American Public Education - A Modern “Medieval Guild”

“There were laws on the books in Colonial America, for example, demanding children be educated (although not that schools be established). There was free public education in the US too prior to Horace Mann’s  introduction of the ‘Prussian model’.” --Audrey Watters[1] The public education system in America is very much like a Medieval Guild, devising its own rules on who may enter. The Guild is highly protective of its secrets and is extremely suspicious of “outsiders”. We’re told that only those who have been granted entry, and upon whom the State has bestowed “credentials”, is capable of imparting knowledge.  Most believe, quite wrongly, that the creation of public schools in America, and the compulsory school laws that set government schools in motion, was to better ensure a literate society. But, as the above quote by Audrey Watters pointed out, children in America were being educated prior to the introduction of compulsory school laws in the mid-1800s.  In 1787, James Madison authored the Constitution.  Madison never went to public school.  They didn’t exist.  Yet, he learned to read and write. In 1812, Pierre DuPont published Education in the United States, a book in which he expressed his amazement at the high rate of literacy he saw here compared to Europe.  40 years before the passage of the first compulsory school laws, DuPont found that fewer than 4 of every 1,000 people in the U.S. could not read and do numbers well. In 1818, 34 years before the first compulsory school laws in America, Noah Webster estimated that over 5,000,000 copies of his spelling book had been sold in a country of under 20,000,000 population.  When one considers that every decision to purchase those books had to be made freely, by an individual or family, and there were no purchases by either the federal or state government, since there were no public schools, it would suggest that most people don’t have to be compelled to read. It appears that before 1852, when Massachusetts was the first state to implement compulsory schooling, the American people were educating themselves quite well, better than in any country in Europe.  For the first 200 years of U.S. history, what schools there were normally wouldn’t even accept children who couldn’t read or count.  They must have learned these things somewhere.  Sometimes they used traditional methods such as when a town would hire a teacher to hold classes.  Sometimes they invented new kinds of schools, such as when a group of parents would simply get together and use the Bible as a text. In the pre-industrial world, one could be thought of as “literate” if they could read the Bible.  After all, you didn’t need to be able to read much more than that when all you were going to do was work on the farm.  If you were going into a trade, you were apprenticed to someone who taught you what you needed to know to do that job. Children were being schooled as best their parents saw fit.  In other words, whatever method the adults saw fit to teach the children to read, write, and do numbers.  To those parents, the phrase as best their parents saw fit was a prescription for a free, individualistic people.  As the authorities see fit is the formula of a collective. Therefore, we have what appears to be a great mystery here.  America was a perfectly literate country before the advent of forced government schooling in 1852.  Yet, we hear all the time about the increasing rate of illiteracy in America. Why aren’t we a literate society in our present, universal school era, when we once were in a lightly schooled one? The answer lies not in the type of education being delivered in the public schools, but in its purpose. In 1852, the first compulsory schools appeared in Massachusetts. They were modeled on the “Humboldtian Education Ideal”, otherwise known as the “Prussian Reforms”.  When Napoleon’s amateur soldiers defeated the mercenary army of the King of Prussia at the Battle of Jena in 1806, it sent shock waves through Prussia.   When your business is renting mercenary soldiers to other countries, which was the business of the Prussian army at that time, losing a battle like that is not to be taken lightly. In 1807, the philosopher Johann Fichte, who was later considered the intellectual father of Nazism, delivered an “Address to the German Nation” in which he called for shaping the personalities of students.  He said, "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished." [2] Modern forced schooling in Prussia started in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schooling was to accomplish: 1. Obedient soldiers for the Army; 2. Obedient workers for the mines; 3. Subservient civil servants for the government; 4. Subservient clerks for industry; and, 5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues. At that time, education in America was largely a fragmented system, for an agricultural economy, characterized by the one-room schoolhouse.  The 3 “R’s” were all that the majority needed in such a world.  But, the country was entering the Industrial Age.  Industrialization destroyed the world of skilled artisans.  What was now needed was a mass infusion of compliant workers for the factories.  Henry Ford didn’t need people who could think for themselves.  He needed workers who would simply follow instructions. A small group of very passionate and influential Americans, including Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Calvin Stowe of Ohio, and Barnas Sears of Connecticut, visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century and fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency they saw there.  They attributed the well-regulated, machine-like society to its education system and, upon returning to America, began an organized campaign to bring the Prussian system to this country. One of the principle goals of important leaders in the northern U.S., such as Horace Mann, was to mold the millions of Irish Catholics, whose emigration to America was being encouraged to supply cheap labor to the emerging factory system in New England, and as settlers for the West. As Mann put it, “With the old not much can be done; but with their children, the great remedy is education. The rising generation must be taught as our children are taught. We say must be, because in many cases this can only be accomplished by coercion. Children must be gathered up and forced into schools and those who resist and impede this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable and punished.”[3]   From their inception, public schools were a form of social control and indoctrination.  These newcomers were to be indoctrinated into the “American Creed”, a national consensus, based on the New England cultural model. This, in turn, led to the presentation of American History in a “heroic”, nation-building arc, embellishing America’s “exceptionalism”, and going to great lengths to omit, or minimize, any national blemishes.  “To sow allegiance to the nation state requires constant maintenance.  Cultural leaders worry that the onslaught of immigrant ‘pluribus’ will undermine the possibility of ‘unum’.”[4]    The principle innovation of the Prussians was the “Kindergarten”, with its early removal of the child from its parents and culture, and its replacement of serious learning with songs, games, pictures, and organized group activities.  Kindergarten was remarkably effective in delivering compliant, moldable material to the schools run by the state.  But, there was still one more obstacle to reaching Prussian perfection.  The traditional form of school size, shape, and governance worked against it. The one and two-room school houses, which were highly efficient as transmitters of learning and bred individualism and self-reliance, almost exclusively female-led and locally administered, had to be put to death.  As previously mentioned, Henry Ford didn’t need people who could think for themselves.  This logic created the need to eliminate the one-room schoolhouse; not because it wasn’t effective, but because it was too effective.  It vested too much authority and responsibility for learning in the children themselves and in unmonitored, female managers. Three major ideas were transferred from Prussia and slowly worked themselves into the 20th century framework of American government schooling.  The first was the very sophisticated idea that state schooling exists not for the benefit of the students and their families, but for the benefit of the state. In this idea, the individual will of the child has to be broken in order to make use of them as "mold-able" material.  Children were not to be taught to think, but only to memorize facts unrelated to their daily lives.  Memorization is an essential glue that gives continuity to families, communities, and religions.  But, if the use of memorization can be perverted by the massive introduction of “nonsense-memories”, which are then bolstered by making the testing of them the very reason for going to school, a vacuum can be created. The second important idea in the Prussian method was fragmentation of whole ideas into “subjects”, into fixed time periods, pre-thought sequences, externally imposed questioning, age-based cohorts, and the like.  It is here the analogy of the "factory model" is apparent.  Think of it as a continuously moving bucket line, arranged in what are called age-based cohorts. Children are educated by their date of manufacture - 6 year-olds with 6 year-olds, 10 year-olds with 10 year-olds, 15 year-olds with 15 year-olds, and so on. As they move at the set pace of the bucket line, information is being delivered. What’s fixed is the amount of time they have.  What’s variable is how well the students get it.  This simplified many of the problems of central management.  Thought broken into fragments can be managed by a poorly trained, poorly paid teaching force.  Fragments memorized and then regurgitated on a standardized test create the appearance of precision in testing and deliver beautiful distribution curves that central education officials can use to “prove” the effectiveness of their instructional program.  But, they don’t represent thinking ability or knowledge. Perhaps the words of the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, in 1899 provide the best explanation of the original intent of public education in America.  In speaking with Collis P. Huntington, of the Central Pacific Railroad, Harris explained that American schools had been “scientifically designed to prevent over education’”.  He went on to say, “The average American would learn to be content with his or her humble role in life, because he or she would not be tempted to think about any other role." Endnotes: [1] Watters, Audrey, The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education', (www.hackededucation.com), April 2015 [2] Address to the German Nation (1807), Second Address : "The General Nature of the New Education". Chicago and London, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1922, p. 20 [3] Nasaw, David, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States, Oxford University Press (New York, 1979), p. 78 [4] VanSledright, Bruce, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group (New York, 2011), pp. 21-22