Public Education

[TheDevil'sApprentice]

I read somewhere that public education was brought in during the industrial revolution to create a new generation of more disciplined workers - and that everyone was very explicit about this being its purpose.

I forgot where I read this, so if someone could help me out in finding these explicit statements, that would be great (its for my liberal professor who's research interest is the philosophy of education).

Cheers

[ComradeOm]

I'm not so sure about this. In the first place free and compulsory public, in Europe at least, generally didn't appear until the late 19th C (the Jules Ferry laws of 1881) or even the early 20th C (AFAIK free universal education in England was only introduced with the Education Act 1902, compulsory schooling having been established in 1888). I do believe that universal education appeared earlier in the US but I can't recall the dates

As for the motivations of these laws, I've seen nothing to suggest that they were directly aimed at creating "a new generation of more disciplined workers". Indeed often the socialists were the most enthusiastic supporters of such measures, for obvious reasons. Which is not to say that the issue was not directly targeted at specific groups and ideologies. In France the Jules Ferry laws were devised in order to weaken both the monarchist/Church alliance and regional identities; the aim being to create a homogeneous and secular Republic. By the same token, in Britain a system of state sponsored schools was introduced relatively early in 19th C Ireland in a deliberate attempt to kill off the Irish language and distinct Gaelic identity

Of course such measures tended to be strongly resisted by the Church in all countries. Education was traditionally their responsibility and a major weapon when struggling with the secular state. Indeed the education reform process occasionally led to open bloodshed, as in the Swiss Sonderbund Rebellion of the 1840s. One would expect that if simply dulling the workforce was the objective then politicians would be happy to maintain the status quo

[Junius]

From memory, Marx talks about the Factory Acts in Capital (may have been other legislation) which required children workers (i.e. ages under 14) to attend school. From his description, however, it wasn't really compulsory, nor was it educational:


The moral degradation caused by the capitalistic exploitation of women and children has been so exhaustively depicted by F. Engels in his “Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse Englands,” and other writers, that I need only mention the subject in this place. But the intellectual desolation artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus-value, a state of mind clearly distinguishable from that natural ignorance which keeps the mind fallow without destroying its capacity for development, its natural fertility, this desolation finally compelled even the English Parliament to make elementary education a compulsory condition to the “productive” employment of children under 14 years, in every industry subject to the Factory Acts. The spirit of capitalist production stands out clearly in the ludicrous wording of the so-called education clauses in the Factory Acts, in the absence of an administrative machinery, an absence that again makes the compulsion illusory, in the opposition of the manufacturers themselves to these education clauses, and in the tricks and dodges they put in practice for evading them.

“For this the legislature is alone to blame, by having passed a delusive law, which, while it would seem to provide that the children employed in factories shall be educated, contains no enactment by which that professed end can be secured. It provides nothing more than that the children shall on certain days of the week, and for a certain number of hours (three) in each day, be inclosed within the four walls of a place called a school, and that the employer of the child shall receive weekly a certificate to that effect signed by a person designated by the subscriber as a schoolmaster or schoolmistress.” [54]

Previous to the passing of the amended Factory Act, 1844, it happened, not unfrequently, that the certificates of attendance at school were signed by the schoolmaster or schoolmistress with a cross, as they themselves were unable to write.

“On one occasion, on visiting a place called a school, from which certificates of school attendance, had issued, I was so struck with the ignorance of the master, that I said to him: ‘Pray, sir, can you read?’ His reply was: ‘Aye, summat!’ and as a justification of his tight to grant certificates, he added: ‘At any rate, I am before my scholars.’”

The inspectors, when the Bill of 1844 was in preparation, did not fail to represent the disgraceful state of the places called schools, certificates from which they were obliged to admit as a compliance with the laws, but they were successful only in obtaining thus much, that since the passing of the Act of 1845,

the figures in the school certificate must be filled up in the handwriting of the schoolmaster, who must also sign his Christian and surname in full.” [55]

Sir John Kincaid, factory inspector for Scotland, relates experiences of the same kind.

“The first school we visited was kept by a Mrs. Ann Killin. Upon asking her to spell her name, she straightway made a mistake, by beginning with the letter C, but correcting herself immediately, she said her name began with a K. On looking at her signature, however, in the school certificate books, I noticed that she spelt it in various ways, while her handwriting left no doubt as to her unfitness to teach. She herself also acknowledged that she could not keep the registe ... In a second school I found the schoolroom 15 feet long, and 10 feet wide, and counted in this space 75 children, who were gobbling something unintelligible” [56] But it is not only in the miserable places above referred to that the children obtain certificates of school attendance without having received instruction of any value, for in many schools where there is a competent teacher, his efforts are of little avail from the distracting crowd of children of all ages, from infants of 3 years old and upwards; his livelihood, miserable at the best, depending on the pence received from the greatest number of children whom it is possible to cram into the space. To this is to be added scanty school furniture, deficiency of books, and other materials for teaching, and the depressing effect upon the poor children themselves of a close, noisome atmosphere. I have been in many such schools, where I have seen rows of children doing absolutely nothing; and this is certified as school attendance, and, in statistical returns, such children are set down as being educated.” [57]

In Scotland the manufacturers try all they can to do without the children that are obliged to attend school.

“It requires no further argument to prove that the educational clauses of the Factory Act, being held in such disfavour among mill-owners, tend in a great measure to exclude that class of children alike from the employment and the benefit of education contemplated by this Act.” [58]

Horribly grotesque does this appear in print works, which are regulated by a special Act. By that Act,

“every child, before being employed in a print work must have attended school for at least 30 days, and not less than 150 hours, during the six months immediately preceding such first day of employment, and during the continuance of its employment in the print works, it must attend for a like period of 30 days, and 150 hours during every successive period of six months.... The attendance at school must be between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. No attendance of less than 2½ hours, nor more than 5 hours on any one day, shall be reckoned as part of the 150 hours. Under ordinary circumstances the children attend school morning and afternoon for 30 days, for at least 5 hours each day, and upon the expiration of the 30 days, the statutory total of 150 hours having been attained, having, in their language, made up their book, they return to the print work, where they continue until the six months have expired, when another instalment of school attendance becomes due, and they again seek the school until the book is again made up.... Many boys having attended school for the required number of hours, when they return to school after the expiration of their six months’ work in the print work, are in the same condition as when they first attended school as print-work boys, that they have lost all they gained by their previous school attendance.... In other print works the children’s attendance at school is made to depend altogether upon the exigencies of the work in the establishment. The requisite number of hours is made up each six months, by instalments consisting of from 3 to 5 hours at a time, spreading over, perhaps, the whole six months.... For instance, the attendance on one day might be from 8 to 11 a.m., on another day from I p.m. to 4 p.m., and the child might not appear at school again for several days, when it would attend from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; then it might attend for 3 or 4 days consecutively, or for a week, then it would not appear in school for 3 weeks or a month, after that upon some odd days at some odd hours when the operative who employed it chose to spare it; and thus the child was, as it were, buffeted from school to work, from work to school, until the tale of 150 hours was told.” [59] Here.
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S3a)
:lol:

[Schrödinger's Cat]

I do believe that universal education appeared earlier in the US but I can't recall the dates


Prior to the 1790s, half of the states/colonies had already established public education - mostly the New England states, I believe.

[Labor Shall Rule]

The relations in production ultimately determine which ideas are apart of the curriculum, and since it's based on encouraging 'citizenship' and 'succeeding', it takes children and puts them through a rigorous (and mostly unnecessary) schedule of classes with a smorgasbord of homework that's equatable to 'real world' work.

Obviously, 'socialist' education would be focused on splinting the division of labor by introducing children to all fields of 'specialized' production and would be truly liberatory.

[Elway]

ONE argument against the point of view raised by the premise of this thread, is that the founders of public education (which was and is a state by state program, and not a federal one), was to PREVENT big business from exploiting children as only members of a work force.

Horrace Mann, perhaps THE American associated with leading the charge for public education, was disgusted by children in the regular work force, and his movement, as well as others, led to children out of the mines and factories, and into the classrooms.

The next generation of "Reformers", passed anti-child labor laws. (These laws, in the late 19-teens, and early 1920s, were, interestingly, declared "unconstitutional", as they interfered with a parent's right to contract the labor of their children with business. (That is, these laws violated the Contracts Clause of Article I, Section 10, of the federal constitution.) The Chief Justice who wrote this majority opinion was former president H. Taft.)

Eventually, a new Supreme Court membership overturned that opinion, and laws preventing children from working have been constitutional since the late 1920s or early 1930s. In fact, in Colorado, as in most U.S. states, the only work children, before the age of 14, are allowed to do is in the field of performing arts. Children 1 day old to 13 years, 364 days, are not allowed to contract to work.

I'll bet the state's high school laws may have done what this thread is about: providing workers for business. Public education usually meant first through eighth grade, what we used to call "grammar school". High School was a "new invention" of the 20th Century. But here I'm just guessing.