What's Really Wrong with Education and How to Actually Fix It

What's really wrong with education and how can we actually fix it? There's no overestimating the importance of education for a person to grow as an individual and to be assimilated into society and become a contributing member to it. Yet, while few people would say that education is unimportant, most people would probably say that education isn't as good as it can be or should be. I have taught at colleges and universities since 1998. That doesn't mean I know everything about education, but between all those years of teaching and, of course, being a student, K through 12, bachelor's degree, two master's degree, and a PhD, I've developed some opinions, at least educated opinions, no pun intended, about what's wrong with education and how it can be better. The problem, number one, the assembly line. I think there are two main reasons why education isn't better than it could be and should be. The first one is what's known derisively as the factory model of education. It's a system of education that most people are used to because most people have grown up in it. It was first instituted in Prussia, which later became Germany in around the 1830s. In the 1840s, it spread to the United States, thanks mostly to the author Horace Mann, who discovered this way of educating in Prussia, and brought it back first to Massachusetts, then it spread throughout the entirety of the United States. At its heart, the idea is that everyone should be educated. That wasn't an entirely original idea, but what the Prussians instituted and what Horace Mann brought over from Prussia is the idea that education should be systematized and homogenized. That we have public funding for education is clearly a very good thing, but how the Prussian factory system instituted education was to place all students into grades of the same age, regardless of their individual abilities and needs, to be taught as a group by a single teacher in a single room. Horace Mann eagerly adopted the idea of systematized and homogenized education. He declared that the goal of education is to simply create a tolerant civilized society. His ideal, which was actually quite common in the middle of the 1800s, was that if we treat everyone exactly the same, then they will be properly assimilated into society. A common education will build a common sense of national and social identity, or so the idea went. The Prussians were very good at that, and the philosophy of York Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was an inspiration. Hegel said that things happened to us. We are the objects of history. And going back way, way back to Plato, actually, is this idea that you simply fill a person with the proper ideas, the proper knowledge, then they will all turn out more or less the same. The uniformity that we want is, as Mann said, a tolerant civilized society, systematized, homogenized, students, who will become predictably contributing members of society. We can count on this because we've created them all the same. It's a nice enough egalitarian model. So for over 160 years, the United States, and very similar things happening in the United Kingdom, we've had this system of the factory model. Schools are systematized and homogenized factories that are designed to produce a product and that product is a good citizen. The factory model label is very apt because just like a factory that produces material products, personalization isn't the issue. Standardization is you don't want variation. There's a whole industry that's all about making sure of the quality control of products, such that they all come out to be virtually exactly the same, or as exactly the same as we can possibly make them. The same is true for the factory model of education. We are producing little students as exactly the same as we can possibly make them. The factory model label is also fitting because this system does little more for a student than prepare them for work in the factory. Homogenized human beings for homogenized industrial roles. It's no coincidence that this system emerged at a time, the 1830s, 1840s, when the second industrial revolution was in full force. What society needed or what it thought it needed more than anything else were good little workers. And that's what the factory model produces. Education is a factory that produces homogenized little workers. Definitely, it is important to help people gain basic values, norms, and knowledge so that they can be functional both vocationally and as citizens. The problem is that that's mostly all the education has ever been because public education, education for the masses is the factory model of producing the mass product of good, basic workers and citizens. If you want more than that, public school isn't and hasn't served you well. The rich, of course, could afford to send their children to better schools that deliver better education, but obviously that is out of the reach of most people. Although to be fair, that there are now public-fully funded education, that education then became part of your right as a citizen. That was a huge liberal advance, and I'm not done playing that at all. The problem is we have an advanced beyond that mid-1800s factory model. We continue to use the factory model of education with its rigid schedules, its rigid curriculum, its test-based methodology, as though that's what education is and it can't be anything more. Worse, today, a major plank in the Project 2025 platform is to dismantle reforms that have attempted to nudge education beyond the factory model. In education, as in all other planks of the Project 2025 platform, the goal is to take society backward nearly two centuries. They want to return to a two-tiered educational system, real education for the rich, factory indoctrination for the rest, which leads us to the second major problem with education. The educational split. This second problem for education was pointed out by James T. Kluffenberg, in his essay, "James's Pragmatism and American Culture." I will repeat this quote from him because I think it really nails the second problem with education. Quote, "When school systems consolidated, when some children were channeled into more academic and others into vocational tracks, when professionalizing educators, increasingly monopolized decisions about methods and curricula, and spawned a distinct class of administrators. And especially when taxpayers decided they would prefer to buy bigger cars and houses for themselves, instead of paying for smaller classes and better compensated teachers for their children, almost all the characteristics necessary for pragmatist education vanished." End of quote. "Whenever I hear complaints about how education isn't good enough, and I agree with that critique, I think of Kluffenberg's quote. The idea of splitting academic and vocational education builds on the faculty model, is really just saying, okay, now we have two product lines. We have the academic product line where a small number of students are trained to go to university and get at least some sort of higher degree, and we have the vocational product where we're producing little workers. The split of education into these two product lines, academic and vocational, is an old one, and it's not entirely without merit. Some people don't want to study philosophy. I know that's a terrible thought, but it's true. Some people don't want to do science. Some people don't want to become mathematicians. Some people want to just simply learn a trade and work at that trade, and there is absolute honor and value in people who want to take the vocational track." Years ago, I had the distinct privilege of teaching a community college early in my career as a professor, and I do mean it's a privilege, because one of the things that I really enjoyed about teaching a community college is that you meet people who are getting a higher education, mostly in that sense of the vocational track. I would teach classes on philosophy, religion and critical thinking, and down the hall, professors taught how to repair our conditioners and furnaces. And that's wonderful. That's a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues still look down upon the community college system, where people can get a higher education in the humanities, where they can learn about a trade and philosophy. But my colleagues largely diminish and ridicule that. And it's far too prevalent that if an educator does get a full-time professorship at a community college. Their career advancement is finished. That's a dead end job as far as academia is concerned. The other problem is that the split between the vocational track and the academic track is continuing to widen. More and more you hear that one shouldn't bother with academic courses. One doesn't need to learn about sociology or anthropology or philosophy or any of those fluffy social liberal arts sort of things. They just need to be, well, go back to the factory model. You are simply there to learn how to do a trade and become a good citizen and a good little worker, whether it's repairing air conditioners or doing STEM. Again, this is a major plank in the Project 2025 platform because for them, education about anything beyond how to be a good little worker drawn for the corporations is woke and needs to be eliminated. Cloud Bloomberg's quote also points out another problem with the distinct class of administrators and funding priorities. But I'm going to save that for another time. We are very wrong on our funding priorities and our priorities of how especially higher education is structured. But I want to keep talking about the factory model, the two tracks of the factory model and what the solution is. Part one of the solution, Jane Adams. Yes, there is a solution to the problem in the education system and it's been out there for quite some time. That solution was proposed around 1900 to 1910 in response to man and his Prussian factory model by two people, Jane Adams and John Dewey. Jane Adams, if you've heard of her at all, you've heard of her only as a social reformer, a social activist. But she was a philosopher. Sexism has reduced her role to simply being a radical activist who founded Holhaus. She did, of course, found Holhaus in 1889. Her experience is running Holhaus as a home for marginalized people where they could learn about life and become better people, became the laboratory through which she and other people, including John Dewey, learned new ideas about how to educate people. Adams and Dewey were both pragmatists. That's the same pragmatism in which William James, who Clappenberg wrote about, was involved. Adams was a teacher at the University of Chicago Extension Division. While Dewey was a full professor at the University of Chicago, the reason why their status was different was, of course, sexism. In the early 1900s, women didn't have the vote. Women were not considered full citizens. Therefore, women were not allowed to be professors. But in her philosophical work, Adams focused on the interchanges between theory and practice, and between activities and perspectives. And wanted to understand how different people have different standpoints. You can have all the theory in the world, but no matter how rational your theory is, it cannot tell us what people perceive and who they are. The practice of asking people about their experiences and activities, and listening to their answers, will tell us much more. That approach, that methodology, was very influential in the formation of American sociology. Adams's scholarly work was in keeping with her strong ethical conviction that society cannot claim progress unless all social classes are benefiting. She calls for lateral progress, by which she means social gains held in common by society as a whole. This was in contra distinction to the prevailing practice then, and sadly still now, of focusing on the achievements of the rich and famous, thinking that the large successes of a few proves that a society is progressing. To achieve this lateral progress for all of society, Jane Adams wrote in her book Democracy and Social Ethics, that was published in 1902, that we must not speculate on what is good and ethical, but instead act in concrete ways that care for other people. That means a social democracy in which we listen to people, in which people are continually looking out for each other and the good of the community. Education then, to bring about social democracy and lateral progress, must be participatory, must be something where we listen to the students, we understand the students, and this is a reflection of how Adams thinks society should be in all its aspects. Society is obliged to understand what the working class poor are experiencing and develop means to improve their lot in life. Education, obviously, is a very important aspect of that. To emancipate the working class, we don't need a Marxist revolution. We need constructive solutions. Adams proposed an educational system that took into account students' particular standpoints and care for them by improving their abilities to improve their own lives. The solution part two. John Dewey was a very close friend of Jane Adams, very much inspired by her, and he fully admitted his debt to Jane Adams. He wrote as much in the dedication of his books, but of course, she's a woman, she doesn't matter, so academia and history have forgotten about her, and people are taught only about Dewey, if they're taught about Dewey at all. What Dewey developed partly inspired by Jane Adams, and of course, by the other pragmatist scholars like William James, is what Dewey called instrumentalism. Knowledge, she said, is an instrument, a tool, and the human activity of education and learning is the activity of developing and using beliefs as tools or instruments for solving problems, and if needed, altering our environment to meet our needs and desires. So, Dewey's primary aim was to reform education to help students develop problem-solving skills, instruments to solve problems. Dewey said that in schools, students are too often seen as mere theoretical spectators who are under the instruction of experts. Well, this is the factory model of education. You bring them into the classroom, you set them down, you have the teachers speak at them, and the students just absorb and regurgitate back what they've heard. And they do. Dewey strongly criticized this factory model. He said that all of academia and all of education is neglecting the need to perceive and appreciate the uniqueness of individuals. Individual people have an infinite diversity of active tendencies, and Dewey said that education and society as a whole must account for this. Dewey, again similar to Jane Adams, thought that education is best when it is active involvement, when we're listening to students, when students themselves are not passively just seeing and hearing and repeating back what they have seen and heard. Central to Dewey's educational reforms was the need to get away from wrote memorization of facts, and instead adopt processes of open inquiry, critical thinking. Good education, Dewey thought, teaches individuals how to solve problems and engage better with their society and environment. Students therefore need to be active questioners. They need to be hands-on in both practices and dialogue. That's why, he said, discussion is a very important part of education, and students need to be able to ask questions of their teachers, discuss among themselves, and discover truths for themselves to be allowed to think for themselves. Dewey was proposing all of this over 100 years ago, but sadly many educators, perhaps most educators, including those with advanced degrees, still insist on the factory model of education. Teaching to the test, treating students as passive vessels to be force-fed facts that they must memorize and regurgitate back to receive a grade. We produce little workers, even in academia, even in philosophy. You come in, you have your mind filled, you regurgitate back, you get your diploma, by go away. Education still has not achieved the dream of Adams and Dewey to see education as a learning process of problem solving and creative thinking. But there's a part three to the solution. Dregly inspired by Dewey was the Brazilian philosopher Paolo Friere. He was concerned for those who suffered in the poorer communities of his native Brazil, where the problem of illiteracy was huge. In his time, over 60% of people in Brazil were illiterate. In the 1960s, he worked with government agencies trying to promote literacy. Friere. grew to realize that the problem of illiteracy and poverty, which were very intertwined, were related to authoritarian attitudes that were deeply ingrained in all aspects of society, even in how parents religion their children, and especially in education. Like Jane Adams and John Dewey who inspired him, Freer saw that education needs to be more than learning skills, more than memorizing facts and figures. Education is about people discovering themselves as creative agents and becoming more human. After teaching for years, Freer went back to school to get his doctorate and learned about the philosophy of social justice, which is also the track that I took interestingly, not knowing about Freer's personal journey until after I got my PhD. Central to Paulo Freer's social philosophy is his insight that within oppressive dynamics, the humanity of both the oppressor and the oppressed is diminished. This idea is similar to Hegel's identification of the master servant or master slave dialectic, which gives neither the master nor the slave sufficient recognition to realize themselves as human beings. Freer thus believed that political and legal reforms were on their own insufficient to change oppressive dynamics. People in all classes had internalized the historically pervasive authoritarian oppression. Jane Adams had had similar thoughts, which is why she talked about lateral progress, the need for all of society itself to change. Freer said that everyone has been conditioned to maintain the dynamic of authoritarian oppression, and this includes the oppressed who have internalized the oppressive structures. What does all this have to do with education? Well, if everyone is indoctrinated into the dynamic of authoritarian oppression, then it is no surprise that education is also so indoctrinated and a tool for continued indoctrination of the authoritarian oppression. Freer explains this in his 1968 book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book I highly recommend. In the book, Freer calls for an overhaul of pedagogy, the method and practice of teaching. He learned a lot about this working as a teacher in the early 1960s. He saw that authoritarianism was deeply ingrained in all aspects of society. For Freer, the method of indoctrination is the factory model of education, which he calls the banking model of education. He calls it the banking concept of education or banking concept of knowledge in that the bank holds the knowledge and people must come to the bank to receive it. The bank of knowledge is separate from the people and under the control of the bankers who decide to whom to distribute the knowledge. The banking model of education, Freer said, was a legacy of colonialism. The traditional dichotomous and authoritarian model of education assumes that experts bestow their gift of knowledge to those who know nothing, just like the colonial's came into a society like Brazil to save the ignorant indigenous people from themselves. As he said in his book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world itself. A person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others. The individual is a mere spectator, reduced to such a status, and is no longer considered a creator or re-creator of life. Freer argued that this banking concept of knowledge perpetuates hierarchies of power, reaffirming the oppressive dynamics of powerful and powerless. Freer saw the legacy of colonialism in Brazil as an oppressive dynamic that permeated all levels of society, including and perhaps especially education. Even well-meaning teachers who wish to treat their students as the valuable individuals they are are trapped within a system of education that enforces authoritarian colonial economies. This banking model not only perpetuates oppressive dynamics, Freer says it is an ineffective method of education. This may turn some people off as being very radical, and yet is it not true? Not just for colonialized countries like Brazil, but even in the United States or the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, what do we see in education both primary and higher? Education is way too often conducted on moss. With a single lecturer speaking to dozens and sometimes hundreds of students, students are seen and treated as theoretical spectators under the instruction and even domination of the bankers, the experts. That's what Freer referred to as the banking concept of knowledge, the banking concept of education. Do he had criticized education and academia itself as not perceiving the uniqueness of individuals? Freer agrees because education is never a neutral process, he said. Education, if it presupposes inequality between teacher and student, then education will perpetuate that dynamic well beyond the classroom itself. Education instead should presuppose no such thing. It should presuppose that there is no inequality between student and teacher. It will instead enter into a dialogue with students. The value of education for Freer was not simply being better able to make a living in a profession, but rather empowerment and transformation for an individual and community. Education, he said, is a process. Education, well done, leads to social justice. So how do we apply these solutions to real life? Obviously, what Adams, Dewey, and Freer propose is an ideal and a difficult reality to bring about. I teach philosophy to mostly non-philosophy majors. Obviously, as much as I give them the leave to express their ideas and tell them what I really believe is true, that you are philosophers, everyone can be a philosopher. Do please thank for yourself. My students, especially the American ones, are so indoctrinated into the factory or banking model of education that asking them to think and express their ideas is drawing to them. It's really sad but it's true. Certainly, of course, students don't know as much about philosophy as a professor. It's true of any subject. That's why you're a teacher, it's why you're a professor. You know stuff. And if that wasn't the case, there would be no point in having teachers. If the teacher didn't know more than the student, well, what's the point? But the dynamic of the banking model, where you need to come to me, the professor, and I will give you at my no-bless oblige knowledge, that's nonsense. It's counterproductive. Of course, all students don't know as much as their teachers, but students are equal human beings, deserving of trust and respect. My job as an educator and the job of every educator should be to empower students, to learn, to thank for themselves. The solution means seeing education as a process of facilitating practice and critical reflection. This is what Jane Adam said. This is what John Dewey said. This is what Paulo Freire said. Our pedagogy needs to be one that fosters democracy of conversation between people in what they discuss and learn from each other about their own power and agency. Education is best when it is active involvement, not passive seeing or hearing. Good education teaches individuals how to solve problems and better engage with their society. Not to become good compliant little workers, but to become active questioners, active learners. And discussion is the most important part of education, real participation. Education needs to empower people by raising their consciousness of their situation in life. Freire said that education changes people and people change the world. Alas, though, education still largely ignores Freire's ideas that have been out there for over 50. 50 years. And they ignore Dewey's ideas that have been out there for nearly 100 years, and they ignore Adam's ideas even longer ago than that. Education is still dominated by a regressive system, whether you call it the banking model or the factory model. Students are consumed by education and turned into products. Higher education remains far too much a factory, far too much a commercial product, where what matters is making money off students. And of course, the best way to keep the money flowing is to just keep the students themselves compliant and content. Those priorities are wrong because what matters now in higher education is not academic achievement, so much as whether the students have enough recreational activities because if they're having fun, they'll stay and keep paying tuition and eventually become little good workers. I would like to say that's just my cynicism, but is the reality of the situation that causes cynicism among many of us in higher education. Now we have to deal with the Project 2025 Trump regime that literally, literally wants to turn back the clock in education to the 1800s. The common thread in the actions to abolish the teaching of topics, ban books, and cancel funding is the reassertion of the regressive factory model and the oppressive banking model. To sum up, the factory model of education that has had a stranglehold on education for over 180 years in the United States and slightly older in Europe is still hanging on and is still a problem. Until we break out of that model, until we start to fully see students as independent, free thinking individuals, we will be counterproductive in our education. We will not be a society that can be everything that it can be because our educational system is not everything it should be. As a society and as educators, we must be open to seeing students as individuals who are creative thinkers, as people who need to be empowered, not just churned through a system and turned into products.