But in fact schools arose with industry to get folks to accept the regimentation and ranking of the industrial workplace, and to curb natural human creativity, exploration, and challenging of authority. As Katja’s proposal’s illustrates, schools could in fact teach folks how to question common beliefs “scientifically,” if in fact authorities wanted common folks doing that sort of thing.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
QoTD
Robin Hanson on education:And that's what homeschooling is breaking. Have fun in obedience training, kids. FWIW, I consider Robin's statement about the history of schooling to be factually true, and barely disputable by anyone who's actually looked into the history.
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8 comments:
The school I went to was set up in the early 17th century, primarily to teach people how to read Greek (and to a lesser extent the other Biblical languages) so that we could have better understanding of the Bible and hence better theology. There was an explosion of setting up schools at this time, for those purposes.
If this has anything to do with the industrial workplace, it's beyond me.
That should read 16th century, sorry.
WIAN,
There were at least 3-4 rounds of schools. I was focusing on the more recent versions.
There have (for ~2500 years in the west) been schools for elites that focus on teaching the elites to do something elitist ( like read dead languages to understand revealed religion, or to be philosopher kings, or to study math ). However, those were for a TINY portion of the population. 1%? 0.01%?
Schooling for the masses grew out of Frederick the Great's need to build obedient workers and soldiers, followed by (in America) Horace Mann's desire to propagandize the youth (anti-Catholicism at the Irish immigrants).
Pure obedience + propaganda.
If I were feeling ornery, I'd argue that whichever parochial school system you went to (Jesuit?) had propaganda and obedience as substantial goals as well that were precursors to studying.
To say schools are about "obedience and propaganda" is non-falsifiable. The question is, obedience to whom? And what kind of propaganda? I just don't agree that there is a single answer to this question (e.g. "the industrial workplace").
I'd also draw a distinction between compulsory education run by the state, and independent schools that competitively seek to attract students (or, more realistically, parents). The "propaganda and obedience" story seems much stronger, and more sinister, in the first, whereas in the second it's merely the parents outsourcing the propagandizing.
Incidentally, the school I went to was Church of England.
WIAN,
There's 2 ways in which this could be non-falsifiable. 1 is that it's historical, and thus hard to falsify. The other is that it couldn't be converted into a testable experiment.
Claim:
The primary differences between schooled kids and homeschooled kids are in two areas:
1. How habitually they listen to social superiors.
2. How consistently they hew to the party line.
Both are measureable, and can be compared against other metrics (learning, academic skills, etc.) In this sense, it's awful hard to argue that it's unfalsifiable.
Actually your tests are not reliable, at least they are subject to a range of false negatives.
For one thing, this will only give a positive result if the schools are EFFECTIVE at propaganda and obedience training. Regardless of the actual intent.
My school had a very clear hippie/peacenick/native-shamanistic-religion propaganda stream (which is weird because it was a Marist Brothers Catholic school.
However this push was SO lame, obvious and clumsy that it drove at least the top 25% of the students into being gun toting capitalists who applied to join the military after graduation*. The religious response was split between those who rebelled against society by going to church and those who straight out started worshiping satan.
Thinking back on it, I later realized that this might have been the Marist Brother's plan all along. Except for the Satan part.
*The military judged me as "psychologically unsuited" which was probably correct.
Fair enough on the false negatives, drpat. But I've been watching this for decades...and I'll take the false negatives.
Not only does school try to generate conformity and obedience, it's very good at it.
Aretae, the reason it's non-falsifiable is because the terms "the party line" and "social superiors" are pretty much infinitely malleable. Is there any definition for "social superiors" other than the people who the majority of the population generally listen to? So of course the majority of the population generally listen to their social superiors, because you've defined the terms that way. Now you pick a subset of the population, and you find that the people they listen to are slightly different. It doesn't follow that the schools are teaching obedience - for example, I suspect that home-schooled children disproportionately listen to religious figures.
In order to evaluate whether schools are teaching "obedience" and "propaganda," you need to evaluate why people listen to the "superiors" that they do. The H0 must surely be that they do so because it's rational. This idea that people have all been brainwashed by a false consciousness seems to be a claim without content. The fact is that in the modern western world we do not have a clear hierarchy of social superiority, we have multiple competing "party lines" and we have multiple sources of information outside of schools. If this doesn't disprove your claim, I don't see what possibly can.
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