School Is a Prison — And Damaging Our Kids

[Igel]

21. And yet it's modelled more on industry than on church schools.

Nice batches of kids that are processed by groups, evaluated in groups, and issued a "quality certificate" at the end. Lots of industrial regulations and quotas, with quality control checkpoints along the way.

Having all the production follow a set formula and requiring 100% compliance is "big-government regulation of industry" idea. We take kids and sort them; we shape and mould them to fit the die-presses we have for them.

The religious schools in 1500s and 1600s were small and fairly free form. They were strict and imposed control, but that's not unique to religious schools. A lot of their methods were taken over by Big Education, first in the late 1800s but also in the 1920s and 1930s by proletarian-oriented secularists because it's also Big Industry and Big Government ways of doing things. It's handy to point the finger at the religious folk because they're nice scapegoats. Dewey and other "progressive" and "socially aware" thinkers are much, much harder to impugn. It's to them, and not to Luther and his immediate successors, we owe Arnie Duncan.

If you have to deal with 1 000 000 individuals it's hard. If you can divvy them up into a few different categories for assembly-line processing, it's much easier.