Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Public education always seems to be under stress. Students spend the school day lost in their phones, we hear that they're horribly behaved, they are crippled by social and other anxieties. My guest today has an interesting take on public education's main origins and its goals, and it casts those problems in a provocative light. Agustina Paglayan is a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and she's the author of a recent book titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education". Professor Paglayan, welcome to the program.
Agustina Paglayan: Hi, Grant. Thank you for having me.
GR: It's a pleasure and we really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a very basic question that takes us back to the beginning, because, you know, your book tells a story about history in many respects. When and where did mass public education first really take root in the United States and really get going.
AP: In the United States, well, it's an interesting question, because the United States was not the precursor in providing access to primary or elementary education. So, within the U.S., I would say Massachusetts was the first state to pass state law to require local areas to fund public schools, which were called common schools at the time. But the precursor was actually Prussia, in Europe, which was an absolutist regime, so, happy to talk more about that. And the U.S. model very heavily emulated the Prussian model. And the Prussian model, so the Massachusetts state law that I was referring to goes back to the very end of the 18th century. I don't remember the exact date, I think it was 1790 or 1789, but it was soon after Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts, whereas, in the Prussian context, the first compulsory primary school year dates to 1763, so a few decades earlier than that.
GR: Well, you argue in your book, and you already mentioned when you said Shays' Rebellion, sort of, it sounds like there's going to be a relationship there that you're going to want to draw, but, you argue in the book that the main purpose of public education was to indoctrinate and, I'm going to use a pretty provocative word here, control the unvarnished masses of people to make the public more obedient and well behaved. What is the evidence that you found in doing your research that supports that? What kind of things leapt out to you?
AP: There's lots of different types of evidence that I, probably, you don't want me to summarize within the short span of time. But I'll, let me clarify a couple things, because you mentioned the word indoctrination. That's a charged word. I think people think of, ah, indoctrination, it's what communists do, it's what fascists do. We don't do indoctrination in the United States. So, let me clarify it first, how I use the term indoctrination. And if you look at the dictionary definition, indoctrination refers, according to the dictionary, to the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It doesn't make indoctrination dependent on what's the content of those beliefs. Indoctrination occurs whether you're teaching someone that communism is wonderful or fascism is wonderful, or also that democracy is the best form of government. As long as you're teaching these beliefs in a way that doesn't allow for questioning or for students to ask, oh, but why are you saying that? For them to think critically and keep an open mind about what they're being taught when that is not taking place, that's what would be consistent with the dictionary definition of indoctrination, and that's the way that I use it. When I make the claim that when mass education systems emerged around the world, particularly in the Western world, the primary goal was to instill in students, future citizens, essentially, the idea that they needed to respect the government's authority on the government's laws, that it was the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. And that if they behaved in ways that challenged the state's authority, or they behaved in ways that deviated or didn't comply with existing laws and rules that the government was setting, that that was going to bring them to be rejected by their peers, or go to hell, or whatever the basis of morality was, it could be secular, it could be religious, but that it was morally reprehensible to challenge the authority of the state. So, it was essentially, project that states advanced as a way to legitimate their authority and consolidate their power. So, very different from the ideas we have today about what education means.
GR: No, I appreciate that, thank you. So, in uncovering that, did you find evidence of this in like, what people at the time were writing about what they were doing? Was it like, correspondence with other leaders, diaries? I'm just trying to figure out sort of where you'd go back and sort of say, ah, you know, I see. One thing you do do, I understand is, you know, you have this association between efforts to do this and perceived threats. I mean, you mentioned Shays' Rebellion there. And so just tell us a little bit about, sort of, what things you're pulling out of the historical records that convinced you about this.
AP: Right, because I didn't even speak about the evidence before, which is what you wanted me to talk about. So, the first, I started with this, this was not the idea that I started with. The argument that I shared with you was not, it wasn't kind of where I was a priority. I grew up hearing that agitation spread around the world because of democracy, that it was driven by democratic ideals. So first I started by investigating the truth to that conventional wisdom and looking at, okay, did this education systems, mass primary education systems, did they emerge before the spread of democracy or after the spread of democracy? Well, it turns out they spread well before the spread of democracy, on average, six decades before our country first transitioned to democracy. And then, okay, could it have been that it was driven by prejudice to industrialize on the economic needs to have a skilled workforce in order to sustain industrialization? So again, I looked at, okay, let's compare the timing of when these systems emerge and when they reach a critical access level, versus when industrialization takes place. And again, not a strong relationship there between those two, and in particular, I was mentioning Prussia before as the pioneer of mass primary schooling. Well, it did in 1763, a time when Prussia was an agrarian country, and England on the other hand, an industrial power and leader, was the last country in Europe to introduce compulsory primary education though, or to start legislating primary education. So again, not a relationship there. Another possibility, people said, oh, what about interstate wars and threats from abroad that lead governments to want to teach everyone that patriotism? Could that be something that that led to education expansion? Again, looked at the evidence, no, not actually. It turns out that wars did not spur the expansion of primary school. And through this, as I was doing all of this, which was quantitative statistical analysis, I also was reading about the evidence that politicians at the time, when they were setting up these primary education systems regulated by states, what were they arguing? What was the point they were making? And in those, I mean, you were wondering were they letters they were writing? Some of them were letters, some of them were, like, debates during parliamentary debates. You know, some of these were special reports that they were writing about, the status of education and why it was necessary to expand it. So, there's all different types of evidence. But one thing that became very clear from that was that what they were worried about was the masses being a threat to the state's authority, especially if the masses became organized, and mobilized in violent ways. And so through that, then, back to the Shays' Rebellion and the other evidence that I uncovered, I developed this idea, hypotheses, that perhaps one of the things that spurred the government's fear of mass rebellion was precisely the occurrence of mass violence against the state, and that if it was indeed the case that those kinds of episodes of mass violence against the state, where things that activated or heightened the government's fear of the masses, then we should observe that after those episodes, there should be more efforts to regulate and expand primary education. So, then what I did was look at civil wars as one example of a type of mass violence against the state, and focusing specifically on those types of civil war study involve mass violence against the state. And then I looked again, quantitatively, at the expansion of primary education after episodes of civil war cross-nationally in Europe and Latin America, and found, indeed, that civil wars led to a big expansion of access to primary education. I can keep talking about the evidence because then, but I'm sure you have follow up questions for me on this.
GR: Yes, I do. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Agustina Paglayan. She's a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of a recent book on education and its history titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education." No, I appreciate that, I’ve a much better sense now of where this is all coming from and how you, the patterns that you saw around the world. I have heard sometimes in conversations about the history of public education in the United States, that one of the main purposes of it was to teach children to read so that they could read the Bible. You know, there was a concern that they need to be able to read the Bible because we want to make sure they can get to heaven, etc.. Did you find any evidence about that in what you were looking at?
AP: Not very strong, I would say not so strong in the United States. There were some other countries where mass education was religious. But, you know, in the United States, there was always this big debate about whether mass education should be religious or secular, and they ended up on the side of, well, it should be secular because they wanted freedom of religion. That's part of what led many people to migrate to the U.S., was the search of a freedom of religion. And so, I think that there was in Protestant countries in particular, in continental Europe, Prussia being one of those cases, there was a desire, among other things, to teach children the Bible. I wouldn't necessarily say, so, I think that the issue is that sometimes people then make the extrapolation that if you were learning to read the Bible, you were also learning to read other things. And as people, when you look at how people were learning how to read the Bible, there was a lot of rote memorization of the Bible that was taking place. That doesn't necessarily mean you could actually extrapolate your memorization of the Bible to be able to read and understand, comprehend other texts, scientific texts or anything like that. But I do think like, there's like either, and there's evidence that other people have produced of like Protestantism being relevant for the expansion of primary education in places where Protestantism was very strong, but also places where the state was strongly fused with the Protestant church, because there were some places where that wasn't the case. By the way, I’ll also note there are like, there are some countries where Catholicism is the primary religion, like France didn't have a strong influence of Protestantism and they still expanded primary education. So, sometimes what the state was doing was to expand education to contest the authority of the church, again, to consolidate the secular authority of the state, because historically it was a church, like, regardless of whether you were thinking Protestantism, Catholicism, historically it was churches that were in charge of the moral education of children, and parents also of course. And so, as I was saying earlier, the goal of the state was to say, no, we're going to be the ones teaching you what's morally right and what's morally wrong, and as part of that project we're going to teach you that it's morally wrong to challenge the authority of the state. And so there was, in some cases, they did it in conjunction with the church because they were a kind of, of the same mind. But there were other cases where this project entailed delegitimizing the moral authority of the church. And that was an example in France and in many countries in Latin America also, where it was a project of expansion that was antagonistic to the church's interests.
GR: You're listening to "The Campbell Conversations" on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Agustina Paglayan. She's a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of a recent book titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education" and we've been talking about some of the issues that her book raises and some of the content of it. I wanted to ask you, you were describing how these public education efforts arose and what was driving them, the patterns that you saw there, in looking across the Western world. If we can come back to the United States in particular, but if this is something that's shared, we can talk about that too, but, were there certain techniques early on that were emphasized? I mean, I've got Catholic friends that went to Catholic school, and they almost all have stories about nuns hitting them on the hands with rulers, you know? I mean, what kinds of methods were used to try to achieve this obedience?
AP: So, actually, the hitting children, which is what you're describing, wasn't the main technique that people had in mind when they were thinking, how do we instill obedience? Because remember, we were talking about how the goal was to make people not rebel against the state, and what they thought was the problem with, like why people were rebelling against the state, from the mindset of elites, is because they were violent masses and like barbarian savages and that's why they needed to kind of be civilized in schools. And so, there were a lot of intellectuals who thought, like, if we were to use violence in schools, that would actually not be, like, role modeling the idea that you shouldn't be violent, we should be leading by example, and we should be selecting teachers, so as to select those who are morally, like, worthy of holding this position so that they can, kind of model the values of nonviolence that we want kids to internalize. And so there were, again, the teaching, the training of teachers very heavily emphasized their moralization. The recruitment also, like when you were hiring teachers, like every Western country or almost every Western country, you needed to demonstrate you were, had the right moral character to become a teacher. And that was actually, a more common requirement than demonstrating that you were intellectually qualified to teach. And then within the classroom, a lot of what was done was just thinking of the setup of the classroom, like the teacher stands in front and there are rows of students sitting in desks, facing the teacher, head down. And the idea of the teacher standing in front already sets up this hierarchy of the teacher represents essentially the state's authority that the kid as a child, needs to learn to respect, and the teacher is the one that's dispensing the truth that doesn't need to be, shouldn't be questioned. The students need to be writing down and then memorizing what the teacher said. So, it was sort of more of a softer, if you want, way of inculcating the idea that there are certain authorities in society that need to be respected, certain rules that need to be respected. And then also, of course, if you look at the textbooks, there was like a particular way of teaching history or a particular narrative, you know, that, again, the whole thing like, I mean, you must face this also as a, I don't know, maybe you don't, but for me, when I get students coming from K through 12, they are still in the same mindset of, what do I need to know to do well in the exam? Just tell me what I need to memorize. So, it's still very pervasive. The students are not being, like, educated in a setup that encourages them to challenge what they're being taught, but rather to accept it without questioning. And that was the whole enterprise. So it's like, if kids can learn from a young age to accept rules and accept authority, they'll continue doing that through the remainder of their life, and they're not going to then challenge the state's authority.
GR: Well, that leads directly to something that was, really came to my mind when I was reading through your book and that is, you know, there is in recent years, an enormous amount of emphasis that's been placed on this phrase, critical thinking. You know, you hear it all the time, and particularly in higher education, but also in the upper levels of grade school as well. It seems like that has got to sit very awkwardly with this history that you are laying out.
AP: Oh, definitely. I mean, I don't know, but it is the antithesis, like an education system that promotes strong critical thinking skills, looks very different from an education system of the kind we have, which were set up, again, Prussia was an absolutist regime, and that model became the model for the rest of the world, including the United States. So, the idea of promoting critical thinking through education was really not on anyone's mind. And so, when we talk today about it, it does require thinking, okay, what, how would our classrooms even look like if the primary goal or one of the primary goals was to promote critical thinking? Probably they wouldn't look in this kind of very hierarchical way, that if you Google any lit classroom in any country in the world, they all look the same. So, even little, I don't know if it's a little detail, maybe it's not that, it's actually very relevant detail, but we would need to really sit down and rethink also the way that we are teaching in the classroom, like this idea of lecturing. Well, lecturing is again something where students are just taking notes and then learning what the teacher said, as opposed to a situation where the students are being asked to think in class and to like, revise their own ideas. If they answer something, then they're being pushed back to say, okay, let's look at the assumptions behind what do you just stated, like be engaged in follow up conversations in debates with others. That's not what education systems were set up to do. So, it does present a huge challenge for those today who want to do that.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is the political science professor Agustina Paglayan. I'm also wondering about how artificial intelligence is going to fit in with this. I mean, on the one hand, I could see that it could be a very powerful tool that would advance these goals. On the other hand, I could see how it might be a threat. Looking at it through your lens, where does artificial intelligence fit? I mean, it's something that we're all wrestling with as teachers, that's for sure.
AP: Yes. And we can talk about that, the challenges that we faced, individually, if you want. I'll mention very briefly, I was, last November, I was in London at Google DeepMind, at a conference on artificial intelligence and learning. And they asked me to speak about kind of the good things that I could bring into learning and the threats that it could bring. And of course, everyone was talking about the great things, right, there were a lot of education technology entrepreneurs that were like, this is going to solve all of our learning problems, it will provide personalized learning so that it keeps our being like, have AI tutors that are kind of meeting them at the level of where they are. And yes, those are all possibilities if you have access to the internet, which in many parts of the world don't. But, without neglecting those as possibilities, what I brought up, which is something that stems from my book, is that artificial intelligence actually has the potential to empower or enhance government’s capacity to indoctrinate students or anyone's capacity to indoctrinate students, Google's capacity, for that matter also if you want, right? And the reason why, is that historically, when states, or historically and up until five years ago, when states were trying to instill in students a particular set of ideas and beliefs about the history of the country or anything, they were using textbooks and relying on teachers to be the ones that were accurately teaching the textbook. But there was always room for teachers to not comply, and to exercise some agency and expose students for example, to diverse perspectives of history that were not necessarily represented in those textbooks. What artificial intelligence allows governments to do if they want to, is to bypass the teachers’ agency and to keep repeating over and over and over to students the same idea, that's what they want them to internalize. And more than that, it also gives governments an incredible tool for political surveillance because you can collect, ask questions to students, collect their answers, and this is actually already being used in some parts of the world where they're using what students are inputting to say, okay, these are dissident families that don't support the regime, or these are families that have participated in a protest recently, and so on, so forth. So, it gives them, kind of this incredible political surveillance and indoctrination infrastructure that is very, very concerning to me, very concerning.
GR: Yeah. That's fascinating that you when you frame it that way. I can think of teachers in my life that have put different spins on things and in subtle ways, and overall you get different perspectives, you know, if you add them all up.
AP: Exactly.
GR: Yeah, that's very interesting. And I'm thinking of, you could also just monitor the questions that get asked if you wanted to figure out who your potential threats were, right? Someone's asking a question that's a provocative question.
AP: Exactly.
GR: Well, we've got about three minutes left or so, and I want to try to get some speculations from you and this may go beyond your book, but you've obviously thought a lot about this, so I'm very curious to hear what you have to say, but, first one is looking toward the future. Where do you see public education going in the future? And again, I'm most interested in the United States, but we can think about the Western world more generally if you'd like. But where do you see public education going in terms of this emphasis on conformity and obedience and concerns of that nature?
AP: I don't think that the desire of governments to use public education for conformity will go away.
GR: Okay.
AP: I don't. And we can talk about the ways in which that has come up recently in the United States, with all of the efforts around patriotic education that emerged precisely after the Black Lives Matter protests. So that would be kind of like, a more modern example of the patterns that the book identifies. But it I think it's just like, it's so much in the origins, and it's embedded in what systems should do. They should stabilize, that would be kind of a more, acceptable, right, like they should stabilize people and prepare them to be good citizens. Well, as long as part of the good citizens means that they accept the idea that democracy is the best form of government, that violent protest is not a legitimate way of expressing your grievances, and so on and so forth. So even if we look at artificial intelligence and all of these things, that specific goal of education, I just don't think it's going to go away.
GR: And just a few seconds left and I'm going to be very cruel to you because I'm going to ask you a huge question, but just very, very briefly. If you could wave a magic wand…
AP: Oh, yes.
GR: And change the way that public education is happening, can you just give us, really literally, in thirty seconds, just an idea of what it would be, blow up the classroom and reframe? What would it be?
AP: No, I would invite you to come to one of my classes where I try to do what I hope others will do better than I do, but engage students in questions, constantly asking them questions. Don't suppress the tendency of human beings to ask questions like a young kid who’s like, why? But why? But why? But why? You know, like, don't suppress that curiosity that we had, actually like, cultivate that. But this would be like a much longer conversation.
GR: Right. But no, that's interesting, and for what it's worth, I do try to do that in my own classes too.
AP: And question me, I want the students to question me. That's like the best thing that can happen to me is like, oh, but couldn't this be the other way? And so on and so forth.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there, unfortunately. That was Agustina Paglayan and again, her book is titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education." Professor Paglayan, thanks so much for talking with me, I learned a lot in this conversation.
AP: Thank you. Grant, this was wonderful.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
