I thought the public school system was created mainly to create workers for the factories and the new jobs that came about with new technology.
A lot of nice ideas are thrown around about an educated electorate, blah, blah, but they are just nice ideas.
Well, I guess that we will just have to agree to disagree on the value of an educated population.
But I would be interested in your thoughts about the history of the public school system. I am not a social historian, but I would have thought that if the only aim was to create workers, school would have been unnecessary (why not just send them to the factories at the youngest possible age to learn by doing?). Would you be able to elaborate? I am genuinely interested.
Actually, I do believe in the value of an education population. I just don't think our schools turn out my ideal educated population lol.
My ideal educated population would: have critical thinking skills,
ask many questions, know more national and world history, appreciate other cultures, take responsibility for the things they complain about in our country and help to fix them, not be intellectually satisfied by reading about the lives of celebrities, etc.
For the factory model idea... well, I've read many books written by educators who think our schools don't teach things like critical thinking (or that the current system makes it hard to teach these skills.) So my sources are rather biased.
First, our public schools were originally based on the Prussian school system, which was developed purely to indoctrinate the citizens. Second, a lot of ideas in psychology and business converged at one time and the efficient factory model of doing business was applied to educating children. But as we all know, children are not widgets to be manufactured exactly alike.
The system isn't set up to encourage children to seek out new knowledge, learn on their own schedule, delve deeply into whatever is being studied.... Children are seen as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, but we now know that learning does
not happen like that.
We also know that grades are detrimental to learning and many of the other practices we use in schools don't make any sense for how kids really learn (like, younger children play (and learn!) side by side and older kids want to work together. Yet, young children are supposed to work in groups and the older ones mostly work alone.)
