“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”
— Bertrand Russell
To discuss the topic of education in the US, one must understand that adequate education hardly exists in this country, but it didn’t have to be that way. The US was an early pioneer in mass public education. Thomas Jefferson’s work to establish the University of Virginia in 1819 was an extension of the Enlightenment, communitarian ethic which aroused the founding period. As he wrote to William Roscoe in 1820, “this institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” Another reformer, Horace Mann, known as the “Father of American Education,” believed in the development of “common schools,” supported by their communities, which would provide education to all American children.
As mass public education in the US developed in the 19th century, elites began to conceive of public education as a means of subverting independent farmers, many of them overtly radical. If you go back to the end of that century, the Farmer’s Alliance emerged from Texas as one of the most radical popular democratic organizations anywhere in human history (something unheard of in Texas today). They stuck up for their rights—not wanting to be slaves to the big financial trusts—and they had to be driven into factories and turned into tools for corporate and governmental power. It’s hard to believe for many, but a lot of public education was, in fact, concerned with trying to teach independent people to become interchangeable workers in an industrial system.
But, there was more to it than that. Actually, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on it. In his 1844 essay, “New England Reformers,” he noted that tyrants are often motivated to provide education as a means of social control. “I notice too,” Emerson wrote, “that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: ‘This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.’” In other words, we have to train them for obedience and servility, so they’re not going to think through the way the world works and threaten our privileged interests. So, it’s kind of a mixture. There’s a lot of good things about it, such as the development of skills and promotion of social bonds, but there were also the interests of the propertied class. The people who concentrate wealth don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts, but in order to maintain their position of dominance and extend their power. Part of that dominance is predicated on keeping the masses pacified enough to not consider revolt. And it’s been kind of that battle all the way throughout organized human history. Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education but in democratic accountability. A lot of what’s happening is still rooted in the backlash to the 1960’s; the 1960’s were a democratizing period. The society became a lot more civilized and there was a lot of concern about education across the mainstream spectrum—liberals and conservatives alike.
It’s interesting to read liberal literature of the 1970’s, but there was concern about what they called “the failures of the institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young.” That’s the exact phrase that was used, which expresses the liberal view quite accurately. So the indoctrination of the young wasn’t working properly. This was the view of people like Samuel Huntington, former professor of government at Harvard, who was a liberal guru. He co-authored a report called “The Crisis of Democracy.” There was something that had to be done to increase indoctrination in order to beat back the democratizing wave.
A major component of this change came with the Governorship of Ronald Reagan in California. Prior to Reagan, under the leadership of Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, the University of California was an emblematic example of a successful, free public college system. With the free tuition and the commitment to academic freedom, the Berkeley Free Speech movement grew in the 1960s, challenging the establishment within the University of California and the broader powers controlling the state. Reagan’s election in 1966 saw him oversee a massive change of the University of California system, introducing austerity and limitations on academic freedom. He also spearheaded the charge to fire Dr. Angela Davis as a professor for her political commitment to communism, a chilling of free speech that altered the UC system forever.
Reagan understood, much like Richard Nixon did, that if you changed the public university in America from a place of free education and academic openness, you could control both the students and the broader public. Other public colleges and universities followed Reagan’s plan with the UC system, instituting tuition fees for the first time and placing a major financial burden on students. This has only grown more so in the following decades, with student debt skyrocketing to an unbelievable $1.77 trillion today. When students are burdened with so much debt, they’re unlikely to become dissidents or activists. This is a form of social control that stifles free speech, academic excellence, and progress—instituting subtle forms of indoctrination against democratic principles.
One can be, at minimum, reasonably suspicious that skyrocketing student debt is a device of indoctrination. It’s very hard to imagine that there’s any economic reason for it. Other countries’ education is essentially free, like Mexico—a relatively poor country. Finland, which has perhaps the best education system in the world, by the outcomes and records at least, is free. Germany’s education is free. The US in the 1950’s was a much poorer country than it is today, but education was basically free with things like the GI Bill. So there’s no real economic reason for high-priced higher education and skyrocketing student debt. But there are other reasons. And one of them, the primary reason as mentioned, is just that students are simply trapped. The other is what’s happening to teachers who are being turned into glorified babysitters and temporary workers who have no rights, such as adjunct professors. Just go ask any public school teacher in the US. The more you can make the lives of graduate students, temporary workers, and two-tiered payment workers more precarious, then the more people you have under control—and all of that’s been going on continuously since the assault on public education began at the onset of the neoliberal era.
At this point it’s institutionalized with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, bipartisan education overhauls led by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively. These reforms forced teachers to teach students only what was on standardized tests, which is the worst possible way of teaching. But it is a disciplinary technique. Schools in the US are simply designed to teach to the test. You don’t have to worry about students thinking for themselves, challenging entrenched ideas, and raising provocative questions. Students and teachers go along with this because their economic futures and salaries depend on it. And it has the obvious effect of dumbing down the population and turning people into obedient workers—thereby controlling them. And, as mentioned before, it’s bipartisan; The Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations all pushed it.
Also, other efforts to kill education—such as vouchers for charter schools or private schools—are nothing but an attempt to destroy the public education system. As journalist Katherine Stewart has written extensively about, the modern private school movement in the US grew out of an intense backlash to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated the public school system. Southern whites were appalled at the thought of their children going to school with black children, so they led efforts to develop private schools that could remain segregated. They were known as “segregation academies” for this very reason. The development of private, religiously motivated segregated schools went hand-in-hand with the development of the religious right as a political force in American life. Today, the effort to provide private schools with public dollars is known as “school choice,” but that’s patently ridiculous. It’s an attempt to profit off education and hand it to private power while simultaneously undermining public education for all American children.
For most people, they can’t make the choices; there are not any choices for poor kids in the urban slums or rural backwaters across the US. It’s like saying everyone has a choice to become a millionaire or billionaire. You do, in a sense that there’s no law against it, but you likely won’t. Just like poor communities likely won’t be able to send their kids to private schools. They’re trying to make it so poor people can’t even send their kids to school, thus they will labor endlessly to help support their families’ ever increasing living expenses just to stay alive—effectively wage slaves—while those who have the privilege of getting an education will be indoctrinated to fill the institutional roles, say and do all the things corporate America wants them to, and become consuming cogs in a machine of profit and death. We’re well on our way to this reality, especially with the fascist Republicans taking the dismantling of the American state and its already horribly limited social support system to new, and rather grotesque, levels.
Education in this country, as discussed, is primarily about off-job control, and there are many devices for that. Education is one but advertising is another. The advertising industry is a huge industry, and anyone with their eyes open can see what it’s for. First off, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of an unwillingness to let markets function. If we had markets, we wouldn’t have advertising, and if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want to. Second, advertising exists to manufacture wants rather than needs, which further subverts traditional market mechanisms. The techniques of advertising and public relations, what another generation would’ve called propaganda, were pioneered by Dr. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who developed elaborate techniques of propaganda to sell products to consumers. Once advertising became a mainstay in American life, the average person didn’t stand a chance.
Additionally, the concentration of corporate power led to efforts to stifle competition, as many corporate dictatorships wanted to stop price wars. Needing some product differentiation, they turned to deluding people into thinking they should buy this rather than that, or just getting them to consume. If you can get them to consume, they’re trapped—that’s advertising. By now there’s a huge part of the advertising industry which is designed to capture children, and it’s destroying childhood. Anyone who has any experience with children can see this. It’s literally destroying their childhoods. Kids don’t know how to play. They can’t go outside like when other generations in the 20th century did, since the suburban neighborhoods they live in aren’t walkable and parents are more uneasy about letting their children out of their sight. In earlier eras, children with a free Saturday afternoon could go out to a field or park and find other kids to play a game or sport. Kids today can’t really do much like that. It has to be organized by adults, or else you’re at home with gadgets, video games, and social media.
But the idea of children going out just to play with all its benefits—that’s gone, and it’s done consciously to trap children from infancy to turn them into consumer addicts. This means you’re out for yourself and have the Ayn Rand-type of sociopathic behavior, which comes straight out of the consumer culture. Consumer culture means going out for myself; I don’t give a damn about anyone else. This kind of thinking and practice is really destroying society in a lot of ways, and education is a huge part of it.
Much has to do with the catastrophe that’s looming—the climate crisis and environmental breakdown. It’s very serious. It’s not generations from now; it’s people’s children, their grandchildren, etc. And the public is essentially in agreement with the scientific consensus, aside from fascist supporting republicans and conspiratorial nut jobs. If you look at polls, it will say it’s a serious problem; we’ve got to do something about it. The US Government doesn’t want to, and corporate America not only doesn’t want to, but is strongly opposed to it.
So now, take the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It’s funded by the Koch brothers and other likeminded corporate oligarchs. It’s an organization that designs boilerplate, pro-corporate legislation for state legislatures. They have plenty of clout, so they can get a lot of it through. They have a program which sounds very nice on the surface. It’s supposedly designed to increase “critical thinking.” And the way you increase critical thinking is by having “balanced education.” “Balanced education” means that if you teach kids something about the climate, you also have to teach them about climate change denial, usually referred to as “climate skepticism.” This is like teaching evolutionary biology and creationism as two sides of a debate, which provides the appearance of “critical thinking” but actually muddies the waters concerning established concepts of knowledge. All of this is a way of turning the population into a bunch of ignorant and mindless imbeciles. That’s really serious. I mean, it’s literally life and death at this point, not just making society worse. This is an existential problem for humanity, especially for children, who are naturally creative, inquisitive, and looking to learn. Hence why they’re asking, “Why?” all the time.
Education should be about laying out a thread for children to connect the dots in their own creative ways—not opening a textbook or PowerPoint and asking them to take notes and study for a test they’re largely going to forget about shortly after. Imagine thinking that’s going to make kids want to learn. The reason many “hate school” isn’t because they’re inherently lazy, but because of how it’s structured. Public education in the US today has a funny effect of getting the population used to the 9-5 grind, the work off the clock (homework), the monotonous work tasks we don’t want to do but have to, etc. It’s effectively training people for their future subservience to corporate America. If teachers were allowed to be free and creative agents, there’s every reason to believe they’d opt for a more flexible approach to education. One geared more towards students and teaching them to think rather than simply test well.
But that’s what’s being destroyed: teachers’ control of the classroom, like worker control of the shop floor. For the ruling class, you can’t allow that; you must have obedience. It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to one day see education in US public schools reduced to some sort of AI-generated curriculum and teaching that’s incredibly harmful to learning outcomes. For parents who can afford to do so, they will simply opt out of this into the private school system where real teaching remains. For private power, why use teachers you have to pay continuously for public schools when you can simply use AI to run the lessons? Then you don’t have to worry at all about any teachers actually interested nurturing their students’ critical thinking abilities.
Control from above, control by the administrators. No respect for the working person, whether it’s a teacher or machinist. And it’s amazing how this is done. I mean, there’s been great studies on this. One studied the machine tool industry in the 1950’s and 1960’s. There was a move towards computer control of machines. Numerical control of machine process, a big advance. There were two tracks that could be followed. One was letting skilled machinists run the system with their detailed knowledge and ability to fix things that went wrong and develop new ideas. The other was to let the managers run it. And there were studies, and the ones where the machinists ran it were successful and profitable and everything else, but they picked the opposite way. And they picked it for a very simple reason: they received disciplined workers. Even if that overcomes profit, it’s much more important to have a disciplined, obedient workforce. Not workers who can do things for themselves, for pretty obvious reasons. If they can do things for themselves, they’re pretty soon going to ask: “why do we need bosses?”
And then you’re in trouble. Just like sit-down strikes, that’s why they’re so dangerous. This happened, and it’s the same thing in schools. You can’t let teachers control the classroom. You must have teaching to the test; then the teachers are disciplined, obedient, and controlled. They do what you tell them. As mentioned, their salaries depend on it; their jobs depend on it; their lives depend on it. They become as controlled by the system as everyone else, and this is why parents are frustrated with their kids’ teachers. If you have a society where it’s only, “Look after me; I’ll forget everyone else,” then they can get rid of public education, and then Social Security and Medicare. You get thinking like, “Why should I pay for the kid across the street going to school; my kid is not going to school. Why should I care about disabled widows?”, etc.
Dismantling public education also has the consequence of cutting creativity and independence with regard to the arts. Adolescence is a phase when children express and learn about themselves. It’s important for privileged interests to cut that back. My grandfather grew up in the depression of Youngstown, Ohio. Back when that city was three times the size of today. His family was employed working class and many never made it past grade school but were familiar with what could be called “high culture.” That is to say the plays of Shakespeare, the literature of people like John Steinbeck or Sinclair Lewis, the concerts of artists like Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra, etc. It was a part of life to my grandfather’s family, just like working in steel mills. In fact, there was once a detailed scholarly study of working class people in England in the 19th century and what they were reading, and it’s pretty remarkable. The people mostly didn’t go to school but they had quite a high level of culture. They were reading contemporary literature and the classics. In fact, the authors of the study concluded that they were probably more educated than the aristocrats themselves.
The working class must defend public education against the attacks of the corporate elite and the political leaders who are bought by them. We must reform education so that it’s more important to teach children how to think critically than what to think about on a standardized test. We must continue to build labor and solidarity movements that bring education to the people, such as book swaps, book clubs, and free lectures. Children should be given the opportunity to find what they’re good at and what they’re passionate about, which will instill a lifelong love of learning. The great Issac Asimov once said that “self education is the only kind of education there is.” We can’t develop self-education without strong public schools, vibrant communities, and a communitarian ethic that binds people together. Only then can real education begin.
