All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.
—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
As we’ve seen, education through the ages took place in many different venues and by many different methods. Apprentices learned by doing in their masters’ workshops. Classical Greeks walked around or sat under olive trees, exchanging viewpoints until the wine ran out. Early universities pursued esoteric topics for a handful of privileged people who’d done their early learning at home; most of those students were wealthy or connected enough that “work” was almost a dirty word.
That gives us a little context for higher education. But when and where did there come to be such a thing as “primary school” and “secondary school” as we know it (or K-12 education, as it is often now referred to)? The orthodoxies that we take for granted and are now in thrall to—the length of the school day and the school year; the division of the day into periods; the slicing of disciplines into “subjects”—where did these things come from? For that matter, who decided that education should be tax-supported and compulsory, that it should begin at a certain age and end after a certain number of “grades,” and that it should be the business of the state to decide what should be taught and who could be a teacher?
To those not in the field, it may come as a surprise to learn that all these then-radical innovations in what we now call K-12 education were first put in place in eighteenth-century Prussia. Prussia—with its stiff whiskers, stiff hats, and stiff way of marching in lockstep—is where our basic classroom model was invented. Compulsory, tax-supported public education was seen as a political at least as much as a pedagogical tool, and no apology was made for this. The idea was not to produce independent thinkers, but to churn out loyal and tractable citizens who would learn the value of submitting to the authority of parents, teachers, church, and, ultimately, king. The Prussian philosopher and political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key figure in the development of the system, was perfectly explicit about its aims. “If you want to influence a person,” he wrote, “you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”
The standard classroom model offered boundless opportunities for political indoctrination. Some of these were direct and obvious, such as the manner in which subjects like history and social studies were presented. But there were also other, more subtle ways of shaping young minds. Former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto has written that “the whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates.” It was not by accident that whole ideas were broken up into fragmented “subjects.” Subjects could be learned by rote memorization, whereas mastering larger ideas called for free and unbridled thinking.
Similarly, according to Gatto, our sacred notion of the “class period” was put in place “so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.” Heaven forbid that students might delve beyond the prescribed curriculum or have time to discuss possibly heterodox and dangerous ideas among themselves; the bell rang and they had no choice but to break off their conversation or their deeper inquiry and move on to the next episode of approved instruction. By design, order trumped curiosity; regimentation took precedence over personal initiative.
Now, I don’t personally believe that the Prussian system was designed purely as a tool for subjugation to the will of a ruling class. There were many aspects of it that were innovative and egalitarian for the time. In fact, just the notion of a universal, tax-funded, mandatory public education system was revolutionary. It lifted millions into the middle class and played no small part in Germany’s rise as an industrial power. And the most economical way to deliver education to everyone, given the technology at the time, may have been the Prussian model. However, whether it was intentional or not, the system tended to stifle deeper inquiry and independent thought. In the 1800s, high-level creative and logical thinking may not have been as important as a disciplined tractability coupled with basic skills, but two hundred years later, they clearly are.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Prussian system was put in place in the United States with few modifications, largely due to the influence of Horace Mann, then the Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts. His motivations were generally forward-thinking for the time; he wanted to provide a solid basic education to students of all socioeconomic ranks. As in Prussia, this would play a significant role in building a middle class capable of filling the jobs of a booming industrial sector. There was, however, also an element of indoctrination that had positives and negatives depending on your point of view. While it would be beyond the scope of this book to examine in detail the political climate of the time, suffice it to say that in the 1840s—as today—the United States was faced with the issue of “Americanizing” large groups of immigrants from many disparate cultures.
By 1870, all thirty-seven states had public schools and the United States had become one of the most literate countries in the world.3 Although the most fundamental ideas of the Prussian model—students separated by age moving in lockstep, bells ringing—had become commonplace, there was not yet a lot of standardization across the country as to what the students were taught and for how many years they needed to be educated.
To address this issue, the National Education Association formed the “Committee of Ten” in 1892. This was a group of educators—primarily university presidents—led by Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, whose mission was to determine what primary and secondary education should be like. It was these ten men who decided that everyone in the United States should—starting at age six and ending at age eighteen—have eight years of elementary education followed by four years of high school. They decided that English, math, and reading should be covered every year, while chemistry and physics should be introduced near the end of high school.
For the most part, the recommendations of the Committee of Ten were refreshingly progressive for the time. For example, the committee felt that every student should get a fair chance to see if he had an interest in and capacity for intellectual work. In most of the world—and this is still true today—subjects like trigonometry, physics, or literature were reserved for the very top students destined for professional careers; the bulk of students were tracked into purely vocational courses around eighth grade. I also really like what they had to say about teaching math, the spirit of which has been lost in many of today’s schools. For example, regarding geometry:
As soon as the student has acquired the art of rigorous demonstration, his work should cease to be merely receptive. He should begin to devise constructions and demonstrations for himself. Geometry cannot be mastered by reading the demonstrations of a text-book, and while there is no branch of elementary mathematics in which purely receptive work, if continued too long, may lose its interest more completely, there is also none in which independent work can be made more attractive and stimulating.
In other words, if you want students to really learn geometry, you can’t just have them listen, read, and repeat. You have to allow students to explore the subject on their own.
For all their comparative enlightenment, however, the Committee of Ten lived in a world without interstate highways, the Federal Reserve, television, awareness of DNA, or air travel except in balloons, not to mention computers and the Internet. The system they framed has not been fundamentally rethought in 120 years, and it has by now taken on such a weight of orthodoxy and rust as to stifle the sincere creative efforts of even the best-meaning teachers and administrators.
The heavy baggage of the current academic model has become increasingly apparent recently, as economic realities no longer favor a docile and disciplined working class with just the basic proficiencies in reading, math, and the liberal arts. Today’s world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses.
Arguments about education are contentious enough without bringing partisan politics into them, but it is interesting to note in passing that in recent years our Prussian-based public school model has come under virulent attack from both the right and the left. Conservative complaints tend to center on the alleged usurpation by government of choices and prerogatives more properly left to parents; as it was put by author Sheldon Richman in his book Separating School and State: How to Liberate American Families, “the state’s apparently benevolent goal of universal education has actually been an insidious effort to capture all children in its net.”
Attacks from the left have tended to be surprisingly similar in tone, though the villain is not the government but the corporations that have the most to gain from a well-behaved and conformist population. Writing in the September 2003 issue of Harper’s, John Taylor Gatto urged that we “wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands…. School trains children to be employees and consumers.”4
The foregoing is not intended as a wholesale condemnation of our current educational system. I’m not proposing that we shut down the schools and start over. What I am suggesting, however, is that we adopt a more questioning and skeptical stance toward the educational customs and assumptions we’ve inherited. Those customs, as I hope I’ve made clear, were the products of particular times and circumstances, established by human beings with human flaws and limited wisdom, whose motives were often complicated. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some good ideas in our traditional approach. Most people who’ve been to school, after all, can read and write, know some basic math and science, and hopefully have picked up some useful social skills as well. To that extent, school works. But we do ourselves and our kids a disservice if we fail to look past those minimum requirements and recognize the places where the system has become creaky and archaic, and why old customs and standards no longer suffice.