A Model T Education: Public Schooling on the Assembly Line
Sunday, 06 January 2013 12:05By Adam Bessie, Daily Censored | News Analysis
“Mass production is a problem the auto industry solved over 100 years ago,” veteran education reporter Jonn Merrow narrates over grainy images of Model Ts being rolled out of a factory in his most recent PBS NewsHour report. He observes that with the Model T, Henry Ford’s innovation was not in creating a quality car, but in constructing an assembly-line which could mass-produce them, providing this once cutting edge technology affordably to the public. “But it’s an issue our education system has yet to figure out. Nobody has figured out how to mass-produce high-quality, cost-effective schools,” Merrow mournfully concludes – public education has yet to discover its “Model T.”
In other words, Merrow – who has been reporting on education for forty years – is saying public education should aspire to the assembly line of the 1920s.
Perhaps the Mayans were right.
The last few years have felt like the beginning of the end of public education: it’s not just neo-con think tanks and billionaire industrialists calling for the end of public