The School of the Industrial Society

Thesis: Schools and teacher education programs are most commonly based on an economic conception of man. This conception forms the background against which competing alternatives vie for attention. The common school was established largely during the nineteenth century. 2 Its curricular content, the processes used to teach that content, and the social structure of the school reflected the educational needs of the society in the early days of the Industrial Revolution as well as the need to establish a common heritage for persons who came to the United States from Europe. (Page 112)

Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world–a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock. The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world. This system did not emerge instantly. Even today it retains throwback elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius. The whole administrative hierarchy of education, as it grew up, followed the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines was
grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place “to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time. (page 113) 

The inner life of the school thus became an anticipatory mirror, a
perfect introduction to industrial society. The most criticized features of education today–the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher–are precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time.

Young people passing through this educational machine emerged into an adult society whose structure of jobs, roles, and institutions resembled that of the school itself. The school child did not simply learn facts that he could use later on; he lived, as well as learned, a way of life modeled after the one he would lead in the future. 

As secondary schools and colleges were established, the school system became even more closely tied to the status system of the society. Education became an indispensable means of status maintenance and acquisition for most persons. To acquire status or to maintain it (unless one’s family was unassailably wealthy), one
had to acquire education. It is not surprising that a schooling so tied to the economic system would reflect economic values.

The structure of the school was designed to facilitate this conception of education and to permit the easy maintenance of order and regimentation. Departmentalized
systems with students moving from class to class where they would be under the supervision of a particular teacher emphasized the role of the teacher as taskmaster and disciplinarian. The segmented day provided conditions for the teacher under which most student-centered modes of education were extremely difficult to carry out. The structure of secondary education, with students passing from station to station, mimicked the assembly line in the factory. Man was seen as a producer and a consumer. The purpose of education was to make him better in both roles.

… Conceptions of education derived from an economic point of view have dominated American society for more than a century. The community guards the economic conception closely. Parents put enormous pressure on schools to teach their children to read early because they are fearful of the disadvantages that will accrue later if the children are poor readers. The substance and methods attendant upon innovative practices are scrutinized carefully to determine whether they threaten either the economic view of the child or the industrial view of the school.