The management culture

Our particular style of public schooling, adopted from the Prussian example, was heavily influenced by the "robber barons" at the turn of the 20th century, and the continuing push toward industrialization.

In 1911, Frederick Taylor published a paper titled The Principles of Scientific Management. By "management" he meant specifically the management of people, not of expenditures or equipment. Taylor proposed that workers should no longer be allowed to work unsupervised, but that their jobs should be reduced to following detailed instructions, written by a manager who had analyzed the job scientifically. Essentially, Taylor proposed turning tradesman into obedient, unthinking drones. He wrote:

Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. And the work planned in advance in this way constitutes a task which is to be solved, as explained above, not by the workman alone, but in almost all cases by the joint effort of the workman and the management. This task specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it. And whenever the workman succeeds in doing his task right, and within the time limit specified, he receives an addition of from 30 per cent to 100 per cent to his ordinary wages.

To a large extent Taylor's ideas were adopted. This was the era of efficiency experts and the advent of the assembly line. The wealthy industrialists were concerned with making people as productive and consistent as machines-- with making them like machines. But that's not easy to do. How do you take a tradesman and strip him of any pride he might have taken in being knowledgeable about his work, by giving him exhaustive instructions and no freedom in his methods; subject him to a manager breathing down his neck every minute; and impose the tedium of total uniformity and consistency?

Well, I'm not sure you can do it. But you can raise a child to accept it, if you put them through the right kind of schooling. Here is an excerpt from a talk by John Gatto (you will find the same information in his book, The Underground History of American Education):

Between 1906 and 1920, a handful of world famous industrialists and financiers, together with their private foundations, hand picked University administrators and house politicians, and spent more attention and more money toward forced schooling than the national government did. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller alone spent more money than the government did between 1900 and 1920. In this fashion, the system of modern schooling was constructed outside the public eye and outside the public's representatives.

And what did Carnegie and Rockefeller have in mind? Here is how Rockefeller put it:

In our dreams... people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

By "in a perfect way," he meant, of course, as a scientifically managed person would do it. As a machine would do it. They wanted to design public schools to churn out workers amenable to scientific management, amenable to repetitive assembly line work, accepting of close supervision, no privacy, and unquestioning obedience.

To what extent did the robber barons succeed in reforming our public schools? I don't know, but I'll end with John Gatto's answer:

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this.