A comment by a reader:
Education and the Industrial Imagination
Prof. Ravitch and followers of her blog are of course right to underscore the fact that for-profit colleges and universities must be understood in the broader context of an increasingly dominant business or industrial model of education. It is helpful to spell out that model more precisely, so that our criticisms can be more clearly and forcefully targeted. Let me take a stab at that here.
On the industrial model, educating whole persons for lifelong growth is replaced by education as just another industrial sector, on a par with any other sector. Education’s job is to manufacture skilled labor for the market in a way that is maximally efficient. Knowledge on this model is a market commodity, teachers are delivery vehicles for knowledge content, and students are either consumers or manufactured products. Educational institutions on the industrial model are marketplaces for delivering and acquiring content, tuition is the fair price for accessing that content, and the high-to-low grade differential is the means for incentivizing competition. It is not clear where growth, community, and democracy come into the picture.
A school may train more students with fewer teachers, and an industrial sector may produce more clothes, cars, or animal protein to meet market demands with lower overhead costs. These products can then be used, or put to work to produce more things. The industrial imagination stops here, with efficient production. This is arguably useful, but what else has been unintentionally made, to which industrial thinking is oblivious? Have we made narrower lives? Have we embittered and disabled? Have we anesthetized moral and ecological sensitivity? Have we, in John Dewey’s words, made life more “congested, hurried, confused and extravagant”? If the answer is a qualified yes, then these are questions that should be central to public deliberation about education. It would be a tragedy that trivializes all of our successes if we continue unchecked down a cultural path in which schools—or industries—gain efficiency and increase productivity by frustrating human fulfillment.
Steven Fesmire, author of Dewey (Routledge, 2015)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautiful questioning.
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It is the industrial lack of imagination — so like the illusions of the “self-made man” — that fails to realize how far from being self-sufficient it really is, that failing the sacrifices of generations who saw beyond the zero-sum game the bubble world of industry would never escape the pricks who hallow it.
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What kind of government creates public schools to contribute to the greater good and informed, responsible citizens? Then this government works to destroy those schools, while allowing the “marketplace” to feed on its most vulnerable children? What kind of government refuses to listen to its people while it accepts corporate funds to comply with the corporate agenda crushing democracy along the way? This is a broken system where greed reigns. If a government cannot protect is citizens from unfettered capitalism, what good is it?
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Our government wants pawns, who don’t question. This way the can do their dirty deeds with the help of BIG MONEY … OLIGARCHY.
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I quoted John Ruskin in a response to an earlier post, but I think what he said captures well modern public education. “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.”
Modern public education (though I have a sense that public education as long as I have been alive (circa 1949) has been more concerned with making tools than with helping students to become fulling realized human beings.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
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It is clear to some of us that most schools, even today, still serve the purposes of industrialism (while simultaneously claiming a mission statement of “self-actualization,” “critical thinking,” and “cultural awareness.”) As the 21st century has been defined by educational and social theorists, we’ve hardly ventured there yet.
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good liink
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“What serious-minded men not engaged in the professional business of philosophy most want to know is what modifications and abandonments of intellectual inheritance are required by the new industrial, political, and scientific movements… The task of the future philosophy is to clarify men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become, so far as is humanly possible,an organ for dealing with these conflicts.”
– John Dewey in Creative Intelligence
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Wonderful, clear and helpful. Thank you!
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That’s ironic, given that many reformers refer to the older model of public education as “the factory model of education”…http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model/
“What do I mean when I talk about transformational productivity reforms that can also boost student outcomes? Our K–12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools. But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century.” – US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2010)
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It’s funny and sad, because in the same paragraph he uses the terminology “boost student outcomes,” and then critiques the “factory model of education.”
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Oh, the Dunkster certainly can hold quite a number of opposing points of view in his head at the same time-they cohere into his incoherent brain as coherence itself.
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There are in order: educators, teachers, and instructors.
The “reform” model is to make instructors – purveyors of corporate mindset – out of educators.
Name the largest problems of today:
Is it that we do not have enough scientists, widgets for the corporations on their assembly line to make ever bigger profits
or
is it that the search for “truth” is decimated, that integrity, love for humanity et al that humankind’s greatest minds have sought as that which education is all about?
For me the small mindedness of the corporate mind which understands only making money is what is killing our country. Chris Hedges mentioned this yesterday. He went to college with the Bushes. The only thing now that mentality understands is making more money. Anything beyond that is beyond their comprehension.
Again: of what earthly use is a bag of gold in the middle of a desert – that desert is fast approaching.
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I bought a door to hang in my kitchen. My goal is nice oak solid doors. When you drill for the handle, you find the oak appearance is a thin veneer of true oak covering sawdust, shredded cardboard, and pieces of trash off a factory floor. All held together by cheap glue. All of America is now cheap doors. Rather than compete on quality, industries compete on low cost and price. Houses are thin trusses wrapped in plastic. Foods are dyed, injected, and processed. Politics is sound bytes and op-ed solutions. Technology is poorly developed and unreliable. On and on. No substance, all show. Americans are part of the problem willing to accept substandard products for a low price. It is the Walmartizing of America.
To an industrialist with a hammer, every issue looks like a nail.
So now education falls under the hammer of the simple minded industrialist. Learning is not an investment in the future, but a line item cost. Cut costs, they say. Quality is just an illusion. True quality in education is too expensive and can be achieved by a cheap veneer, substandard core, and cheap glue. We are doomed.
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It’s a great image. We have indeed become a society of sawdust with veneer holding us together.
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Your starting example is wonderful and you elaborate on on it perfectly.
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In certain applications in furniture making and woodworking a good particle board/plywood made properly with the right materials is far superior to use than planks of a solid wood. Right now I’m looking at a cherry hutch that I made in 1985 that has cherry veneer plywood for some parts and solid cherry for other parts. Long and/or wide spaces are not served well with plank wood as plank wood has a tendency to twist and bend over time causing cracking of the wood. Now as far as your door, well one gets what one pays for and yes, one can find cheap, inexpensive ones. Unless one knows what to look for it can be hard to tell an inexpensive one from a quality one. Hey, looks are everything aren’t they?
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If I could augment your thought: “So now education falls under the hammer and sickle of the simple minded capitalist industrialist. . . we are doomed.”
No we just choose not to pay for a quality education for all.
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In her book “Reign of Error,” Diane Ravitch succinctly states, “schools and societies are intertwined” (p. 7). The culture of the United States is one that epitomizes efficiency and productivity, and has increasingly done so since the Industrial Revolution. Can we blame for-profit colleges and universities for partaking in the capitalist system that perpetuates their existence? The Marxist convictions of labor determining one’s value and of the economic system beholding primary importance in society are alive today. While John Dewey intended to overcome these ideologies and ignite a movement of learning through interests, his influence was misinterpreted and instead erected vocational tracking. Vocational tracking is but one quality of the industrial model, and we see it among schools today– public, private, for-profit, universities, etc. I agree with Diane Ravitch’s statement above, “schools—or industries—gain efficiency and increase productivity by frustrating human fulfillment.” However, I am unsure that we can change the federally supported (and perpetuated) industrially-minded motivation of schools unless society as a whole chooses to place greater value on a people fulfilled than on a thriving economy. While the nation trusts schools to cultivate all needed change, the general public cannot demand what it does not value.
The following video, entitled “In Schools We Trust” provides a well-done overview of the development of public schools through the ages. This documentary illuminates the paradox of placing great expectations on schools to fix problems that exist in the greater/older society– and in policy makers.
I believe that young people today have potential to thrive through fulfilled and productive lives. However, such lives will not likely blossom through schools following the industrial model. Students need progressivist schools that practice critical theory and focus on “educating whole persons for lifelong growth,” as Ravitch beautifully encapsulates above. As a refresher, progressivist schools philosophically value the whole student and their freedom of choice within their education. Furthermore, schools with philosophical underpinnings of critical theory are linguistically and culturally responsive, involving students’ native languages and cultures in classroom teaching and learning. With the expanding U.S. student population of English learners, schools need to value an individual’s home language and culture, which will engage the whole student, and as a result better ensure lifelong growth. The world is changed by people who explore their own potential, not by those who are tactfully regulated by industrial modeled schools. If schools and societies are intertwined, our society must revolutionize its values and not expect the schools to do it for us.
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Whoever created the term, “human capital” should get a life sentence or have their tongue super-glued to the roof of their mouth (obviously kidding on the latter)! That is probably the most telling phrase indicative of the industrial philosophy and the term sickens me along with a few HUNDRED others!
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