Factory Model Education “Reforms” Were Designed for Product Testing, Not Children
“The factory model was developed to ensure quality control and produce identical “consumer” products cheaply. It is NOT an approach that should be used with children. Modern researchers and professional educators have come to understand that thehuman brain is wired for learning, and that the most effective methods of education are aligned with how children naturally learn.”
Education reforms that attempt to enforce fixed standards, continuous data collection and high-stakes testing are applying an industrial model of factory production developed in the early part of the last century. It’s a manufacturing approach that should not be applied to children.
The factory model (and mindset) continues to be very popular in business. It’s been re-branded, but can be recognized by it’s shared emphasis on top-down controls, strict standards, rules enforcement and data collection. It is a very effective way of making products cheaply and generating profits (turning everything it touches into a commodity to be bought, sold and traded), but is completely inappropriate in educational settings, and with children, because it ignores their inner lives, treating them like data points and soul-less products on an assembly line.
“Asking kids to meet target on standardized tests is like making them meet a sales quota. Our kids are not commodities.” ~Kris Nielsen
The Mismatch of the Data Focused Business Model with Education
This graph shows the “business model” of data collection and decision-making that is utilized by many Fortune 500 firms and is currently being implemented by education reformers in the United States. (It’s also quite popular in Asia, where it appears to be Factory Model Education “Reforms” Were Designed for Product Testing, Not Children | Creative by Nature:
