What Are Schools For?

The modern education system around the world continues to bear the imprint of mass education’s original goal: obedience.

Agustina Paglayan is a political science and public policy professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development.

—

Clara Collier: To start, do you want to give us a quick background of the book and your research?

Agustina Paglayan: Sure. Raised to Obey examines the origins of modern public education systems. This project began out of my interest in our current education systems and why, in many different countries, they are not living up to their promise of leveling the playing field, of giving people the knowledge and skills they need to thrive.

In seeking to understand that problem, I realized that I had to go back in time to understand why these education systems were established in the first place. Were they created and designed to teach kids valuable knowledge and skills, or were they designed with a different set of goals in mind? And what I learned was that they were actually designed with a different goal. The primary purpose behind the creation of primary education systems was to convert unruly children into obedient citizens who would respect the state and its laws.

The idea that rulers had was that if you caught children from a young age and taught them to sit still, to respect rules, to respect the teacher's authority, they were going to internalize these norms — that following rules and respecting authority is a good thing to do. And in the long term, that would lead to social order and political stability that would preserve the status quo, which these rulers benefited from.

C: In the book you walk through all of the different explanations for why states would invest in mass primary education. Is it because of democratization? Is it to prepare an industrial workforce? Is it for military readiness? Is it for nationalization? And you make the case that those explanations don't really fit the available evidence.

I'm most interested then in zooming in on what effects this has today. How do these origins manifest themselves in the way that schools work in the present?

A: I think that there have been changes in the goals of education systems over time, and we have seen some education systems take on more goals, beyond the original goals that motivated the emergence of these systems. But even then, in the vast majority of education systems, you still see these disciplinary and coercive roots very embedded in the character of how schools today continue to operate.

If you do a Google search of "classroom in [country of your choice]," you're going to find that classrooms around the world are all organized with a teacher-centered approach: kids are sitting in rows facing a teacher who stands at the front of the class.The kids are paying attention. They have to raise their hand and get the teacher's permission to participate. If they want to go to the bathroom, they must ask.

Time in school is very structured around when you can do what. It instills the idea that kids have to memorize what the teacher is saying, and that that is the truth that they need to learn if they want to succeed in school and eventually get a good job. It’s an emphasis on rote memorization and repetition.

This is opposed to a system that could be designed around the promotion of critical thinking, around promoting debate, around a much more student-centered approach to education, where the child's curiosity guides what kinds of assignments and projects are used to teach different skills and knowledge.

You see the remnants of the original purpose of education in the fact that the curriculum in more than 95% of countries around the world continues to be set by the central government. It's imposed from the top. It's not something that's decided democratically. We also see it in the way, for example, that history is taught around the world. History is typically taught through a specific narrative that serves the interests of dominant groups of society who are in power — and want to preserve that power. The implication is that history is often taught glorifying national heroes or minimizing episodes in which elites applied violence against other members of society. Because of course, if you were to teach that, it would look ugly and people would start questioning the legitimacy of the ruling class.

C: I’m really interested in the question of teacher-centric education and these very hierarchical, coercive classrooms. The sense I get in the book is that you think that this is ultimately a flawed pedagogy in two ways. One, it's bad for the student — that it's bad for a student's personal growth or their development as a person to have more freedom, more autonomy in the classroom. Two: it doesn't promote learning. You're making both of those arguments. Is that correct?

A: Yes. I think that when you have these teacher-centered approaches to education, by definition you are limiting the child's autonomy. I think that's one of the goals of a student-centered approach to education –- to start from the child's curiosity, to honor those interests and structure your pedagogy around that.

But I think there's also an argument to be made that if you do it that way, then you maintain student motivation about what the classroom experience is about. That motivation then creates a setup where learning is fun and stimulating. And that is not a minor factor affecting student learning. When students feel respected, they are more invested in their learning.

C: I want to be a little contrarian for a moment. My own sympathy is really with these child-centered approaches. But how strong is the evidence for it? Finland has a famously child-centered education system. When you look at TIMSS data¹ — and this is just math attainment, it's not everything — it's in the low 500s, a little behind the US. It's a fine education system, but it's much, much lower than, say, Singapore or Japan or Korea or these countries that have much more hierarchical, teacher-centric systems.

In general, I think that promoting children's autonomy in the classroom and promoting educational attainment are both really important goals. But it seems less obvious to me that they always go hand in hand.

A: Let me start by pushing back a little bit on your interpretation of the Finland scores. If you look at Finland ten years ago, Finland was at the top of PISA² scores. I don't like just taking the most recent PISA examination, I like looking at overall trends. If you look at Finland in the last 20 years when it still had this relatively child-centered approach, there are times when it was at the top, and then there are times when it's not.

C: I also want to clarify, I'm not saying that it's a bad approach. I'm saying that it seems that you can also have more hierarchical approaches that are also compatible with very high learning achievement.

A: Correct. So then the question is what exactly is this high achievement in PISA, which is the marker you are using, really reflecting? To what extent can those kids think critically? We don't have much evidence on that because we don't have standardized tests of critical thinking.

My bet would be if you had an exam on critical thinking, the kids in Korea would perform a lot worse than the kids in Finland. We can't know whether you are right or whether I am right until we have that kind of testing.

And we can't just look at cross-national comparisons to make inferences about whether a student-centered approach is better than a teacher-centered one. There's a lot of other things besides the type of education countries have that affects learning outcomes. The more rigorous kind of evidence is the evidence that comes from randomized controlled trials. But we don’t have many RCT studies of large-scale student-centered approaches to K-12 education, because the model isn't widespread virtually anywhere. You do have several RCTs of different approaches to teaching at the early childhood education level, particularly in the United States. The general finding of those studies is that the student-centered approach promotes more learning.

C: A lot of these student-centered approaches are more demanding from teachers. They require a different set of classroom control skills, a different level of investment, different student-teacher ratios. One big question is: If there is this association between hierarchical teacher-centric pedagogy and worse outcomes, how do you address that in places that are less resourced?

A: I'd say that the fact that you have in, for instance, many countries in Africa, well-documented low teacher skills, that's endogenous to policy decisions that were made to keep teachers lacking autonomy.

If you had the political will to create a different education system than the one we have, then you would invest the resources. You would take money out of the defense budget, out of other sectors that are getting subsidies, etc. The fact that we don't see that happening is, in and of itself, indicative of the lack of political will to transform education systems toward systems that really promote critical thinking.

This is the argument people frequently make when they talk about sub-Saharan Africa. "Well, there aren't resources to invest in education." But that kind of argument was also very present in the 19th century among European and Latin American rulers who resisted investing in education — back then as a tool of social control.

One of the things that the book documents is that there were episodes and moments in history, particularly episodes of social unrest, when political rulers became more fearful of the masses and their potential to topple the status quo. When that happens, the resources available don't change, but suddenly you start seeing political will to invest the resources they do have into education.

So I think one of the questions for us will be — say you have a politician who so far has been saying, "We don't have the resources or the capacity to do a different type of education." Under what conditions would they suddenly decide "Oh yeah, let's actually promote a different type of education that promotes higher quality, promotes more equity"?

Jake Eaton: I thought the most compelling instantiation of the idea that education is equated with social control is where you documented that there's greater investment in areas within countries that had more political resistance to whatever regime was in power. On the surface it’s a contradictory finding. Why would politicians want to be investing in the education of these areas that politically rebelled against them? But that’s only if one assumes that the outcomes of education are greater autonomy, greater economic gains. It makes more sense if the impact of education is really to limit autonomy, or to inculcate more nationalistic/pro-regime values.

A: Yes. And I'll add one thing, from the devil's advocate perspective. People who think that education was used not for indoctrination, but rather for equipping people with valuable knowledge and skills that improve economic productivity would make this argument: "Well, if after an episode of internal conflict, a civil war, a revolution, etc., you see that the government is devoting more effort to constructing schools in those areas that rebel against the government, that could be driven by an effort to address the economic grievances that led to the rebellion, in the hope that if you address those economic grievances, then people in the future will be less likely to be discontent about the regime and rebel against it."

So you can't just look at school construction data and where governments are investing to disentangle who's right. You have to also look at what the curriculum is doing. Does it, in fact, focus on teaching skills for economic productivity? Does it, in fact, address the demands of rebels?

That's the other thing that I also do in the book, and that's how I come to the conclusion that it isn't driven by wanting to address rebels' demands. It's essentially driven by this elite-driven desire to teach children to stay put.

C: I love this moment where you actually cite Prussian educational materials from the late 18th century. My background is as an 18th century Germanist, so it was fun for me to see this stuff. It's just very explicitly like “teach kids to be obedient to the king." And we will do this by making them recite dialogues where they talk about how everyone should be obedient to the king.

But this leads to another question. I get the sense, looking at the literature around your book, that in political science your argument is something of a new take. This surprised me because from my admittedly inexpert awareness of the history, it's like, well, yeah, that's what Prussians wanted. That's what they said they wanted.

This is a broad question that comes up for me when I read quantitative social science a lot, which is something that is in the historical literature that takes a very long time to penetrate into the quantitative literature. I'm just curious about that dynamic in your interactions with it and how you feel that reading history informs your work.

A: Reading history certainly informs my work. And I think you're right that in the social sciences, there's frequently an underinvestment in reading what historians have researched. I think that's the case in the study of education, both in political science and in economics.

There's a lot of economics research that makes the claim that the spread of education was driven by the spread of democracy. There's a book by Peter Lindert called Growing Public that says that the spread of democracy was the leading driver of the expansion of primary schooling. There's work by economic historians Engerman and Sokoloff who also make claims along the lines of "it's democracy that leads to the expansion of access to education."

Why people don't look as much at history as we would want - I can't speak to that. But I do think that there is a general human tendency to apply our current models for thinking about the world today to our interpretation of the past. People think of education today as something that should be leveling the playing field, should promote economic development. And they think, "Surely that must be also what politicians back then had in mind.” I think that's anachronistic.

C: There's one paragraph in your book where you mention, "If you've seen classrooms in other parts of the world, you'll notice that US classrooms are unusually participatory." I'm also interested in talking about what teaching critical thinking looks like and how it can be done. Because I think it's important, and I think it's genuinely more difficult than just imparting information. I'm curious how you see it modeled in current systems, how you think it could be done better.

A: Let me start with the case of the US. I do think that, for anyone who has studied in both the US and in a different country, one big adjustment when they move to the US is that they’re expected to participate more. The teacher is asking questions and expects students to answer.

That said, I don't think that the US is a country where education fosters critical thinking skills very much. So you have a lot of asking students to answer questions, but then when students answer, the teacher doesn't necessarily follow back asking the student a follow-up question, asking the student to clarify or pushing back or noting that there's an underlying assumption in a statement that they made, and asking them to notice that assumption and asking them to think how valid that assumption is in other contexts. There isn't this kind of intellectual exchange necessarily happening.

We see this when students arrive in college — they're used to participating in class, but when they participate and then you push back, they don't know how to engage in those conversations because they're not used to that.

The other thing I'd also say is in the context of the US, there are certain topics that are also not open to debate. The notion, for example, that democracy is the best form of government, the notion that violence is never a form of legitimate protest. These are two things that are ingrained in the US citizen through the entirety of their K-12 education. When you ask people to justify those claims and you present to them alternative arguments, they really can't hold their arguments very strongly because they just haven't learned what the limitations of those arguments are, how you might respond to critiques, etc.

J: They've only learned about MLK up until the Civil Rights Act is passed in 1964.

A: Exactly.

J: There's the famous Paulo Freire quote “If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed." I was shocked that I don't think that you quoted Freire in your book at all.

A: I know! I, of course, should have quoted him. There's just so many people who I wanted to quote. But yeah, if there's one person that I wish I would have highlighted their work more, it is Freire, certainly.

J: This goes back to another influential thinker in the education space. The 1976 Bowles and Gintis book Schooling in Capitalist America has been very influential in some education spaces — it was cited in my training as part of Teach for America back in 2010. Their argument is essentially that the schooling system is set up to benefit businesses. So, schools track students into specific roles. Curriculum is designed to provide a minimum level of low-skilled labor, such that factories don’t need to also teach basic skills.

I definitely take your argument up until the 1900s. I think you do a good job of showing very clearly that schooling came from a political function and not a capitalistic function, especially because there are many instances, prior to the advent of child labor laws, in which businesses were actually angry that the state was taking kids away. You give the example of Britain — they didn't modernize their education system or expand it until the 1850s, decades after industrialization.

But I'm curious whether or not you see the Bowles and Gintis argument gain credence in the 20th century, where education starts as a state apparatus and then, as corporations grow more influential politically, they exert more influence on policy.

A: I wouldn't say that the goal of education for capitalism displaces the goal of education for political control. But I would agree that it gets layered as an additional goal and an important one, where you're training people for jobs, and those jobs are a particular set of jobs in the hierarchy.

So I agree that the education system in the 20th century — I would say it’s around the mid-20th century when we start seeing this more — gets repurposed so that in addition to teaching people to respect the government and its laws, you are also accepting your place in the economic hierarchy.

J: I worked at a KIPP-style charter school when I was part of Teach for America. I agree with your critique about schools with an almost militaristic form of obedience. It is hard for students. Speaking from experience, it’s hard for teachers as well.

At the same time, I do think that there's a legitimate defense to be made of a KIPP style with respect to better performance, especially on math, somewhat on reading. It's especially effective in middle school, it appears to be less effective in high school. I'm curious, if you agree with that, or if you think it just comes at too much of a personal cost.

A: I think the difference there is more at the margins. You're thinking of KIPP versus a traditional public school. That's not the question I'm interested in. I'm interested in knowing who learns more math, more science, more critical thinking — someone in a KIPP school or a traditional school or someone in a Dewey-style school. And we don't have that analysis.

And the reason we don't have it is we don't have Dewey-style schools that are common enough that we can study. It's extremely difficult to find a school that is modeled around that type of approach to education.

C: Do you think there's a valuable comparison that can be made with a system like Montessori, or Waldorf, that is a little more child-centric? Do those comparisons exist?

A: I think so. People have done, again, at the early childhood education level, more studies of Montessori schools, for example, and how much kids learn in those preschool settings. And those tend to be kind of good outcomes when you go to one of these schools.

C: The question I have is how much that translates into later grades. Anecdotally, I've heard Montessori can be such a mixed bag in terms of learning attainment. Some people really, really thrive and learn a lot at older levels. Sometimes a lot of it seems to depend on the teachers and how it's implemented.

What does it demand of teachers? Because I've known people who teach in those environments, and it's a very different skill set. It requires a lot of attention to individual student needs and requires quite small classroom sizes. We ran a piece comparing Montessori and Jesuit schools a while back, and we talked about how both of those systems, while obviously they're very, very different, they both invest a ton of effort in acculturating teachers and acculturating students into their particular styles of education because the Montessori model does not work unless you have a different, but still quite specific kind of student.

A: There is some evidence that when kids go to a non-traditional education institution in their early years and then they transition to a more traditional approach, then they sometimes don't adapt well. Some people might interpret that as evidence that these schools are not that good. But I think the only reason why people don't adapt well is because you're trying to adapt them to the traditional model. If the traditional model was not the one we have in K-12, if we had a student-centered approach from pre-K through grade 12, then you probably wouldn't have these problems of adaptation.

We don't have many examples where we can look at this. But you did bring up earlier the case of Finland, which has a much more student-centered approach to education than most countries. There are other examples that I don't know enough about. Ontario carried out a reform just a few years ago to foster critical thinking across all subjects.

But in the case of Finland, to your question - what does this demand from the teacher? The reason they were able to implement this in Finland is because they recruit into the teaching profession the top 10% of high school graduates. On top of that, the training itself looks very different. You're preparing teachers to analyze data, to be able to adapt their pedagogical skills in response to what they're seeing in the classroom. They learn how to do research. You rarely see that in teacher education programs elsewhere.

C: The state of teacher education in the United States is like a whole other conversation that we probably shouldn't have because it would be too long and too complicated.

J: And I will say, as a former teacher, it is the hardest job I've ever had. And it was also the worst paid job I've ever had (uh, apart from grad school), which does not align incentives very well.

A: Exactly. So the problem that we have with teaching as a profession in the United States is that it's lost a lot of prestige over time, in part because it's underpaid. Pay is something that affects the prestige of an occupation.

And then the additional reason that teaching has lost prestige has to do with the fact that becoming a teacher is not particularly difficult in the United States compared to several other countries. Canadians are very aware of a loophole, that if you don't have good enough grades to get into a teacher education program in Canada, you can come to the US to get your teaching degree. So we don't have the type of setup that would enable us to really attract more highly talented people.

Of course, there are many talented teachers, and I think teachers do an incredible job when you consider the resources they get, the salary that they get paid. But if you really want to transform education, you have to give teachers a lot more autonomy. The US is one of the countries with the lowest levels of teacher autonomy. The training needs to look different. There's so much of the teacher education training in the traditional approach that focuses on, for example, behavioral management and philosophy of education style classes. You don't really have enough subject matter training and practical experience in the classroom where you're getting feedback from someone who's an expert in teaching.

C: It's interesting that you say becoming a teacher is too easy here, because one thing I hear a lot in education policy is becoming a teacher is too hard. We have too many bottlenecks for becoming a teacher.

A: Those bottlenecks are mostly paperwork. So you have to take this exam and you have these credentials and so on. But it's not as cognitively demanding as it is in many other countries. You don't have to show that your GPA is in the top 10% or the top 30% of your high school cohort to get into a teacher education program.

J: Teacher certification in the US happens at the state level. The Department of Education has some influence over states, but by and large, educational policy and curriculum in America comes from the state. I'm curious how that complicates your argument about the nation. Is it that US states have basically inherited a system that we designed throughout the 1700s and mostly 1800s? How does having state control complicate the idea of this more hegemonic force?

A: In my view, state control over education in the U.S. is still part of a top-down system. States have a responsibility to maintain social order and, under the U.S. Constitution, they can do so by regulating institutions such as police forces and schools. The functions are deeply intertwined.

C: We’ve floated this at a few points, but to the question of whether indoctrination is always wrong. I think that democracy is the best form of government. And there's different ways to relate to this, right? I think that a high school student should definitely be able to think critically about kinds of government and have been taught enough history to evaluate other approaches and come to a conclusion for themselves. And I think that mostly the conclusion they should come to is going to be that democracy is better than alternatives, because I think that's true. But they should be given the tools to think about it.

I don't necessarily think that's necessary for, say, a second grader, for the same reason that I don't think you necessarily need to teach a second grader that, well, some people think the earth is round and some people teach the earth is flat.

But I do ultimately think that part of the role of education, especially in a democracy, is creating an informed, civically engaged public. And I think it's very hard to do that if you don't at some level try to create a shared set of values. And in this country at least, "our system of government is democratic and that's good" is an important one.

A: I have lots of thoughts on this. Whether or not you teach a seven-year-old to repeat that democracy is the best form of government depends heavily on your values and your goals. If you prize individual autonomy and you prize an education that gives people the capabilities to live autonomous lives, then you don't teach them that in second grade, and you wait until they are capable of having the kinds of conversations you were describing happen in high school. You wait until high school to teach about forms of government and have a discussion about them.

In fact, not all countries teach civics education in primary school. That's not inevitable. And, more specifically, there are democratic countries that don't teach civics education in primary school. So you can have a democracy without doing that.

There are things I think that you could do with second grade students to inculcate democratic values that are not about repeating "democracy is the best form of government." So you were describing, for example, how you would want schools to create civically engaged citizens. In the Dewey approach to education, the kids in second grade would be choosing assignments, timetables, etc. They would vote on, "Okay, we're going to learn this concept by working on this or that assignment."

But I think the more fundamental question is how you trade off individual autonomy versus social stability and democracy or whichever system you want. And how you make that trade off depends on your values.

And even if your main goal was to strengthen democracy, the trouble I see is that there is an underlying assumption in your question, and in the statements that many people, including self-described liberals, make. Which is that if you don't teach kids to accept that democracy is the best form of government, and if you teach them to think critically about politics, they're going to go in the streets and protest, and there will be political instability. That is an assumption – not necessarily a fact. The jury is still out on what type of education is best for strengthening democracy.

1. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a global standardized test used to benchmark country progress. It primarily tests 4th and 8th grade students.

2. Programme for International Student Assessment, another standardized test across math, science, and reading, usually administered to 15-year-olds.