Education is about giving children the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life—especially economically—and public education was created to ensure that all children can acquire such learning to the best of their ability, regardless of their parents’ desires or financial resources. That, at least, is likely the assumption of most Americans: public education is a ladder of upward mobility.
Perhaps the assumption is wrong.
Governments could have embraced mass elementary education for another primary reason, which might explain why public education has often been ineffective at providing skills and knowledge crucial for upward mobility. Indeed, rather than creating a ladder of opportunity, the aim of mass education has been to keep people passively in their place. That is the argument of political scientist Agustina S. Paglayan in her new, deeply researched book Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education.
While it might be surprising to hear that government-driven mass education did not start in order to give all kids an equal chance at lifetime success, Paglayan’s basic thesis should not be especially controversial to students of education history. It is well established, for instance, that shaping patriotic citizens was an explicit goal for many founding era American public education proponents. Horace Mann—the “Father of the Common School” who in 1837 became the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education—wanted to mold children and their families into ideal citizens, and was enamored of the heavily centralized Prussian model of education. Prussia had created Europe’s first nationally controlled public education system, and as Paglayan catalogues, the increasingly powerful country became an exemplar for public education advocates who were looking to build efficient, unified states.
For many public education founders, control, not elevation, was the focus.
Because Prussia’s pioneering efforts in mass education served as a model for public education advocates in numerous countries, it is useful for understanding Paglayan’s theory of what has fueled government-established mass education. Paglayan departs somewhat from what students of education history, and combatants in the ongoing debate about public schooling and school choice, commonly hear about Prussia. The prevailing narrative is that Prussia created its system because it suffered defeat in the Napoleonic Wars and the King wanted to create a nation of martinets who would dutifully and enthusiastically mobilize anytime he ordered it. Paglayan, in contrast, focuses on the law establishing mass, compulsory, state-regulated—but not yet state-delivered—education after the Seven Years War. Some historians tie that law to wartime struggles, too, but Paglayan writes that the goal was not to mold a nation of soldiers, but to pacify restive subjects, especially rural populations aggravated by their economic and social plights.
The law that was ultimately enacted required Protestant children in rural communities—and soon after Catholic and urban children—to attend primary schools that taught a national curriculum, used government-approved textbooks, and “charged teachers with cultivating discipline and obedience and breaking the child’s will.” Paglayan writes that the 1763 timing of the law’s passage has fed the Seven Years War frustration theory, but by 1754—before the war—Frederick the Great had already approved plans for essentially the same system. What spurred that, she argues, were peasant revolts in the 1740s and 1750s.
In direct opposition to upward mobility, a primary goal of the system was, as Paglayan quotes from a 1757 Silesian economic journal, to cultivate “inner contentment”—and hence passivity—among the peasantry. Paglayan bolsters the contentment thesis by noting that Prussia had different content for urban and rural areas, with rural education withholding skills that might have encouraged children to eventually move to cities to pursue easier livelihoods. She quotes Frederick himself warning that were rural schools to teach “too much” children might “rush off to the cities and want to become secretaries or clerks.”
American public education has not always been liberal or benevolent, with public schools sometimes used to “Americanize” people who did not fit into the basic Anglo-Saxon mold, whether they liked it or not.
Attacking another widely held assumption, Paglayan argues that history does not support the idea that mass education quickly expanded whenever political leaders became aware of the mass-education model. She catalogues sizeable differences in the timing of adopting mass schooling in countries that were introduced to the model roughly simultaneously. That, she argues, supports her theory that fear of unrest—which would rise and fall at different times in different places—was the most common driver of mass government-driven education.
The book includes case studies of Prussia, France, Chile, and Argentina, as well as discussing the United States and relative laggard England, which did not adopt full-scale state education until 1870. Paglayan also draws from impressive databases she has assembled on the years that countries adopted their first primary education laws, the spread of elementary education, when countries democratized, years of countries’ interstate wars, and more. In specific cases, she highlights the differing concentration of schools in provinces that were more or less restive within countries. Throughout, she detects a predominant correlation between internal unrest and the establishment of primary schooling.
Of course, all countries are different, and the United States has a distinctive education system, especially regarding nationalization. While some early American public education enthusiasts explicitly connected education to creating virtuous citizens for the new republic, the country has never had a nationally controlled education system. Public education evolved from largely bottom-up civil society provision, to burgeoning state influence with advocates such as Horace Mann in largely exhortatory positions, to more centralized districts in the Progressive Era, to greater state control, to some federal intervention that peaked with the now-defunct No Child Left Behind Act. The centralizing trend notwithstanding, American public education has always been grounded in local control, while the Constitution gives Washington no education authority.
Though its structure is more decentralized than that of many other countries, Paglayan still sees the United States falling into the status-quo-maintenance pattern. Public education was, as mentioned, meant from the beginning to shape obedient citizens emotionally attached to their country, while Paglayan notes that public schools today inculcate core American values of obedience to political authorities and peaceful resolution of differences through democratic processes. That said, if such “indoctrination” is intended to protect a liberal society, including the right to openly question the government, it is not exactly oppressive.
Of course, American public education has not always been liberal or benevolent, with public schools sometimes used to “Americanize” people who did not fit into the basic Anglo-Saxon mold, whether they liked it or not. The schools were also often de facto Protestant, and openly hostile to Roman Catholics, convincing many Catholics that they could not use them in good conscience. That led to the creation of a parallel Catholic system that, by its peak in the mid-1960s, enrolled more than 12 percent of all school children. And, most shamefully, in many states, the public education systems forcibly segregated black children.
Overall, Paglayan’s historical evidence is novel and powerful. But in making her case, especially when it comes to the modern day, she might go a bit too far in assigning blame for what happens in schools to pacifying indoctrination.
Paglayan, for instance, laments that even today, classrooms are often arranged with desks in rows and teachers in the front. This perpetuates a “design element,” she writes, that “deliberately sought to establish a clear hierarchy between teachers and students and to encourage respect for teacher’s authority.” This might, indeed, inculcate norms of obedience, but rather than advancing some sort of grand pacification effort, the goal might simply be to manage a classroom full of high-energy kiddos so that learning can be accomplished. Practical necessity, not indoctrination.
More broadly, Paglayan despairs that “the practice of using threats or actual punishments to induce someone to behave in a specific way … remains part of the fabric of education systems to this day. The reason is not just inertia … governments old and new have found the idea of using schools to mold children into obedient future citizens quite attractive.” Again, the explanation might be more practical than Paglayan suggests. “Threats and actual punishments” might simply be seen as the most efficient way to maintain the classroom order necessary to get important instruction done.
Paglayan also detects pacifying indoctrination where the root problem is likely not indoctrination, but that government-controlled education inherently requires people with different values and beliefs to impose on each other to get what they want for themselves. This is borne out in the wildfire of culture war we have seen in public schools over the last few years. If, say, one parent wants radical historian Howard Zinn in the district’s history curriculum and another does not, one must win and the other must lose.
Race and the nature of American society have been one of the hottest battlegrounds. Paglayan fingers Republican responses to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, including numerous state laws against teaching “divisive concepts,” as an example of elites using mass education to quell threats of social unrest. But she ignores what preceded that, including state legislation requiring ethnic studies, school superintendents mobilizing their districts to fight systemic racism after the murder of George Floyd, and the publication of the 1619 Project. The last called the arrival of enslaved people in 1619 the country’s “true founding” and the Pulitzer Center sought to place it in schools around the country.
Conservative actions over the treatment of race as likely illustrate that conflict is inevitable when people with diverse values must fund a single system of government schools as they represent a one-sided desire to pacify.
Ultimately, when it comes to detecting modern-day pacification efforts, Paglayan says that it might be impossible to do so definitively. While in the past elites could flatly state that they wanted education for social control because they were only communicating with other elites, today’s mass media makes it very hard to be so blunt. Desires must be shrouded because if they were clear, the intended subjects would almost certainly find out. But that also leaves lots of room to ascribe ugly motives where there may well be none.
In addition to possibly over-detecting pacifying indoctrination, Paglayan might go too far in presenting the creation of obedient citizens and teaching of useful skills as mutually exclusive. She offers no compelling reason that a school cannot give both heavy doses of the three Rs and, say, 1776 Commission-style patriotic lessons. Education need not be virtue or human capital. It can be virtue and human capital.
While it might go too far in some of its conclusions, Raised to Obey is a valuable contribution to the ongoing education policy debate in the United States and beyond. It makes clear that public schooling has, in many cases, not been created primarily to empower students, but for social control. To anyone other than the biggest paternalist, that should be concerning.
