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What is the purpose of public education? Is it for the development of the individual? Is it for the development of society? All educators should study their own ideas and assumptions, and those of others, regarding the purpose and role of public education.
For most of the 20th century public education focused on preparing a workforce capable of running and working in factories and other mechanized industries such as shipping, fishing, and mining. In the United States, running a mechanized economy required that schools recruit and maintain a much higher percentage of youth than they had previously done during the era of an economy based on agriculture. By the beginning of the 20th century economic changes lessened the need for agricultural workers, and those changes greatly increased the need for workers who lived in cities near large factories or ports. The purpose of education during the “factory model” of schooling was to increase the profit of corporations producing industrial and individual consumer goods. Such an economy requires workers capable of teamwork and equipped with the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. The “factory model” of school also created academic tracks that would prepare individuals for work within the financial sector which was becoming more and more significant in the globalization of a manufacturing economy that was also becoming a globalized finance economy, or an economy based on loaning money and investing for profit. The changes in public education were promoted using the rationale that “a strong economy requires efficiency and highly effective workers who can operate the machinery and financial services that promote commerce.”
Today, public education no longer follows a “factory model,” but it does continue to promote itself as a change agent, and it structures itself in ways that prepare workers to run and deliver the services of the very industries that are creating a new economic order. Instead of manufacturing, rail road and mining magnates, today’s economy is led by leaders of finance capital (financial institutions, banking, investment firms), and by technology leaders (electronic services, communications, software, hardware, and information structuring).
Many educators do not see being efficient and useful today as mechanization as much as algorithmization – the promise in artificial intelligence and virtualization as key’s to personal success and happiness. Little analysis is directed toward the role and results of algorithmitized standardized testing, individualized class room conduct and results, and the socialization of individuals as community-unready persons unprepared for citizenship as co-directors of the nation. Part of the present dilemma is that far too many educators and learners consider education as a process of taking from the common resource and applying what one takes to individual gain. This notion leads to the acceptance that becoming highly skilled in digital, algorithmic storage and delivery of information is equal to becoming a practitioner of democratic ethics, values, and civic engagement.
Education technologists today believe, as did the “educational manufacturers” of the last century that teaching machines can personalize and thereby “revolutionize” education by allowing students to move at their own pace through the curriculum. Computerized education is promoted as the pinnacle of democracy because it supposedly offers the individual unlimited choices for developing skills and conduct that is “sell-able” in an ever-individualizing, Uber-style economic competition. Such technologists consider access to information the definition of “educational democracy.” Access is certainly basic, but access isn’t truly access if the battlefield of interests between classes, races, nationalities, and cultures is not level and fair. The “factory model” of education was created and led by financiers and corporate leaders. In many cases the profit-making scheme of transforming school systems into using “learning machines” and methods was not as much a conspiracy as it was an industry-wide effort to amass great personal wealth. Today, the algorithmic educational process reinforces the dynamic of the learner-as-private contractor. Each learner must learn how to take the most from the common good. Some can succeed at this and still be a functioning devotee of pluralist democracy. However, access to controlling government and public assets is much more important to democracy than individual access to such important tasks as computer coding, software development, and electronic informational services.
Thus, we come back to the need for each of us to develop as fully as possible an understanding of the purpose of public education. Educators in the United States must work from a developed educational philosophy. Otherwise, they work for economic and political interests whose need is to continue to privatize all that is public, including the educator’s job.
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