American schools are modeled after factories and treat students like widgets. Right? Wrong.
A worker prepares assembled stand mixers for packaging on the production line at the Whirlpool Corp. KitchenAid manufacturing facility in Greenville, Ohio, U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg)
How many times have you heard that public schools in the United States were modeled in the 20th Century on factories and have yet to be restructured to meet 21st Century needs? A lot, I’d bet. But what if that isn’t true? In this post, education historian Jack Schneider looks at the truth behind the “factory model” theory and whether school design is really the cause of student disengagement and inadequate learning. Schneider is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross and the author of “Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools” and “From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education.” Follow him on Twitter @Edu_Historian.
By Jack Schneider
American schools were modeled after factories. And they treat students like widgets. As a consequence, learning is often irrelevant to young people—failing to target their interests or to recognize their unique needs.
The claim has been repeated so often—by entrepreneurs, by policy wonks, by the secretary of education—that it has achieved a kind of truth status. And increasingly, it’s a rallying cry for reform. Our schools need reinvention,reformers assert. If we want to promote real learning, we need to tear down the factory and rebuild around technologies of the Information Age.
It’s the stuff of great TED talks. It just happens to be wrong.
Now, reformers aren’t wrong that school all too often feels irrelevant to young people. Students are regularly bored and disengaged in the classroom. They memorize meaningless minutia that makes only a shallow imprint on their brains. And they rarely have the opportunity to pursue their passions.
But that isn’t because of a “factory model.”
To start with, American schools were not actually modeled after factories. That’s an invented history full of errors and omissions. It illustrates very little knowledge of how actual factories operated. And it happens to totally American schools are modeled after factories and treat students like widgets. Right? Wrong. - The Washington Post: