Factories Produce Products – Schools Shouldn't

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. 

The education system owns part of the blame

The U.S. education system owns some responsibility for why we have the current president.  I’ve heard a lot of people say something like that, but they mean something different than I do.  They typically mean that voters needed more education on civics, the Constitution, learning to spot lies, or some other missing skills or knowledge.  All those may be true, but that’s not what I mean when I ascribe this blame.  In my experience, it’s the system itself that bears some fault – what its goals are and how it operates daily.  I internally debated whether to write and post this essay because of the serious, current attacks on education.  I wondered if this is the time to add a critique to my profession.  However, my concerns subsided when I realized that this is exactly the time to offer this critique – at the time when we should be questioning our role and past efforts so that we can strengthen this work against the barrage of attacks.  

Understanding what I intend means understanding the difference between explicit learning versus internalized learning.  Explicit learning is what we expect learners to know as a result of any learning experience.  We may want learners to understand how to multiply fractions, to write a paragraph, or to know about the causes of the Revolutionary War.  Those are explicit intentions.  In contrast, internalized learning is what happens as a result of learners experiencing the lesson.  They may come to internalize, for example, that multiplying fractions is too hard for them to do, or that organizing a paragraph into a logical order is enjoyable, or that history like the Revolutionary War is uninteresting.  Internalized learning defines the relationship that the learner has to the subject.  If you’ve heard someone say, “I didn’t like math and wasn’t any good at it,” or, “History just wasn’t my thing in school,” you’ve heard them express the lessons they internalized. 

 

Explicit and internalized.  Both exist every time learning is supposed to happen.  But educators and systems tend to focus only on explicit learning objectives with not as much care for the internalized.  That’s a mistake since the internalized relationship that learners develop to a subject greatly influences how they’ll really learn that subject.  People who connect positively to a topic will learn.  People who don’t make that connection won’t.  A teacher can force learners to memorize information, but that teacher can’t force people to learn it.  There’s a difference.  Just ask any adult what information they remember from a school subject they didn’t enjoy.  While most adults passed the courses they disliked during their education, they retain little to nothing from the experience. 

 

It's like the last day of a course I recall from my undergraduate days.  As we left the last session, a fellow student and I walked out of the classroom and the building.  When we crossed into daylight, my classmate took the course book from under his arm and threw it with force into nearby bushes where he left it.  He exclaimed that he was done.  His act embodied what people do with the subjects where they make no connections.  It is a sad truth that much of formal education alienates students.  By the time children enter early elementary grades, education is less about inquisitiveness and exploration than it is about regimented bits of information that only engage some learners. 

 

Unfortunately, that leads to an internalized learning for many people that schooling, and by extension formal learning, isn’t for them.  I hear this expressed all the time when people tell me something like, “I wasn’t good at school.”  Or, “My sister was the smart one.”  We use those experiences to internalize who is “smart” and who isn’t.  That internalization establishes our self-belief in how far we can go in the education system.  It’s also a system that favors some kinds of learning over others as people who succeed in the model of education benefit from it.  Education is not, despite all our claims, a meritocracy where the best succeed.  It’s a system that values and rewards certain kinds of thinking and certain ways of exhibiting knowledge.  It’s a system that intentionally culls the student population into learners and non-learners because of how it favors and rewards people who can succeed at it. 

 

Here's the problem:  By creating systems of who’s “smart” and who’s not, we start segregating ourselves by those categories.  We socialize by those categories; we engage in activities by those categories; we set expectations for our offspring by those categories; we live our lives by those categories.  People who complete college tend to come from certain ZIP Codes.  Children of professionals become professionals and move to those ZIP Codes.  Children of trades workers become trades workers.  Yes, there are exceptions, but those are despite the system.  The U.S. educational system helps support a social stratification that we claim doesn’t exist – a separation that gets broadened as the education system favors some over others.  These internalized lessons of education help determine our life paths.  We become insulated from others who aren’t on similar paths.  In that insulation, we can start to distrust people who aren’t like us.  So people who succeed in the education system can come to distrust those who don’t, and people who don’t attend college can come to distrust those who do.  It’s an outcome of isolation and a system that favors some over others.

 

My descriptions come from my personal experiences in the education system.  These observations began when I was an elementary and high school student who experienced a system that didn’t think like I did – a system where educators told me I was “smart” but not very capable because I was unfocused and lazy.  I was fortunate that I never internalized that lesson (see the explanation for HERE, on pages 65-82).  My observations continued through an undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees where I learned to succeed in the system.  But I saw others fail when they couldn’t – and I saw that most people never got the chance to try. 

 

My experiences as a secondary English teacher affirmed my observations as I saw many students discarded by a system that neither understood them nor cared to understand them.  I taught in systems that celebrated the twenty percent who went on to four-year colleges while condescendingly smiling at the remainder and showing them the exit.  What I saw continued when I became a community college teacher and asked students to tell me of their prior experiences in education and received overwhelmingly negative responses.  Finally, as I became a researcher, professor, and consultant to educational institutions, I saw how deeply committed that the education system is at maintaining the status quo that favors some over others.  My observations don’t arise from ideology.  They come from intimately witnessing. 

 

No wonder 77 million people didn’t trust the “elites.”  Folks with education, the people who succeeded at the education system, got a lot of advantage that others didn’t.  Republicans discovered how to exploit that gap a long time ago.  They’ve been stoking the mistrust that came from that gap since Richard Nixon’s appeal to “hard hat” and “silent majority” voters in the 1972 election.  Nixon, raised as a Quaker and trained as a lawyer who’d graduated from Whittier College and Duke Law, was by every definition an elite.  However, he learned to exploit workers’ misgivings about educated people.  Reagan built on that in 1980 by appealing to blue-collar workers and the Moral Majority that televangelist Jerry Falwell organized in the previous year.  The right-wing fundamentalist groups of the era were also stoked by a deep-seated distrust of people they identified as elites – enough so that they rejected one of their own, a Sunday-school-teaching, pious Baptist, in favor of a B-grade actor who could spin a folksy tale about the glory times of the past.  The most recent federal election refined that appeal through targeted social media, a sealed right-wing media ecology that ignored or lied about troublesome truths, and a cult base of voters that believe anything their leader says.

 

It's a split in the nation that got incubated in the classroom.  Childhood experiences in the education system gave a lot of adults a reason not to trust anything that’s a product of it.  The split was inevitable when so many people have so many bad experiences in school.  Denied opportunity in any form creates a reaction.  Langston Hughes warned us what would happen with a dream that’s always out of reach.  It may take a while, but the reaction to exclusion eventually explodes.  And if someone is devious enough to see the pressure building and take advantage of that reaction, it can be used by any conniving demagogue astute enough to use rhetorical trickery.  In the current nation, a lifelong con man who spent his life wrangling power and money from others knew exactly what levers to pull.  It’s why he exploits every facet of mistrust, whether it’s vaccines, elections, or diversity work.  If he can effectively label something as coming from “the elites,” he can harness people’s support against it.  The people and systems labeled as elites are the straw man to which all evils are ascribed. 

 

If my observations are right, then the nation has a deep problem that a new president, elected legislators, or the courts can’t fix.  The disaffection with education has created a group of people who are resentful of everything that education means.  That group is large.  And it has grown to contain not only people who don’t go to college, but people who attended college and found the processes dissatisfying. 

 

The solution involves words that have become anathema to the right wing:  equity and inclusion.  An education experience that puts learners’ success at the foreground, that ensures that every learner has a fair chance of success, and that supports every learner’s needs creates a different internalized lesson for learners.  At the core of our society, we all share the common experience of schooling; yet some of us leave it with an internalized message that has us distrustful of it and anything it produces.  That’s not a political statement.  It’s a statement of need.  The nation needs an education system that includes every learner and provides every learner equitable support to succeed.  Right now, we’re a long way from that.