Rick Santorum is
right on with this:
At another point on Saturday, Mr. Santorum repeated his skepticism about the
government’s role in public education. He harked back to a pre-industrial 19th
century when many Americans, including presidents, home-schooled their
children. The public school, Mr. Santorum said, arose “when people came off the
farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and
into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public
schools.”
And it has been thus ever since, thanks in large part to government unions
who have an interest in keeping the U.S. education system in a permanent state
of suspended animation. Here is a great bit from
Walter Russell Mead on factory schools:
Fordism was once a term of abuse hurled at the factory system by Marxist
critics who, rightly, deplored the alienation and anomie that mass production
for mass consumption entailed. Has the Fordist factory system and the big box
consumerism that goes with it now become our ideal, the highest form of social
life our minds can conceive? Social critics also denounced our school system,
justifiably, as a mediocre, conformity inducing, alienating, time wasting system
that trained kids to sit still, follow directions and move with the herd. The
blue model built big-box schools where the children of factory workers could get
the standardized social and intellectual training necessary to enable most of
them to graduate into the big-box Ford plant and shop in the big-box store.
Maybe that was a huge social advance at one time, but is that something to
aspire to or be proud of today? Don’t we want to teach our children to do
something smarter than move in large groups by the clock and the bell, follow
directions and always color between the lines.
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