Industrial Revolution & American Education

There are two Big Narratives in education:

1. Traditional education became the factory model, signaling, and oriented around obedience.

2. Progressive pedagogy destroyed the cognitive and social value of education.

Both are sort of right, largely wrong, and fatally imprecise.

In the second half of the twentieth century, it became common wisdom that American unity was rooted in shared pride at the nation’s #1 status, attributed to the maximization of industrial capacity required by modern warfare. Whether they thought this was a triumph or grounds for an anti-capitalist revolution, all American intellectuals agreed that industrialists—in America and everywhere else—had built modern society, arranging it in accordance with their own needs.

All also perceived something deeply wrong with the public education system. The first narrative, associated with “the left,” held that the system had been built by industrialists to create model factory workers: compliant, conformist workers who knew how to do little but memorize and follow instructions. The second narrative, associated with “the right,” didn’t talk so much about who built it or why, but were sure it had produced excellence-oriented innovators who were the backbone of modern industrial society…until recently. By the 1960s, the right also believed that the system was defective, and that their political opponents were the problem. Progressive educators had “dumbed down” the one-time engine of American success to the point where students learned hardly anything useful. Time to go back to basics, they insisted, at the same time progressive educators were insisting that we finally go beyond the basics.

To add to the confusion, in recent decades, the arguments have shifted. Many on the right have adopted a version of the left’s argument: the modern education system was built to supply the fuel for the industrial revolution, but the industrial era is over and we need a new, internationally competitive system that allows for more individualism and creativity. On the other hand, many progressives are now focused on making sure everyone gets access to the benefits of the system, presumably no longer seen as an inescapable force of disempowerment.

Everyone seems to agree that we need a new vision for American education. But first, we need to get straight on what the prior visions were. The best way to straighten this out is to reset the conversation.

Boosterish narratives to the contrary, America did not have an education system standardized enough to be conceptualized as a national model until very recently.

“The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, by Dr. Cristina Viviana Groeger,” focuses on “the birth of what we might call the modern education system, in Boston, from the last 30 or so years of the 19th century to about the midpoint of the 20th.”

Industrialization did roughly coincide with the rise of the modern American school, which took place between 1880 and 1920, the period commonly known as the Progressive Era, which tracked the Second Industrial Revolution almost exactly.

The entire American industrialization discourse, which dates back only to the Cold War, has been impaired by generalizing from concepts that are specific to a country and era. The creation of national plans for industrialization was a 20th-century practice.

From the Founding until some point after the Civil War, the American understanding of industrial development was shaped by a particular context:

The conclusion from all this is that the American public school system, which did not exist until the 20th century, could not possibly have been designed in the antebellum US to produce “fuel for the industrial revolution.” It makes no logical sense.

Where does the idea come from? Well, something like this kind of happened in the mid-20th century U.S., at least in theory. During the Cold War, industrialization, a more universal change not particularly related to sophisticated knowledge, became conflated with specialized technical knowledge, which has always been an “elite” thing. An obsession with educated “human capital” as the key to national success, and consequent fear of falling behind other nations, led people to assume increased education “fueled” surges of development. This rhetoric served useful purposes, but a moment’s thought should lead to the conclusion that this was not due to superior mass education.

China and the Soviet Union may have been serious competitors at the national level, but their populations were not widely educated.

But this more positive spin on the “schools are here to produce fuel for industrial progress” myth only took off because Americans had gotten so used to hearing of America’s factory-style schooling. The origin of this myth will be described below.

Industrial Education

Post-Civil War, Americans became very interested in the European model of “industrial education,” but this did not refer to education for future factory workers. At the time, the term “industrialization” did not exist, and “industrial” meant something like “development-oriented” or “modernizing.” An industrialized economy and increasing democratic or at least broadly participatory social contract, with an increased need for technical or scientific training at the college level, and an increased need for socialization (to maintain political stability) and practical training (to procure economic reward) for those not destined for college. In Europe, the modern educational ideal was vocational training for the masses.

So, during and after the Civil War, Republicans in the federal government set up agricultural colleges and trade schools with similar aims (self-sufficiency and meaningful community participation as a citizen) for children who had been born into slavery or to parents who had been, and Native American children, who were believed to be doomed if they stuck to traditional practices. While the latter were sometimes called industrial schools, they were designed to produce independent tradesmen who could modernize their communities—Navajo territories did not typically have factories.

But the post-Civil War urban high school exemplified the traits that would come to define the modern American education system.

The Modern American Education System: High Schools Preparing the Middle-Class For White-Collar/Office Jobs

A decade after the Civil War, community leaders in northeastern cities were lamenting the fact that the rapidly expanding system of high schools seemed only to produce middle-class strivers.

A similar point has more recently been raised by Bryan Caplan, as shown in the following commentary from Robin Hanson:

This is what the factory-style schooling system complaint referred to. In March 1915, a telling John Dewey piece was published in Industrial Education Magazine.

Dewey began by decrying the fact that no one was on the same page with regard to the need for industrial training in public schools. Advocates of such programs had advanced only an “indigested medley” of reasons for doing so: “the need of a substitute for the disappearing apprenticeship system,” “the demand of employers for more skilled workers,” making sure America could “hold its own in international competitive commerce,” and making education “more ‘vital’ to pupils.” Pro-reform interest groups were working at cross-purposes, and there was no conventional wisdom built up that could be used to engage the general public on specific policies.

Dewey also believed there had been a failure to distinguish between the circumstances, objectives, and needs of America and Germany, which was then seen to possess the world’s most advanced industrial education system. (Emphases added.) I quote at length:

Dewey went on to argue that America’s circumstances demanded “efficiency of industrial intelligence, rather than technical trade efficiency,” the latter of which was the aim of the German system. Dewey was harsh on the “schemes for industrial education” that had been advanced by American proponents, saying that they “ignore with astonishing unanimity many of the chief features of the present situation.”

Dewey summarized these “chief features,” insisting that producing more technically skilled workers was not the main problem Americans faced. Trade unions opposed efforts “to recruit their numbers beyond the market demand,” and workers were more mobile. Rapid technological advances had made hyper-specialized assembly-line work and automation the norm. The industrialized world placed a higher value on workers’ adaptability than it did on accumulated knowledge, leading Dewey to conclude:

Dewey’s point is almost the opposite of the factory training school myth, in all its manifestations. Significant social change has occurred, and that there is a jockeying of various interests. The deterioration of older apprenticeship arrangements, new theories of education, changing workforce needs caused by industrialization, and America’s entry into international affairs, had become chief matters of concern by 1915. Turning to the German model of “industrial education” was nonsensical, and Dewey worried that employer needs—including those of factory owners—would come to dictate the trajectory of American education if it is given a narrow technical focus, as only large employers would be able to partner with schools to systematically provide such training.

We can see that Dewey’s critique did not crystallize until the twentieth century when the Industrial Revolution was already triumphant, and this was separate from his concerns about the more traditional approach of many non-industrial public schools, which he saw as encouraging passivity. Yet for all the ink spilled over the issue, fewer than 10% of Americans graduated high school prior to World War I.

The Real Story

Around 1940, however, this metric had risen to 50%.

The term factory-style schooling had nothing to do with toiling factory workers. Instead, it was used by people like Dewey to describe the tendency towards middle-class credentialism, which seemed to spit out identical widgets like a 20th-century factory assembly line.

The “factory” metaphors likely result from the prevalence of British liberals in the mid-late 19th-century debates over education reform, particularly those in prestigious English-language publications. Twentieth-century American academics relied heavily on these sources, where they would have seen mid-19th century debates over how to remedy the plight of the British masses, toiling away in factories after the first industrial revolution.

Late 19th-century debates found the remedy in “industrial education,” which would train the public of the Western world to adapt to the needs of a society premised on innovation and national competition. These points were echoed by American intellectuals, who added laments about the “rote memorization” and “irrelevance” of America’s emphasis on the universal value of classical education.

Despite shared reformist ideals, 19th century Americans put their own spin on arguments advanced by British liberals, because they were dealing with a very different situation. Unlike Europe, America did not have a “permanent” working-class brutally exploited by industrialists with all the resources and political power. Many looked to Germany, which seemed less classist and more objective in its national ambitions, for inspiration.

In the early-mid 20th century, these debates merged with the concerns of humanist intellectuals like John Dewey and Harvard’s President Eliot that the modern school system neglected character formation and individual creativity, churning out career-focused conformists who could not participate in democratic political life.

By the late twentieth century, American academics synthesized all of this into a model of American public education with a vague connection to 19th-century factories, one that focused on rote memorization of useless information and churned out passively obedient workers. Naturally, such a model must be outdated and unlikely to serve the needs of modern students or their society.

Eventually, Horace Mann’s fascination with the Prussian model of education, designed to create an army and populace loyal to the state, fused with this line of criticism.

Mann then argued that while the people of Massachusetts understood that its exceptional success was linked its high-quality universal education, they seemed less aware it had also allowed two-thirds of them to be self-sufficient. Presumably referring to their relative political and economic independence, he said that without their history of unusual access to education, most citizens of Massachusetts would be "the vassals of as severe a tyranny, in the form of capital, as the lower classes of Europe are bound to in the form of brute force.”

Massachusetts was the most industrialized state in the country, and Mann’s goal was not to create an obedient, permanent class of factory workers. He was not trying to fuel industrialization and catch up with Britain, but to avoid Britain’s fate by limiting the dominance of this model. Like Dewey would be more than half a century later, Mann was worried about class conflict brought about by the societal disruptions of industrialization and wanted an education system that aimed to counterbalance those volatile new forces. Keeping men able to hold themselves independent of a fixed class identity was of the utmost importance.

Nor did Mann disagree with Dewey’s point that the German system could not be suitably imported to America. Mann believed that a national system of education—what the Prussian system was seen to represent at the time—would bring social stability by establishing shared norms and fraternal feelings. This was the theory underlying the standardization desired by education reformers like Mann. Such uniformity was necessarily administered by a centralized government authority but was intended to reflect the character of each nation, not turn every nation into Prussia. And at the time of Mann’s efforts in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the states functioned almost as independent nations. While Mann did hope that the system he implemented in Massachusetts would spread across America, his primary concern seems to have been dealing with the immediate circumstances of Massachusetts, which was the only state capable of implementing such a centralized plan.

In other words, Prussian education was seen as a model of a function, not an ideology or set of practices. To say the modern school system is “Prussian-style” in its origins is merely to say that it is free and compulsory for all children, administered by the national government, and follows a standardized curriculum.

Conclusion

The persistent talk of a “factory-model school system” reflects inquiries into the purpose of the modern American system by asking who benefits, or once benefitted, from its design. Almost all such inquiries result in the conclusion that its design reflects the needs of someone other than middle-class parents, teachers, and modern employers. But the system was not built by greedy 19th-century factory owners. Middle-class parents and local business leaders pieced together the infrastructure in response to post-Civil War social changes.

United by a focus on career training, economic growth, and maintaining social status, middle-class parents and business interests have continued to exercise significant influence as needed, which, along with changing socioeconomic factors, has prevented the Progressive plan—or anyone else’s—from being fully realized. The resulting incoherence of the modern education system, which contributes to these myths, will be the topic of an upcoming piece.

Clearing up the relationship between industrialization and education will make it easier to identify the purpose American education actually serves. And if changes are in order, we must have history in mind when deciding what changes to make and how to implement them. It's encouraging to know that we have more options than those recognized in the usual debates.

For Reference: Popular Uses of the Factory School Metaphor

Dewey objected to “the identification of education with the acquisition of specialized skill in the management of machines,” saying he was “utterly opposed to giving the power of social predestination, by means of narrow trade-training, to any group of fallible men,” meaning advocates of the technical skill- or career-focused “industrial” education model.

Late 20th century scholars alleged that “mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to...pre-adapt children for a new world...in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock... assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory)…"

Today, some intellectuals use the metaphor to describe the worldview of progressive educators, alleging that “public schools are a peerless example of the progressives’ conception of society as one big factory that can be scientifically managed with a kind of political (and moral) Taylorism...the factory mindset of progressives favors unified systems characterized by standardization and homogeneity.”

At the same time, mainstream politicians and reformers use it to advocate for school choice or reform of the outdated public education system, which they describe as “designed as a one-size-fits-all factory model...in the 1890s to build a workforce for a factory-model economy,”

Endnotes