What are schools for?
- sciart0
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Clara Collier: To start, do you want to give us a quick background of the book and your research?
Agustina Paglayan: Sure. "Raised to Obey" examines the origins of modern public education systems. This project began out of my interest in our current education systems and why, in many different countries, they are not living up to their promise of leveling the playing field, of giving people the knowledge and skills they need to thrive.
In seeking to understand that problem, I realized that I had to go back in time to understand why these education systems were established in the first place. Were they created and designed to teach kids valuable knowledge and skills, or were they designed with a different set of goals in mind? And what I learned was that they were actually designed with a different goal. The primary purpose behind the creation of primary education systems was to convert unruly children into obedient citizens who would respect the state and its laws.
The idea that rulers had was that if you caught children from a young age and taught them to sit still, to respect rules, to respect the teacher's authority, they were going to internalize these norms — that following rules and respecting authority is a good thing to do. And in the long term, that would lead to social order and political stability that would preserve the status quo, which these rulers benefited from.
C: In the book you walk through all of the different explanations for why states would invest in mass primary education. Is it because of democratization? Is it to prepare an industrial workforce? Is it for military readiness? Is it for nationalization? And you make the case that those explanations don't really fit the available evidence.
I'm most interested then in zooming in on what effects this has today. How do these origins manifest themselves in the way that schools work in the present?
A: I think that there have been changes in the goals of education systems over time, and we have seen some education systems take on more goals, beyond the original goals that motivated the emergence of these systems. But even then, in the vast majority of education systems, you still see these disciplinary and coercive roots very embedded in the character of how schools today continue to operate.
If you do a Google search of "classroom in [country of your choice]," you're going to find that classrooms around the world are all organized with a teacher-centered approach: kids are sitting in rows facing a teacher who stands at the front of the class.The kids are paying attention. They have to raise their hand and get the teacher's permission to participate. If they want to go to the bathroom, they must ask.