Integrated Activism by Alexis Zeigler

Author:Alexis Zeigler [Zeigler, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-619-0
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Factory School

The essential structure of any culture is set by its core economic institutions. The peripheral institutions of culture tend to take on the form of the core institutions. In our society, we inherited a tradition of social hierarchy born out of the thousands of years of intensifying of production. Our core economic institutions are hierarchically organized to maximize production and to maximize military power. But myriad peripheral institutions are also organized in hierarchical forms, mimicking our central institutions. Though the manipulation of childhood cognitive development patterns predates modern schools, the modern factory school was designed to maximize the efficacy of such manipulations.

Numerous books have been written documenting the development of modern schools. Modern schooling took form in the late nineteenth century, in the Gilded Age of American industrialization.26 That was the time when the one-room schoolhouse was abandoned and children were moved into large, factory-like schools. The similarity is not incidental. The Gilded Age, a term coined by Mark Twain, was when mass production on a large scale was being born. Factory owners became obsessed with efficiency. To their rescue came Frederick Taylor, who conducted “time and motion studies” of factory workplaces. He “scientifically” redesigned workspaces to maximize efficiency. (Workers and unions were often opposed, as these redesigned environments were often harsh for the workers.) Mesmerized by this “cult of efficiency” as it has been called, and wanting to maximize profits from a burgeoning labor base, labor bosses favored and supported the development of large, centralized school systems that taught children how to conform to institutionalized environments.

The factory school fits well with the program of manipulating cognitive development. One may assume that most teachers have the intent of helping their students learn, but the factory-like environment puts severe constraints on what they can do, regardless of intent. Only a limited number of students can get closer attention, and all students must quietly conform to institutional demands or the whole system quickly becomes chaotic. The results of this institutional environment on the development of children is not accidental, though it is in stark contradiction to what most educational theorists have said for centuries about optimal learning environments.

Because the core economic institutions of our society are organized in a hierarchical fashion, our understanding of intelligence is hierarchical. So powerful are our paradigms that they can cause us to interpret events in the world with absolute certainty to the complete exclusion of the evidence. The factory school supports a paradigm of social stratification based on ability, but our understanding of human intelligence is at odds with the evidence. The mathematical systems of most nonindustrial cultures are exceedingly simple. There are many small cultures that don’t count past three or four.27 Anything beyond that simply becomes “many,” or is described by nonspecific terms. Never mind geometry, trigonometry, calculus, or advanced physics. If you take Western IQ tests and administer them to nonindustrialized peoples all over the world, they don’t score very well.28 It is most peculiar to recognize, however, that such nonindustrialized peoples are much closer in social organization to our gathering ancestors than are we.

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