Posted on March 15, 2025

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of minds to think.” Albert Einstein.

The Education System.

Typically, when we consider schools, we see them as places that stimulate learning. Ironically, though, they manage to stifle the innate curiosity and the eagerness to learn that all of us possess as children. On top of that, schools do this while ostensibly acting as environments intended to do just the opposite.

It encourages thoughtless conformity and conveniently overlooks the truth that we are all distinct individuals with various abilities, interests, and dreams.

Schools limit creative thought. They run us through standardised tests and see them as good indicators of a person's level of intelligence.

What if I stated that the current education system was never intended to foster learning, curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity in students, but rather to do just the opposite? In this post, I want to present to you a collection of writings that disclose the truth of the above claim by unearthing the shocking beginnings and aims of the education system.

The factory model of education.

In his 1970s book, Future Shock, the renowned author and futurist Alwin Toffler explains the current education system's lineage. He says: "The American education model - was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create docile subjects and factory workers."(Note Prussia was historically a prominent German state.) Toffler maintains that mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed.

This new world was simulated. The system did not emerge instantly. Even today, it retains some elements from before the Industrial Revolution. Yet the whole concept of gathering together to process gigantic numbers of students became an industrial genius idea.

And the whole administrative hierarchy that grew up around public education followed the model of the industrial bureaucracy. The very organisation 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. The inner life of the school thus became an anticipatory mirror, a near-perfect introduction to industrial society.

Mass education from the factory model taught the basic subjects - reading, writing and arithmetic, with a bit of history and a few other subjects thrown in the overt curriculum. But there was a lot more going on in the schools under the observable surface.

Beneath the observable surface was the much more powerful covert curriculum. It consisted of three lessons - punctuality, obedience and work at a repetitive task. These were the basic requirements to produce good factory workers.

(paraphrased from Alvin Toffler's Future Shock) Although Toffler describes the American education system as producing compliant workers for a factory-like economy, some critics contend that it was intentional. In the minds of those designing the system, it was supposed to produce obedient citizens who would not disturb the status quo.

The system produces people who are compliant on three levels

(1) They are obedient to the kinds of commands issued by any kind of authority and

(2) They are obedient to societal expectations. Moreover,

(3) They are obedient to commands that kind of person issues to themselves when determining what kinds of things they are going to do with their lives.

The Rockefeller Influence on the Education System

In the United States, education systems benefited from the largesse of industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller. He created the General Education Board, which eventually cost him $129 million, and which funded schools across the nation. His influence on the educational system was profound.

He didn't conceal his interest and motive in being actively involved in promoting the widespread adoption of the education system, and he even stated on one occasion "I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.'"

Frederick T. Gates, business advisor to Rockefeller and a prominent member of the General Education Board, declared - "We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or learning men, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen - of whom we have an ample supply."

Yet there are reports that Rockefeller and industrial giant Andrew Carnegie played a significant role in influencing the American educational agenda to direct what students were taught in school.

In 1914, the National Education Association, alarmed by the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, stated in their annual meeting - We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations - agencies not in any way responsible to the people - in their efforts to control the policies of our state educational institutions, to fashion them after their conception, and to standardise our courses of study.

Universally available classrooms, where attendance was required by law, were a significant development in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century. Many well-meaning individuals supported this idea, each with his or her own agenda, wanting to impart particular lessons and values to the children.

The fraternity of champions of compulsory public education had much in common with the fraternity of supporters of compulsory factory labour. For both, the idea was to get children doing what children were not inclined to do - obeying, enduring, labouring in an unending series of tasks that ought to wear down the wildest child’s energy and enthusiasm.

Advocates of this kind of training recognised, of course, that most children detest the very idea of being trained. They have no natural instincts for it, their instincts prompt them to run wild and free.

Public school children were not the first to line up to receive mandatory drills in the performance of duties. Children condemned to summer and winter sessions of being constantly drummed on their heads were not very good rhymers, nor were they good illustrations of the virtues of industry, punctuality, and obedience, any more than the handful of children who did not run away from the educational workshops were good illustrations of the virtues of educational workshops.

Over time, children's lives have become increasingly defined and structured by the school curriculum.

Children now are almost universally identified by their grade (standard) in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.

The Educational Model was perpetuated by leaders like Ellwood Cubberly who frequently used the metaphor of school as a factory - “Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.

The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th Century civilisation, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

The curriculum in schools may have expanded, but the fundamental way in which education is imparted to students remains unchanged. The striking similarities between schools and the factory model even to this day is uncanny.

We are no longer living in the industrial age, but in the age of internet and A.I, where our current education system has become more irrelevant than ever. And this is why home-schooling, and alternative/ non-traditional schools, have seen a surge in popularity in recent decades.