America's Universal Education System Exists From a Coalition of Progressives, the Know-Nothing Party, and the Ku Klux Klan

Christmas is coming fast. If you're still trying to figure out what to get the people you love, crosswalk can help. The crosswalk holiday gift guide is full of gifts that point back to Jesus. There are devotionals, bibles, books, kids gifts, and handmade vines for dads, moms, kids, teams, and even your pastor. Give something that lasts beyond the wrapping paper. Visit crosswalk.com/giftguide today. History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts. It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explain how and why we got here. Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is. I'm your host, Scott Rank. We take for granted that throughout the industrialized world, education is compulsory for those between first and twelfth grade. But we're really not that many generations removed from when education wasn't compulsory. Most children worked on family farms and spent few if any days they could in the classroom. Primary education up to age 18 was reserved for the wealthy, and the majority didn't learn much beyond basic literacy. At least in the case of the United States, this all changed when reformers, like Horace Mann, who in the early 1800s dreamed of education and literacy and science, spreading throughout all levels of American society started to work with politicians and other social reformers to make this dream a reality. Other people wanted universal education in the United States for much darker reasons. The no-nothing party in the 1850s feared the influx of Irish Catholic immigrants and thought they'd bring their papers ideas to the young republic. They figured that compulsory education could break these European children of their Catholic ways and prevent them from going to Catholic schools and transform them into patriotic Americans. The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s also supported universal education because they too wanted to prevent the spread of Catholic schools. This episode is from the vault and explores the origins of compulsory education from the Protestant Reformation and how it is used as a weapon and the religious arms race of 16th century Europe, precious role as the First Nation with the Universal Schooling, how America adopted compulsory K-12 education, whether or not it's true that American schools in the 1800s were set up like factories and basically a training students to become factory workers upon graduation and many other topics. Hope you enjoyed this episode. In the 1840s, Horus Mann was on a crusade to improve American education. He wrote a report in the journal he started, the common school journal, in April 15th, 1844, and he was describing a trip he had recently taken to Europe. He went to England, Ireland, Prussia, one of the states and yet to be unified Germany, looking for the best that Europe had to offer in terms of education. He saw positives and negatives of each place he visited but he was absolutely astounded at what he saw in Prussia. In his report, he contrasted everything he saw positive in Prussia against the American educational system, which at that time was boarding schools and private tutors for the wealthy, one room school houses for those below them socially, and then for the rest of society, whatever bits and pieces of education their parents, their bosses or anyone else would give them. In America, corporal punishment was definitely the rule of the day and that's why Mann was so astounded that in Prussia that didn't use it. Not only did they not use corporal punishment but children actually seemed to be able to enjoy their education. He was shocked to see a school where children were divided in groups of 18 to 20 and according to their age, not children of different ages crammed into one room. He described something that would be familiar to us today but above all, he noted that the method that was used in Prussia and education actually made education enjoyable and you didn't constantly have to threaten students to learn. Here's how he described it. About 20 years ago, teachers in Prussia made the important discovery that children have five senses. Together with various muscles and mental faculties, all of which almost by a necessity of their nature must be kept in a state of activity in which, if not usefully, are liable to be mischievously employed. Subsequent improvements in the art of teaching have consisted in supplying interest in and useful instead of mischievous occupation for these senses, muscles, and faculties. Experiences now provided that it is much easier to furnish profitable and delightful employment for all these powers than it is to stand over them with their rod and stifle their workings or to assume a thousand shapes of fear to guard the thousand avenues through which the salient spirits of the youth play minutes and here describing the Prussian teacher, he says, "There was nothing frivolous or trifling in the manner of the teacher, that manner was dignified, though playful, and the little jets of laughter which he caused the children occasionally to throw out were much more favorable to a receptive state of mind than jets of tears." Man noted the tools that Prussian's school children had. Every child had a slate and a pencil and a little reading book of letters, words, and short sentences. He noted that he never saw a Prussian or Saxon school in which any child was without a slate or a pencil, and there was a blackboard in front of the classroom. But most of all, he noted how the lesson happened. The teacher first drew a house upon the blackboard. By the side of the drawing and under it, he wrote the word "house" in the German script and printed it in the German letter. At the long-pointing rod, the end being painted white to make it more visible, he ran over the form of the letters. The next process was to copy the word "house" both in script and in print on their slates. Then, followed the formation of the sounds of the letters of which the word was composed and the spelling of the word. Several children were then called to the blackboard to draw a house with chalk. After this, the teacher entered into a conversation about houses. The first question was, "What kind of house was on the blackboard?" Then the names of other kinds of houses were given. The materials of which the houses are built were mentioned. Stone, brick, wood, the different kinds of wood, nails, and where they were made, lime and once it came, etc. When the teacher touched upon points with which the children were supposed to be acquainted, he asked questions. In this, as well as in all other schools, a complete answer was always required. For instance, if a teacher asks, "What are houses made of?" He does not accept the answer of wood or of stone. He requires a full, complete answer, as a house may be made of wood. The answer must always contain an intelligible proposition without reference to the words of the questions that complete it. This secures from the beginning, precision in the expression of ideas, and if, as many philosophers suppose, the intellect could never carry forward its processes of argument or investigation to any great extent without using language as its instrument than these children in their primary lessons are not only led to exercise the intellect, but the instrument is put into their hands by which its operations are facilitated. When the hour had expired, I do not believe there was a child in the room who knew or thought that his playtime had come. The reason man was so astounded, partly for the organization of the lesson, and how he could see that children were learning according to the most recent methods of how people could acquire information of using the five senses, was that he contrasted it with how terrible the American system was, where there was constant road drilling, and students had to do what he thought was useless tasks under fear of punishment. Everything was always done with one thing at a time. You know the American system, where a teacher holds a book or a card before a student, and forces him to parrot an empty string of phrases or words, and provided he doesn't mess up and get whipped, then he goes back to his seat to sit still and look out vacantly. Man said, if the child is bright, the time which passes during this lesson is the only part of the day when he does not think. Now, the single faculty of the mind is occupied except that of imitating sounds, and even the number of these imitations that amounts only to 26. A pair or idiot could do the same thing. For the child who stands most like a post is most approved, nay he is re-booted if he does not stand like a post. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about the history of education in the United States and indirectly how it developed in Europe, and really all around the globe because globally, the method of classroom education is really how learning takes place at the primary and secondary level. This question comes from listener Laura Carl, who herself is a teacher, and I'll just play the question for you right now because she submitted it by voicemail. Hi, my name is Laura, and my question isn't about a specific event or time in history, but more about the history of a subject. I would love to know more about really the history of education in America, and how we got to the point where we are now where students are, you know, went from working in the fields to going to school full-time kind of like their job. So, I'm just any information you can give me on the history of education within America and be greatly appreciated. Well, this is a very big question. As she mentioned, children were working in fields that weren't going to school, and even those who were learning, some of them were in a one-room schoolhouse, some of them were writing on us. late at home and copying the Latin dictation from their mother or father. Some of them were going to their church where the church taught them to read through the Bible or the catechism of their denomination. Some of them went to a boarding school. Your wealthy maybe you had a private tutor. So what caused the transformation from this splintered version of education where there were many methods to learn but it wasn't standardized into the standardized system we have today. So in this episode I'm going to be talking about the origins of education how it was really unstandardized in the ancient world and then the medieval world. How things change in the 1500s and then the 1600s when the printing press makes more books available but then also there's a competition among different religious groups that also creates a literacy and education arms race. And then the big change that happens in the 1800s during the time of Horus Mann and other people that gives us our education system today and how modern day critics think that our current education system is completely broken because it's based on well if you get right down to it in 1800s school that wanted to prepare a bunch of kids to work in factories that's what it was set up for at the time and that's what we're still using it for even though things have changed a lot since the 1800s and you need an industrial age factory. So those are the main points I'm going to hit on but I'm not just going to be talking about the chronology of education. I'm going to be talking about a very important concept of modern day education and that is the theory of discipline and I'm not talking about corporal punishment or all that. I'm talking about discipline in a Foucaultian sense in the philosophy of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher from the middle of the 20th century. Now here's the idea that undergirds a lot of this and Michel Foucault is someone that if you study humanities at the graduate level you're going to run into them whether you like it or not. His writing is almost completely incomprehensible as many French philosophers were but he gave us a very important idea and here's what it is. He wrote a book in 1975 called Discipline and Punish. It's actually about the changes that happen in the prison system from the medieval to the modern world but the theory applies to a lot of other modern institutions like schools and hospitals. He said that prisons and schools and hospitals and factories and military institutions are all part of a vast network that tries to train its citizens to act a certain way and make you think that you're being watched even when you aren't so that you'll always behave in a certain way and be better controlled. So in the book Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes about the modern penal system and the purpose of punishing citizens or subjects in order to act a certain way. He began by analyzing the situation before the 18th century when you had public executions and public shaming and public corporal punishment and even torture as a way to control subjects. In the 18th century there were calls for the reform of punishment but many reformers Foucault says they weren't motivated by the inhumanity of public executions or welfare of prisoners but they wanted to make society use its power more efficiently or to discipline the people. Discipline is a series of techniques by which people can be controlled and discipline could be used by devices such as timetables and military drills the process of exercise and it could really be done in three ways. The first is hierarchical observation. The sense that you're always being watched and the summit of this power is an all seen eye or they call it the Pam Opticon. The second is normalizing judgment where somebody takes these rules of discipline upon themselves and they follow these rules even when the observer isn't watching them this is called kind of self-regulation or self-policing and the third aspect is the examination where you have standards that people have to uphold in a school these could be regular tests in a prison this could be you meet before a parole board to get released. Military has all sorts of examinations in order to move up and rank or get certified for different skills. What Foucault said is that through modern institutions like a factory or a school or prison people are turned into docile bodies and this arrangement was ideal for the industrial age where people started working in factories and satin classrooms and had to be controlled. They couldn't just be left on their farm to do really whatever they wanted and as long as they produced a certain amount of barley or harvest then the government really didn't care what they were up to. No, in a modern society you have to control people's behavior a lot more than that. You had to make sure that people internalize certain principles in regards to which activities they did were natural but was expected of them in the future and what they could do as a group. So even in their private manners they were performing the values of the dominant class. This is the value of the panopticon of the sense that someone is being watched. The public is less likely to break the law if it always thinks it's being watched. So this is why Foucault said that public executions these occasional symbolic movements of power went away. They were only good for a moment and instead you have a prison system where guards are always walking around. There's a timetable that's always followed. There are cameras everywhere because it can change the psychology of a person much more effectively than just brief occasional symbolic movements like an execution. Okay, so that's the idea of disciplining and that leads to criticisms of the modern day education system and I'll just mention a few of these criticisms before I get into the actual history of education to see if the history matches up with the criticisms that people have about it today and if the history of education actually shows that there was an agenda to create this system of discipline like Michelle Foucault talks about. U.S. Secretary of Education, Arnie Duncan, said in 2010 that RK-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, 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. Perhaps the best known argument against the factory model of education comes from Alvin Toffler who is the author of the 1970 book Future Shock that argues people simply can't keep up with all the advancements in technology and absorb them. He declared the industrial era school like this. Best education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world. A world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon but by the factory whistle on the clock. The solution was an educational system that in its very structure simulated this new world. This system did not emerge instantly. Even today it retains throwback elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students raw material to be processed by teachers, workers, and a centrally located school factory was a stroke of industrial genius. The whole administrative hierarchy of education as it grew up followed the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge and permanent disciples was grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place to place in satan assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time. The inner life of the school thus became an anticipatory mirror, a perfect introduction to industrial society. The most criticized features of education today, the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid system of seating, grouping, grading, and marking. The authoritarian role of the teacher are precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time. What this and the other quotes are saying is that the disciplining technique of schools was effective but it was effective for a century ago and it's not effective for the modern world. Now let's go back to the origins of education and see how true this statement is. Education is a very general term of imparting instruction to another person. In depending on how you define this term, you can go back to it before the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The hunter gathered a way of life had its own education. It was a way of life that was skill intensive and knowledge intensive, how to track animals, how to hunt them, how to skin them, how to identify different plants for their medicinal qualities. But this was not a labor intensive lifestyle. You had to know your landscape, you had to develop skills in crafting and the use of tools and hunting and gathering, but pre-agricultural societies didn't have to work long hours. And the work typically wasn't dreary like a desk job. Some anthropologists who've looked at modern day hunter-gatherer societies and jungles or isolated islands have noted that many of these groups didn't distinguish between work and play, between work and entertainment. But with agricultural societies, there was over time a surplus of food. You could have more children, an agriculture allowed people to live in permanent dwellings where their crops were planted, rather than living in a nomadic lifestyle. So it was possible to accumulate property, it was possible to invest in a particular skill. skill, there was a growth of specialized knowledge, and this is where schools come in. Some of the earliest forms of literacy, let's take the Sumerians as an example, had select schools where the sons and daughters of royalty and some aristocrats could learn writing. But when we talk about education in the ancient world, it's really similar to America before public schooling existed. You'd have tutors, you'd have some schools for the wealthy, but there was no universal curriculum. Education was ad hoc, it wasn't standardized, and typically centered around a few important books. For the ancient Greeks, you might focus on the Odyssey and the Iliad, but the Jewish people you would focus on the Old Testament later the Talmud, the Christians you would focus on the Bible for Muslims, the Quran, so there were a few books that were touchstones of a particular culture or religion, but nothing like a standardized education. One factor that was fairly universal was corporal punishment. If you look at the Middle Ages, masters and lords would have no qualms about physically beating a child. In one document from the 14th or 15th century, a French count advised that nobles huntsman should choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight, and that this boy should be beaten until he has a proper dread of failing to carry out his master's orders. The document listed all the chores that the boy would need to perform daily, and noted that he would sleep in a loft above the hounds at night in order to attend to the dog's needs. In the age of industrialization, the labor of children moves from fields to crowded, dirty factories or underground in coal mines. In England, or children were commonly farmed out to factories where they were treated as slaves. Many thousands died each year due to starvation, disease, exhaustion, and nothing in the way of occupational safety standards. There weren't laws mitigating child labor in England until the 19th century. In 1883, new legislation forbade textile manufacturers from employing children under the age of nine, and the maximum number of weekly hours was limited to 48, or 10 to 12 year olds. Now, here I'm just giving a very general overview and a timeline, and I'll zero in on some of these issues a little bit later by just want to talk about the switch from the pre-industrial to the industrial period, and then I'll go back and flush aside a little bit more. So, with the industrial era going on and the increased automation, the need for child labor starts to decrease, and there's an idea that spreads that children should spend their time of learning, and as a result, schools for children develop, and the idea and practice of universal compulsory public education begins in Europe. Some people talk about it as early as the 16th century, but it doesn't germinate until the 19th century. This idea had many supporters, but the supporters had their own agendas, whether policy makers, or the clergy who on spread religious ideas, or industrialists who wanted semi-educated workforce who would know how to read the manual of a factory machine. Scott, here we're going to take a very short break for word from our sponsors. First, I want to give a shout out to all the great podcasts on the Parthenon Podcast Network, including this American President, which you can find if you go to Parthenonpodcast.com. Hey listeners, it's Kelly from Life Audio. We know life gets busy, and sometimes it's easy for your faith to get pushed to the side. That's why we created the Good Word, a free weekly newsletter designed to give you a moment to slow down, be encouraged, and reconnect with what matters most, God's Word. Inside, you'll find devotionals, guided prayers, podcast recommendations, and other faith-filled content we think you'll love. No ads, no clutter. Just good content to help you stay rooted in God's Word throughout your week. Sign up for the Good Word today at LifeAudio.com/TheGoodWord. That's LifeAudio.com/TheGoodWord. Every year, the same question, what do I get them? Gift cards feel impersonal. Another sweater feels predictable. This Christmas give a gift that feeds the soul. The Crosswalk Holiday Gift Guide has a gift for everyone on your list, and maybe one for you too. For the dad who's running on empty, there are devotionals written just for him. For the mom who needs encouragement, there are books that offer hope for every season. For the kids, there are illustrated Bibles and story books that make faith come alive. There's even an advent devotional to help your family slow down and focus on what Christmas is really about. You'll find Bibles, devotionals, fiction, jewelry, and unique handmade gifts, all chosen to help the people you love grow and faith. Skip the guest work this year. Find the perfect gift at crosswalk.com/giftguide. The original drive for universal education came from the emerging Protestant religions in the 16th century. And again, this meant many different things to different people. Before the Reformation, instruction was carried out privately in church schools and universities and private schools and guild schools for occupational training. For Martin Luther, he said that salvation depended on each person's own reading of the scripture, but that meant that you had to be able to read scripture and not be dependent on a cleric's interpretation that could be biased toward the Catholic Church or some other institution. Martin Luther urged German rulers to establish public schools. He said this in a letter in 1524 and also encouraged compulsory attendance. And he did this on the basis of a military analogy. He said, "Dear rulers, I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. The government can compel such citizens as our fit for military service, the bear spear and rifle to mount ramparts, perform other material duties in time of war. How much more has it or right to compel the people to send their children to school? Because in this case, we are worrying with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men." The German state of Gotha was inspired by Luther and founded a school in 1524 and won in Thuringia in 1527. Other schools were set up in towns and regions. Some of them had compulsory attendance systems, again under Lutheran influence. Detailed records were kept and fines were levied on truants. The Saxon and Wormberg systems disled out over time, but they formed the foundation of the schools in Prussia later in the 19th century. The purpose of these schools was, again, to provide a religious education and the government didn't see an opposition to this. The government rulers were Lutherans, and they also saw religion as a tool of political power. As I said other times in the podcast, this was known as the Age of Confessionalization, where religion and politics meet together, and that's happened throughout the ancient world, but it was different in the 16th century, where Christianity fractures in a sense. Each of the surviving religious groups identified itself with a succinct statement of belief called a confession. Lutherans had the Augsburg confession that was advanced in 1530. The Calvinists, they had many different confessions, such as the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563. Wranglerkins, they had the 39 articles adapted in 1563, and a Baptist had their own catechism. Catholics had the degrees and canons of the Council of Trent, promulgated by Popes after 1563. These confessions went way outside the doors of a church. They were used to control the belief of government employees, clergymen, and teachers. It helped states to consolidate their power against their neighbors and against other institutions like the Holy Roman Empire or the Papacy. So that's why this is called the Age of Confessionalization, where governments used the tools of religious identity in order to consolidate their power. You were loyal to your pastor, and you were loyal to the Lutheran Church. You were loyal to your priest, Pope, and the King of France. And for many of these rulers, it's not as if this was a cynical ploy of power, because in their minds, they simply didn't see a division between religion and politics. The two completely ran together, and it wasn't meaningful for them to have a division. This is a fascinating age in and of itself, and I won't go into much more detail here, and it's not just a European phenomena. There's been research that suggests in the Ottoman Empire in Iran, there's confessionalization for Sunni and Shi'i identity. So this is something that isn't just happening in Europe, it's happening across the globe. There's religious identities that get more specific than just a general religion like Islam or Christianity. And this has to do with the widespread connections between empires, where empires are getting more closely linked together in the 15 and 16 hundreds, and they're coming to resemble one another even though they don't completely realize it. Anyway, all that to say, in this battle of confessionalization and different stripes of Christianity, education was very important. In English admirer of the advances in Germany praised Luther's achievement. He said, "The permanent and positive value of Luther's pronouncement in 1524 lies not so much in its direct effect as in the hallowed associations which it established for Protestant Germany between the national religion and the educational duties of the individual in the state." Thus, doubtless was created that healthy public opinion, which rendered the principle of compulsory school attendance easy of acceptance of pressure at a much earlier date than England. Luther and other leaders of the Reformation promoted public education as a Christian duty, and this did have an effect, although it took some time to percolate. By the end of the 17th century, century later, Germany was a leader in the development of schooling and it had laws in most of its states requiring that children attend school. Now, school was a very loosely defined term. It could mean that you go to a church where a pastor or a learned member of the congregation leads you through the catechism, teaches you the alphabet, and how to at least slowly decipher the scripture, and it might not be anything more than that. Maybe it could, but there was no standardization. But it was the Lutheran church, not the German state that ran the schools. With this approach of education going on in Europe, it shouldn't be a surprise that a similar approach happened in America in the colonies. This is the same time period as the Calvinist Puritans are setting up the Puritan colonies of Massachusetts Bay. Outside of New England, the rule of the day was mostly voluntary parental education and private education, but the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted to adopt the Calvinist plan for compulsory education in order to solidify Calvinism. In 1642, the colony enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children. Five years later, the colony followed up this law with the establishment of a system of public schools. In 1690, beginning in 1690, children in Massachusetts learned to read from the New England Primmer, known as the Little Bible of New England, and included a set of short rhymes to help children learn the alphabet. With things like, in Adam's fall, we send all and ending with Zacchaeus did climb the tree his Lord to see. The Primmer included the Ten Commandments, Lord's Prayer, the Apostles Creed, and other lessons designed to instill in children basic Puritan theology. As we can see, major change was sweeping through Europe and the United States when it came to education. One thing that did not change from the Middle Ages up until the 16 and 1700s was the extreme level of punishment for students. The sadistic behavior of schoolmasters continued onward after the late Middle Ages. One Master in Germany kept records of the punishments he gave out in his 51 years of teaching. His list included 911,527 blows with a rod, 124,10 blows with a cane, and 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with a hand, 10,235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and over 1 million blows on the head. So this is the type of thing that horseman had in mind when he wanted to get rid of corporal punishment. John Bernard, an 18th century Massachusetts minister, wrote in his autobiography, approvingly of how he as a child was beaten by a schoolmaster because of his desire to play, he was beaten because of this when he failed to learn, and even when his classmates failed to learn. He was a talented student and put in charge of helping others learn, and when they failed to recite a lesson properly, he was beaten for that. His only complaint was that one classmate deliberately messed up in order to see him beaten, and he resolved that problem by giving his classmate in turn a good rubbing when the school day was over. Corporal punishment of students was a big issue when it came to the reforms of the 19th century, and we'll get back to this issue in a little bit. But first let's see if anything changed in American education when it went from a colony to a country. After America gained independence, Massachusetts, followed by the remainder of New England, established public schools and compulsory attendance legislation. In its constitution of 1780, Massachusetts granted authority to the legislature to enforce compulsory attendance in school. In 1789, Massachusetts enacted the first general school on the country, which mandated public schools throughout the state, certifying school teachers, specifying curricula, and enforcing compulsory attendance at school. And other New England states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut followed suit. But the motivation for public education here moves away from the Calvinist ideas of the early colony. Now you have a nation, the United States, with its own national identity, and you have politicians and policymakers who want to make sure that citizens have a certain form of upbringing that will make them useful in the new republic. And this gets to the Michelle Foucault idea of discipline here. One of the most enthusiastic supporters of compulsory school was called the Essex Junto. It was a group of federalist merchants and lawyers in Boston, that hailed from Essex County, Massachusetts. They're particularly eager for an extensive public school system so as to have the youth taught, proper subordination. Stephen Higginson, a leading Boston merchant, said, "The people must be taught to confide in irreverence for their rulers." Jonathan Jackson, another member of the Junto, and another prominent Boston merchant, put forth his systematic social views in his thoughts upon the political situation of the United States written in 1788. He was nostalgic for the colonial era, with its "habits of subordination" to a government of the elite. And he and his colleagues thought all political power should be lodged here. Over time, education became professionalized. When you get to the middle of the 19th century, you have a group of professional educators. Among these was Horace Mann. State governments created posts where they could exert their influence. Horace Mann was the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. And he issued annual reports during the 1840s to spread the influence of having compulsory, standardized education that would mold citizens. And this is where you get his report of Prussian schools that I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast episode. He also created journals such as the Common School Journal, and one of the main institutions of influence where these educationists came into power was the teacher training college, where future teachers would emerge. This idea really comes from Prussia, and I'll get to Horace Mann's trip to Prussia in a second and how Prussia approached education because that's a linchpin to all of this. One other thing I want to mention about the American approach education as a form of disciplining its citizens had to do with the huge influx of immigrants into America at this time. Part of the task of creating uniformity that education is wanted was to mold and assimilate the influx of immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics that are coming into the new world in mass. Benjamin Labory, president of Middlebury College, he addressed the influential American Institute of Instruction in 1849. He worried about the multitude of immigrants from the old world interfused among our population who were rapidly changing the identity of American character. He worried that these strangers among us ignorant of our institutions might come to mistake lawless freedom from restraint for true and rational liberty. They worried whether or not the immigrants would assimilate and become part of the American body politic or they'd be more like the Goths and Huns were to the Roman Empire unassimulated and destroying the structures of government from within. What he thought is that it was the teachers who would determine whether or not these immigrant children would be assimilated or remain unassimulated and reform them into proper Americans. Another vital part of this molding for Labory, man, and others was what they refer to as Christianizing the immigrants. Now they were Catholics, so there were already Christians, of course, there weren't Muslims or Hindus or anything else. What they meant by that was Protestantization. George Chiever in 1854 declared that we are in a great danger from the dark and solid infidelity and vicious radicalism of a large portion of the foreign immigrating population. And it's interesting that people like man weren't Orthodox Protestants in the sense that you would consider Orthodox in the 19th century. He was a Unitarian, which mean they really didn't believe in the Trinity, but Protestantism wasn't so much about theology in early 19th century America. Well yes it was, but an Anglo-American cultural idea. To be Catholic was to hold to the Pope and not have strong ideas about democracy and citizenship and other ideals that were so important to these American reformers. Chiever said that the remedy for Catholics was the public school. How could we reach the evil at its roots, amplifying a wise and conservative radicalism to defeat the working of that malignant social anti-Christian poison? How can the children of such a population be reached except in our free public schools? So these educationists saw themselves as using an expanded network of free public schools to shape and render in discipline all American citizens. To do the work of E. Plurbus Unum out of many one, unify the nation, assimilate foreigners, get the melting pot heated up and stamp all citizens as American and create cohesion out of all these people coming to the United States. And I think these reformers would have been happy to see how things turned out by the 20th century, where you have compulsory attendance laws that swept through state after state and even in the recalcitrant South by 1918 had attendance laws for public schools. With the new wave of immigrants coming to Ellis Island in the early 20th century, children of these families were dutifully sent to schools, learned English, often times their names were anglicized so Leonardo. became Leonard, Miguel became Michael, one of the main factors in this melting pot was the public school. So it's interesting as you can see in the 1840s and 1850s, you have these reformers, these early progressives who have a vision for America, but they were in a lot of ways anti-immigrant the way we would define them today. Many of these educational reformers were part of the "no-nothing" party in the 1850s. The "no-nothing" party was an anti-catholic activist group, and their national platform centered on preventing Catholic influence on American politics. They thought that the Irish could be influenced by the Pope and according to the Pope's whims and not-the-nations desires. The "no-nothing" swept several municipal state and congressional elections. In Massachusetts, the "no-nothing" won the governor's office, the entire state's senate, most seats at the House of Representatives, and Boston City Hall. So on the one hand, these are progressive reformers, wanting to improve education, the role of women in public life and politics. On the other hand, they were fiercely anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, or to the degree that they tolerated immigrants, they wanted them to assimilate into a very Protestant mold. All right, so that's an overview of education in America and how it tried to discipline students. But to really make sense of this story, we have to take a look at pressure. This is where Horus Mann went to. This is where he got his ideas from. This is where critics of modern-day education point to as the origin of the factory model that we have today. So we have to take a look at why pressure organized education the way it did, what parts of it were brought to the United States, what parts of it were spread throughout the globe and how modern education is done, and why was it set up this way? Pressure became the way it was in the 1800s. For the same reason that almost any government is going to reform and organize itself. It wanted to win military battles. Military is really all the earliest governments we're concerned with. You can't have a government if you can't defend yourself. In the order of operations that a lot of historians see for the reason that you get things like administration and education and tax collection, all these things, is because a government wants to win wars. To have a good army, you need money. To have money, you need good tax collection. To collect taxes, you need bureaucrats. To have bureaucrats, they have to be educated. For them to be educated, you need schools. Schools are not the first thing in this chain. They're about the seventh or the eighth. But they make everything else possible. In the 18th century, pressure, this little German state, was called an army without a nation or an army without a state. This phrase gained currency in the 18th century and referred to the fact that although pressure was relatively small, it was only the 10th largest European state. By the mid-18th century, it boasted the third largest army. Under Frederick William I, the ranks of the army grew and was used to great effect by his son Frederick II, a brilliant military strategist. In order to grow the army, the pressure administration had to go to incredible lengths with its system of recruitment. The pressure and nobility also became militarized as a service elite who became the officers of the pressure army. Frederick William I put out a table of ranks which placed soldiers ahead of civilians in the social pecking order. So in comparison to the rest of Europe, it appeared that the various social organs and institutions of pressure serve the interests of the army. The court of Frederick II, largely consisted of men in uniform, and he crafted his own public persona as being the continent's foremost soldier. So it gave this impression that pressure was a militaristic power. Frederick III laid out the basic foundations of a generic pressure primary education with a decree in 1763, which was written by his advisor Johann Julius Hecker. Hecker founded the first teacher's seminary in pressure in 1748. But the 1763 expanded the existing pressure and school system significantly and required that all young citizens, both boys and girls, be educated by municipally funded schools from the age of 5 to 13 or 14. An extraordinarily long length of time when much of the economy is still based on farming and children have often had to run off to the harvest or go back home. So pressure was among the first countries to introduce tax funded and compulsory primary education. This didn't happen in France and Great Britain until the 1880s. The pressure system had an eight-year course of primary education. It provided basic technical skills, such as reading and writing, but also music, and religious education, and in close cooperation with the church, and it also had a moral education, stressing duty, sobriety, and discipline. Advanced instruction, like calculus and mathematics, required additional payment by the parents. Frederick the Great formalized further educational stages, such as the gymnasium, taught a place where you do the pummel horse, but a state-funded secondary school, which served as a university preparatory school. So this incredible level of education in Germany is part of the reason why so many philosophers and literary figures come out of Germany in the 1800s. Germany in the 19th and early 20th century was the shining light of culture across Europe. The construction of these schools were often built on private initiative, though they did receive some state support. The pressure system did succeed in reaching compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, national testing for all students, to prescribe national curriculum for each grade in mandatory kindergarten. In kindergarten, children's garden is a German term, and that is the reason that that term is used in America and other parts of the English-speaking world today, because the concept came from Germany. So all the elements of Foucault's discipline, observation, normalizing judgment, and examination are all here in the Prussian system. Teachers were trained in Prussian schools in the beginning, but there wasn't a completely standardized approach to how they were trained. This changed in 1810 with state certification requirements for teachers, which raised the standard of teaching significantly. For the students, there was a final exam called the Aboutour, introduced in 1788. This is implemented all Prussian secondary schools by 1812, extended to all of Germany in 1871 with German unification under Otto von Bismarck, and passing this exam was necessary to enter the learning professions in the upper ranks of civil service. The Prussian system by the 1830s had the following characteristics. Free primary schooling, at least for poor citizens, professional teachers trained in specialized colleges, a basic salary for teachers and recognition of teaching as a profession, an extended school year to better involve children of farmers, funding to build schools, supervision at the national and classroom level to ensure quality instruction, curriculum that included inculcating and national identity and involvement of science and technology, and secular instruction. This means that unlike the Prussian schools of the Massachusetts Bay colony, you're not just learning literacy and the Bible and basic catechism, you're also learning mathematics, science, physics, biology, literature, and other things that you would recognize in a modern day public school. Now as I said, there was a close connection still with the church and there were religious lessons, despite the mostly secular curriculum. There was a focus on pietism, which was a theology that stressed the need for inner spirituality to be found through the reading of scripture. Pietists helped form the principles of the modern public school, including the stress on literacy and the use of logic. So this was the world that Horus Mann entered when he went on his trip to Prussia. Mann wasn't an education reformer in his early career. He served in the Massachusetts state legislature from 1827 to 1837 and only really got into education reform a decade later. In 1848, after public service as the secretary of the Massachusetts state board of education, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1848 to 1853, and from 1852 to his death, he was president of Antioch College. Mann was a progressive in the 19th century sense. He believed that education should be universal, free, non-sectarian, and that its aim should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character rather than just focusing on mere learning. And he thought of education as a way to turn unruly American children into disciplined Republican citizens. He was highly respected for the modernizers in the Wig Party for building public schools, and he's considered the father of public education in the United States. But he really didn't get going on this until he was appointed secretary in 1837 of the newly created board of education in Massachusetts. This was the first such position in the United States, like I said before this time education was ad hoc, scattered, and not uniform in the U.S. Through this position, he became an evangelist for public education. He held teachers conventions, he delivered lectures and addresses, he carried on correspondence with many other reformers, and he introduced numerous reforms. He founded the common school journal in 1838, and in this journal he targeted the public school and its problems. His six main principles were, the public should no longer remain ignorant, that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public, that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds. Catholic or Protestant or whatever, that this education should be non-sectarian, not focused on one denomination of Christianity, that this education must be taught by the discipline of a free society, and that education should be provided by well-trained professional teachers. He wanted better equipped schoolhouses, longer school years, education to last until his students were 16 years old, and a wider curriculum. And it should be noted that he saw the benefits of education, not just on the individual level, but to create an educated society. And here's what I mean by that. A complaint back then about providing taxes for schools was by parents who sent their children to private schools, or maybe they just didn't want their child to be educated because they wanted them to be a farmhand. And they would argue, why should I pay taxes for a school? My child doesn't benefit by it. And this is an argument today for parents that in their children to private schools or homeschool them, they'll say, I'm double-paying. My property taxes are going towards schools that my children are not a part of. Well, what man and other reformers would argue is that you're not only paying for your child to be educated, you're paying to live in an educated society. You're paying for the fact that if you start a business, you can be reasonably sure that any worker that comes to you is going to be able to read and write. With very few exceptions, you can count on this. If you didn't live in an educated society, you could not count on this and you would have to radically change the type of work that you would make available to anyone who came off the street. If education wasn't universal and you wanted people who could read and write in your workforce, you would have to pay them a lot more money because they would be a rare commodity. But today, you could run a fast food restaurant and you could rely on the fact that teenagers who work at your McDonalds or Arbys know how to read or write. This is the benefit of living in an educated society. This is why man would say it's worthwhile to pay taxes for this, even if your particular child doesn't go to a public school. Hey everyone, Scott here. One more brief word from our sponsors. Well, man was desperate for reform, and he had heard how well organized the Prussian system was. Moreover, he knew how well Prussia molded children into good citizens and instilled them national pride. There were a series of speeches by philosopher Johann Fiekt titled "Adresses to the German Nation" that urged the idea that individual rights and liberties should be subordinated to the good of the nation. In order to achieve that end, children should be separated from their religious parents and haven't grained into them from a young age. Ideas and skills it would ensure the supremacy of the fatherland. So obedience was transferred from parents to the state, and the goal of education would be national uniformity and thought word indeed. Man was impressed with this idea, but other people were impressed with Prussia's military ability and America really wanted that. The army had impressive victories against Napoleon in the 1800s, and when America gave a poor showing against the British during the War of 1812, America's admiration for Prussia increased, and there was a small covert group of people who wanted to Germanize American education, beginning in neighborhoods where the American poor and new immigrants lived, and a large group was needed in order to teach them but also inculcate them and enculture them into American history and language in order to join the growing ranks of wage laborers. So the focus of education was shifting from imparting morality and religious instruction and knowledge to what Thomas Jefferson called promoting the public happiness. This was why man was collecting information. As the secretary of education, he visited several Massachusetts schools, and he wanted to put together reports on finding the most effective and successful methods of arranging the studies and conducting the education of the young. He read hundreds of written reports from individual schools, and he traveled circuits from city to city on horseback with one circuit covering as much as 500 miles. What he noted was that buildings were too small, they were in disrepair, they were in bad locations, and they suffered from little to no ventilation. Bernachines were sparse, students were having to sit on whatever was available, usually long backless benches, which one expert claimed caused curvature of the spine in children. Schools rarely had indoor toilet facilities, and some didn't even have an outhouse. So children had to relieve themselves in a nearby forest. No certification was required of teachers, and new teachers were often recruited from transients passing through town, or locals that had basic literacy, or sometimes no skills of any kind. Newspapers were filled with complaints about poor teachers. Teacher pay was low, even for those times, ranging from five to sixteen dollars per month. Teachers were provided with housing in the community, but in some towns this consisted of living with the students family for a week, and then moving on to another the next. Families really didn't enjoy boarding teachers, sometimes they only did so because they were able to get a reduction in their school taxes or fees. But in order to make this as inexpensive as possible when they boarded a teacher, they fed them as little as possible the week they were present. At this time, there was also no statewide curriculum in Massachusetts, and textbooks were collected from among books owned by the students families. There were door to door book salesmen who saw this lack in the market, and they marketed their wares directly to parents who bought it their discretion. So textbook collections in schools were completely random on titles and subjects and varied widely from school to schools, much as a person's personal library. So by 1838, man thought that the crux of the entire matter was that you had to teach the teachers properly. If you did that, then everything else would sort itself out. They would know how to manage a classroom, they would know how to involve parents in education. Once the community saw how good the teachers were, they'd be willing to pay higher salaries and improve facilities to make them worthy of the teacher. But man wasn't quite sure what the best method was of teaching the teacher. There were few training courses offered to teachers, either in universities or private academies. So this limited the number of people who could take them, and they typically only had a single course on pedagogy. They'd take far more courses on Latin or Greek or ancient literature than they would on actually how to teach that information. Under his own expense, man went to Europe in 1843. He began his tour in Liverpool, England. His visit reinforces belief that the US had a better form of government and a better system of schooling. He deplored England's social class system and the injustices that happened. And he thought that the absence of a national school system in England and the cause of all these injustices would be the salvation of America. Then he moved on to Prussia, believing that its school system would provide the answers, and he was not disappointed. He said, "Arrange with the most highly civilized and conspicuous nations of Europe in their due order of precedence, as it regards the education of their people, and the kingdoms of Prussia and Saxony, together with several of the western and southwestern states of the Germanic confederation, would undoubtedly stand preeminent, both in regard to the quantity and quality of instruction." Along with Germany, man also visited Holland, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Belgium. And he noted that all had nationwide systems of schooling except for England. Here were the things that man was convinced of when he returned to the US. First, corporal punishment was unnecessary. Second, a unified curriculum was needed if schools were to be successful. Third, schooling should be publicly controlled and publicly funded. Immigration, the change from farming to labor, and the downturn in the economy, all decreed that the numbers needing schooling had outstripped the ability of individual parents and towns to meet the need. Therefore, funds for the support of schools should be centrally pooled and given back to each town, only in proportion to the towns raising of matching funds. So he saw the state level system of education as fully money in setting the curriculum. Fourth, attendance must be compulsory for all children if the schools were to be the moral savior of society and the producer of good citizens in a literate workforce. This, with public control and public funding, would combine to form the foundation for an all-encompassing school system. And sixth, a national school system was needed to achieve these goals, not just a statewide system, or else non-democratic nations would surpass the US in literacy and production. These were the ideas he put forward in his reports, but it also influenced the sort of legislation he worked on at the state level in Massachusetts and at the national level as a representative. His speeches and writings were often reproduced in the quantity of 10,000 to 20,000 for use in mass mailings. They were reproduced in newspapers and circulated across the US, including readership in new Western territories, and even made their way to England before man arrived there. There were sometimes translated to other languages, including to German during the wave of immigration from that country in the mid-1800s. His original report on his trip to Prussia was reprinted numerous times, sometimes by private individuals and other times by legislatures. Several editions were issued in England. Finally, things came to a head in 1852 when man supported the decision to adopt the Prussian education system. After Massachusetts adopted the system, the governor of New York set up the same method in 12 different New York schools on a trial basis. So man was ecstatic. He saw that children would learn how to read and write and know arithmetic, but it would also build their moral character. It would instill values such as obedience to authority, propeness and attendance, and organizing the time according to a bell, which would help students prepare for future employment in places like a factory. The question is, did he turn schools from places of learning into a training ground for a factory in the industrial age? OK, so were schools of this time period really set up like a factory? Was that the intention of the people who reformed education like man? And is this a fair criticism that we have of modern day schools, that there's still model on the blueprints of a poor house for children you would see out of a Charles Dickens novel? Those would say yes, include Joel Rose, who writes in the Atlantic. He notes that as part of man's reforms, in every American classroom, you would have groups of 28 students of roughly the same age, caught by one teacher usually in an 800 square foot room. This has been the dominant archetype of education ever since. Man thought that large groups of students flooring together would blur the divisions among religious groups and establish a more egalitarian society, and his blueprint became the foundation of our national system of education. And his vision also made sense for the industrial age in which he lived. That's because the factory line was the simplest and most efficient way to scale production in general. And in the same way, a factory model classroom was also the most sensible way to rapidly scale a system of schools. Factories didn't care about personalization. They cared about being able to produce 100,000 or 1,000,000 or 10 million of something in the exact same way as fastly and as cheaply as possible. The same thing for schools. They didn't care about personalization of students or learning types, or whether they were audio or visual learners, whether they could educate 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 or 100 million students in the exact same way and slightly modify it for each individual student only if resources are time permitted. Other authors, such as Audrey Waters, argue against the idea of a factory model of education, instead say that it is invented history. We're looking at the past with a biased perspective and trying to make it fit into a certain type of argument. Waters says that there are several errors and emissions in this theory of the factory model of education, education and man's time and other times, basically took the blueprint of a factory and copied it. For example, she notes that there was public education before man, like we mentioned, the laws on the books in colonial America that demanded children be educated, although not that schools be established, and there were also charity schools in America and other competing models for arranging classrooms and instructions as well. Most notably at this time was the monetary system where you deputize certain older, smarter students to educate other students. Plus, you had textbooks before education committees came along and decided what should be part of a curriculum. Really, the main difference that man brought along was the education of teachers and the requirement that schools maintain records of student attendance and salaries and other expenditures. You had more accountability, but their changes were more bureaucratic than structural. Now, here's why this argument holds away. When pressure came up with its school system, it didn't base its schools on industrialization because pressure was not highly industrialized when Frederick the Great formalized its education in the late 1700s. Except for a few pockets in England and other scattered places on continental Europe, very few places in the world were industrialized at this time. The point wasn't to train future docile factory workers. Water says that in fact, the Prussian model actually superseded an educational system that did look like a factory. This was the monetary system and it's variance, the landcaster system, the bell and the madras systems that extend well into the 1800s. This involves schools that were housed in large warehouses, larger than many of the early factories at the time, an enormous factory floor where you'd see benches of hundreds of hundreds of students crammed into one massive classroom with one feature. Students would be grouped together about 30 or so, not by age, but by reading proficiency with more advanced students, the monitors, assigned to tutor and train the others. This was one way to provide free education and the classroom Prussian model wasn't the only way, it was just another way. The monetary system was much cheaper, in fact, than having classrooms of 20 to 25 students. That's because the Prussian model needed a tax to support it whereas the monetary system didn't. In his book of Waged India, published in 1820, James Cordenair explained the madras system, the monetary system, following his visit to the military male orphan asylum in India, where this model originated. He said, "From the perpetual agency of this system, "Idleness cannot exist. "On entering the school, you can discover no individual "unemployed, no boy looking vacantly around him, "a hole is a beautiful picture of the most animated industry "and resembles the various machinery "of a cloth or thread manufacturing, "completely executing their different offices, "and all set in motion by one active engine." So the monetary system was designed to operate here like a factory and to constantly keep students busy the way that a factory would as well. The problem with this system that later reformers noted is that despite its widespread adoption in the UK and the US, the monetary system fell out of favor because it didn't stimulate curiosity in its students. Here's what Frederick John Gladman's manual on education in 1886 says. Failure occurred, as it always will, when masters were slaves to the system, when they were satisfied with mechanical arrangements and routine work, or when they did not study their pupils and get down to the principles of education. As the problem was, teachers and administrators were more concerned with how well the system function than whether or not the system was actually educating anyone. According to Gladman, the Lancaster system was replaced by the Glasgow system, which emphasized the training of teachers so as to cultivate the whole nature of the child instead of the mere head, the affections and habits as well as the intellect. Gladman said training of teachers was necessary because it was useless to have the machinery without the skilled workmen, or the well-trained workmen without the suitable premises. While moving forward after the period of man, much changed in public education in the United States over the next 150 years, but the battle over universal education had largely been one. After the Civil War, African-Americans mobilized during public education to the South for the first time. They made alliances with white Republicans to push for many political changes, including rewriting state constitutions to guarantee free public education. This was the idea, but in practice, it benefited white children more than black children. And with the end of reconstruction, and white southerners regaining political control of the South, they laid the foundations of legal segregation, which became formalized in 1896 with the plusy versus Ferguson decision and the right to have separate but equal facilities, including schools. Nevertheless, funding and laws for compulsory universal education spread, especially in the early 20th century. By 1900, 34 states had compulsory schooling laws. And only four were in the South for different reasons, partly because of the strong tradition of private and perkyl schools, partly for lingering divisions between the South and the North after the Civil War. But anyway, 30 states with compulsory schooling laws required attendance until age 14. By 1910, 72% of American children attended school. Half of these attended one-room schoolhouses in rural areas. Larger schools were in cities, which still didn't hold as much of the population as more rural areas. By 1918, every state required students to complete elementary education. Now, this push for universal education in 1920s, some of the motivation mirrors that in the 1840s. And that is hostility to immigrants and a move to try to consolidate American identities. So, according to reformers, it doesn't get watered down by the wave of immigrants and their own identities and ideas. The move in the 1920s for compulsory public education was largely a move against Catholic perkyl schools. And the Ku Klux Klan of all people supported the movement. When they campaigned in Oregon for a measure of compulsory education, they circulated a tract that pictured a grinning torch-wielding Catholic bishop triumphantly departing from a burning public schoolhouse whose teacher rang the bell one last time as he laid dying, mourned by the children. In the 1920s, with large-scale immigration, particularly from Catholic countries like Italy, there was a worry that these children would be shuttled off into Catholic private perkyl schools, get their own education, forge their own identity, and attack the Protestant identity of America that many people held to. American blue bloods, many of them of Protestant background, realized that not everyone was Protestant, but they wanted a Protestant cultural consensus. The Bible that was used in American schools, they wanted the King James Bible, which was the Protestant Bible, not the Catholic Bible. And if there was universal compulsory public education that was publicly funded, This would strengthen public schools and poor immigrant children would go there, rather than go to the private Catholic schools it would remain on the margins. And other reformers fought to make sure that Catholic schools wouldn't receive public funds, really doing whatever they could to make sure that the Catholic Church and the Pabesee didn't medal in the affairs of the United States. The 1947 Supreme Court decision, Everson versus Board of Education, which affirmed the legal doctrine of separation of church and state, applied at state and government levels and wasn't just a federal issue. Some scholars argue that this was motivated by anti-Catholic feelings. In some progressives in the 20th century said that Catholic parochial education was like racial segregation. One Columbia professor referred to Catholic schools by saying, "You cannot practice democratic living in segregated schools." Another Methodist bishop called parochial schools un-American. But nevertheless, students still had the legal right to attend these schools. In 1925, the US Supreme Court ruled in Pierce versus Society of Sisters that students could attend private schools to comply with state compulsory education laws. And more recently in the mid to late 20th century, homeschooling networks have fought for the same right and won victory in a lot of state legislatures that homeschooling can meet the criteria for compulsory education. While compulsory education spread upward from the elementary level to the high school level, and by 1940, 50% of young adults had earned a high school diploma. So there's a lot more to be said about education here, and I'm not going to get into all the 20th century issues, the desegregation of schools and other factors, because this issue of universal public education is ongoing. But it all goes back to these battles in the middle of the 1800s to move from a scattered decentralized network of schools into publicly funded schools whose goal was to forge a common American identity. And what that means is an issue that's still being battled and contested just as fiercely now as it was back in the 1840s. And there's also a battle among summer farmers to get away from what they see as the factory model of education built in the 1840s to allow technology to come in and create a personalized learning experience for students. It can be customized and crafted to them using online technologies and algorithms and computers. So if they're a visual learner who's more interested in art than an audio learner who's interested in mathematics, then the school curriculum can be customized for them. There's an idea that the model of education can receive an upgrade from the factory model using use software and hardware. But this whole narrative about upgrades has to do with whether or not the type of education students are receiving really is based on the blueprint of an 1840s factory or if it's something else. I leave that for you, the listener, to decide in this episode. And I hope this was useful describing the origins of compulsory education in America and how students moved out of farm fields and into the classroom. Well, thank you so much, the listener, for the question. If any of you would like to submit a question to me for me to explore in depth, I would be happy to do so. All you have to do is go to History Unplug Podcast. You can submit a voicemail to me or if you want to, you can also email me at infoathistoryonthenet.com. Lastly, as I've mentioned in the last few episodes, we have a Facebook group for this podcast where you can continue the discussion about episodes. And you can find it if you just go to Facebook and search for History Unplug Podcast. You'll find it right there and you can join. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time. That's all for today's episode. If you'd like to see show notes with sources, maps, links, anything else related to this episode and all my other ones as well, go to pathanonpodcast.com. That's the name of the podcast network that shows a part of, along with James Erleys' key battles of American history, Steve Gweras beyond the big screen in history of the papacy, and other great history shows as well. If you'd like to support the show, the two easiest ways to do so are to subscribe to it on the podcast player of your choice and leave a review. The second thing is to join the membership program for History Unplugged. If you do so, you'll get completely ad-free episodes for the entire back catalog, which is about 600 episodes and growing. And all you have to do is go to patreon.com/unplug. Thanks for listening and see you next time. 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