow segments to at least being aware of the broader needs of more groups. Women, people of color, those who are neurodiverse – all have demanded change and have started the society on the road toward those changes. If this really is a market-driven society, then people who advocate for change, who demand it, must be heard. It’s time to question that purpose of the machine and demand that it offers something else besides helping to mold the next generation of dissatisfied drudges.
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