The Educational Race to the Bottom: How Did We Get Here?
Part 1 of Escaping the Multipolar Trap of Modern Education Systems
The high school was designed as an assimilation machine from the very beginning. Because of the need to integrate many different races and nationalities, America developed a highly conservative, conformist social structure. The classroom had become an all-important homogenizing instrument.
- Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945
Consider a daily routine where you are forced to sit in a classroom. You cycle from one room to another at the sound of a bell, shove your lunch down in a specified timeframe, must undress in front of dozens of strangers, and are obliged to follow an endless set of arbitrary rules (usually in place for “safety” purposes). Above all, you are forbidden from simply walking out the door. Under these circumstances, you would probably feel mistreated. Rightfully so, as this routine is generally reserved in modern society for military recruits in basic training and convicts doing hard time in prison.
So why would a country choose to systematically treat its children this way?
Mass Compulsory Education:
An Outdated System
The answer lies in the history of how compulsory education systems in the United States and Europe first evolved between the 18th and 19th centuries, and then expanded globally in the 20th.
Influenced by the Industrial Revolution and various economic and social agendas aimed at creating a disciplined workforce and homogenous society, the introduction of compulsory education laws were ostensibly aimed to prepare students for citizenship and work. They focused heavily on standardized curricula and assessments to measure student performance.
The American concept of compulsory education was originally based on the so-called “Prussian system,” and was imported to the US by Horace Mann in the 1840s. Originally created by Frederick the Great in the 18th century, the Prussian system of state-sponsored mandatory schooling was designed to ensure obedient subjects would follow orders without question if conscripted into the army. It has endured into modern times, and is the default model for modern schools worldwide.
Public Schools As Conformity Factories
Critics of the Prussian-based system, including the late John Taylor Gatto (an American public school teacher and educational reform advocate), agreed that the main goal of compulsory education had always been “effective early indoctrination of all children.” However, in the 20th century American and European contexts, the object was not to create obedient soldiers, but to build the necessary workforce required for the Industrial Age.
The idea in the early 20th century was that state-enforced educational systems would “bring the whole continental population into conformity,” according to Gatto. Entire populations could then be treated as a human resource to be managed by the emerging professional–managerial class. Hence why public school systems still train children as adult workers, confining them to a specific “place of duty” for 6-8 hours per day, with coercive truancy laws that empower the state to punish parents and children who disobey.
In his book, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945, author Jon Savage agrees with Gatto’s assessment regarding mass indoctrination. He noted that in developing the US high school system in the early 1900’s, its designers prioritized conformity.
This requirement for conformity, Savage writes, was largely due to the changing dynamics of the United States as it transitioned from a frontier society that prized “individualism, wanderlust, and self-sufficiency” into an industrial empire that:
… demanded dependability, physical strength, unquestioning obedience, and the ability to work in a group–to develop, in the educational jargon of the day, “a socialized disposition.” As in public school in Britain, this ethos was best inculcated in the young through sport, and team activities became of prime importance in schools and universities.
Delayed Maturity, Damaged Families
Gatto contended that the social engineering purposely built into the American public school system also actively discouraged young people from maturing. In an essay title “Let’s Abolish High School,” Dr. Robert Epstein, writing for EdWeek in 2007, made a similar point about the public school system delaying maturity:
Over the past century or so, we have, through a growing set of restrictions, artificially extended childhood by perhaps a decade or more, and we have also completely isolated young people from adults, severing the “child-adult continuum” that has existed throughout history …
A primary way in which public schools reinforce this breaking of the “child-adult continuum” is through the deliberate sorting of children into classes by age. This results in children that are almost entirely “peer oriented,” a problem illustrated by the Canadian team of child development expert Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., and family physician Gabor Maté, M.D., who wrote in their 2005 book, “Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers,” that:
… children today increasingly look to their peers for direction—their values, identity, and codes of behavior. This “peer orientation” undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming overly conformist, desensitized, and alienated; being “cool” matters more to them than anything else.
Much of the central thesis of “Hold On to Your Kids” echoes one of Gatto’s key assertions, made in a blistering 1991 essay for the Wall Street Journal, “I Quit, I Think”:
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
Debate continues regarding what factors underpin the dramatic recent drops in family formations and fertility rates, with most OECD countries now below replacement-level. Given their detrimental effects on both family formation and overall mental wellbeing of individuals, it is worth exploring how compulsory public education systems may be linked to crashing fertility. One case study that will be explored further in this series concerns the possible correlation between East Asian education systems and the alarming phenomena of collapsing fertility rates, particularly among Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.
For example, in a recent brief an unnamed official at Statistics Korea, apparently conceded that the government did not have a clear theory “about why married couples choose not to have babies,” adding that “my understanding is that addressing that part is going to be the focus of our policies (to boost the birth rate)," as per reporting from Reuters.
It is entirely possible that South Korea’s brutally competitive education system is contributing to the immiseration of its population, and could be a factor in the country having the highest suicide rate and the lowest fertility rate among the 38 OECD member nations.
This is a subject that will be explored in further detail in subsequent parts of this series.
A New Way Forward
In the same essay quoted above, Gatto analyzes why, in 1991, he was considering quitting the public school system after 26 years as a teacher (he would go on to teach another 4 years), saying in reference to the conformist nature of the institution, “I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.”
John Taylor Gatto died in 2018, so he did not live to see the ongoing mass re-appraisal of compulsory public education systems that occurred as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Gatto’s important contributions to educational reform may finally be realized in our lifetime, though, with perhaps millions of families worldwide now searching for a way out of fossilized compulsory education systems that no longer seem fit for purpose in the modern world.
In future installments of this series, we will explore this issue further.
For additional reading on the history of modern compulsory education systems, we recommend the following resources:
The Underground History of American History by John Taylor Gatto
When High Schools Shaped America’s Destiny by Paul Beston for City Journal
The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager by Thomas Hine
Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945 by Jon Savage
Montessori: The World’s Most Influential School? by David Robson and Alessia Franco
About Alexander Inglis's 1918 book 6 Principles of Secondary Education
Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté