The medieval in our schools: how our schools owe so much less to the nineteenth century factory

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The medieval in our schools:

how our schools owe so much less

to the nineteenth century factory

To better understand how schooling-and-teaching has such an overwhelming grip on our educational imagination, despite its insufficiency and inappropriateness as an educational model, we need to direct our attention earlier than the industrial revolution in Western history. All of those features of our enchantment with schooling that have cast a perverse spell over our educational understanding – its factory nature, the bucket mind, the external authority of the teacher, the agendas set up without reference to the interests or the willingness of learners, the indifference to experience – were being gathered together in the practices of schooling in the ancient world and were concentrated in the efforts to recover literacy and literate culture after the intellectual riches of the old world were nearly lost.

For centuries, Western Christendom engaged in a feverish effort to recover that ancient knowledge; that textual knowledge which largely defined, for them, what knowledge was of most worth. The means for pursuing this obsessive enterprise coalesced around the development and patronage of schooling as an institution – a workshop that grew into a factory long before the industrial revolution.The happy alignment between features of industrial factories and features of schools only resulted in relatively minor innovations in the development of schooling, compared to the implications of state compulsion across the entire population.

Indeed, it is only compulsion that stands out as unique. Even the existence of a state system was prefigured in ancient Rome. Given the scale of our more recent systems, they may, more appropriately, be considered as representing the development of vast, state corporate enterprises of schooling, rather than any innovation mimicking or serving industrial factories. Yes, universal, compulsory state schooling did serve whatever industry might be at hand – including agriculture – but they served under the aegis of the emerging nation-state in administering and engineering mass populations for production, consumption, political compliance – and war.

When people limit the problem of contemporary schooling to its historical involvement with a  factory system that has now come to be depopulated by automation, they make the educational flaw seem less than it is – as if it is merely the result of a development that remains arrested in an outmoded means of production, rather than that the very idea of schooling-and-teaching is educationally flawed at the heart by the factory model that it always represented, and cannot escape. It is all too easy to imagine that, if we could just break the connection with the industrial factory system, then schooling could come right, and we would be on our way to the sunny educational uplands.

That is, like almost every other explanation and suggestion for reform, it is always supposed that, with a certain amount of internal tinkering, or a good sweeping out of old ideas, schooling could come right. The contemporary mind always goes to a limited reconstruction of schooling, finding it difficult to imagine an education, even with a formal structure within it, that does not resemble the broad lines of schooling in which we were all brought up, and that reaches back two thousand years.

The nineteenth century implementation of the universal, compulsory state schooling that we are so familiar with today was, however, made possible because of the European schooling that was already in existence and was so easily adopted by the much later factory interests, and the military and managerial interests of modern state-hood. The schooling factory of Eton, for instance, was a medieval, and not an industrial invention at all. My own secondary schooling was at a state institution deliberately modelled on those medieval public schools, with its brick, the carved sandstone, the wood panelling, the teachers’ gowns – and the caning. Both the schooling factories and the industrial factories grew out of ancient workshops, and in the case of schooling, the transformation from workshops into factories had been under way for thousands of years. Compared to schooling factories, industrial factories are belated affairs.

The medieval schooling project

Hellenistic Greece had developed secondary and tertiary schools, which had the pursuit of rhetoric and oratory at their core – largely as cultural decoration than for their utility, because the original political purpose that made use of oratory had collapsed into a mere social accomplishment with the destruction of city-state democracies. This pursuit paid close attention to linguistic form just for verbal performance, but also mined the literary traditions for examples and illustrations that could be used in elegant persuasion.

The study of language was therefore highly developed. Republican Rome was awed by the intellectual accomplishments of Greece, and by its literature which it could imitate but not match, and valued the rhetoric for its use in politics and law. Imperial Rome drew on these accomplishments to enable a civil service across the empire, and created a state system of schooling in order to do it.

As the Western Empire collapsed, contact with the Greek East was largely lost, until eventually even the survival of Latin literacy was threatened across Europe. The primary intellectual enterprise for almost the next thousand years can be seen as a series of struggles to recover a range of literacies and their texts – firstly the Latin, and then Greek, but also Hebrew and Arabic. The creation of the West – culturally, religiously, and ultimately industrially was built on these long, slow recoveries which defined the development of knowledge – slow rediscovery and reinvention of ancient intellectual disciplines that had been lost, and which political, economic and military events haphazardly made available anew.

The heart of the process was the recovery of language and the mastery of texts – languages that were not the native tongue, and that were difficult and tedious to master, particularly in the absence of native speakers and natural use. This process was often performed through private study, but largely in association with the development of schools, and depended heavily, not only on the existence of the schools themselves, but also on the tools, techniques and procedures that were developed within them – of teaching hierarchies, of courses, classes and curricula, of grammars and dictionaries, anthologies, encyclopaedias, almanacs, glossaries and lists; and of teaching aids such as riddles and dialogues. It is in this process that the Western technology of the school was laid down.

The representatives of the ancient and medieval “grammarians”  can still be seen quite vividly in many of our “literacy specialists” of today; and not merely in the continuing practice in the UK and some of its ex-colonies that have “grammar” schools. Many of our reading teachers and specialists continue to believe that literacy itself (and not life) is of the first importance, and that literacy cannot be acquired without intensive teaching and micro-management. They engage with great passion in the “reading wars” over the science and proper technique of reading “instruction”. Indeed, the idea of “literacies” has now spread far beyond any connection with texts, as overworked enthusiasms so often do. We now have things like “physical” literacy, “financial” literacy and “environmental” literacy.

Schools made sense. The process was hard. It involved learning difficult second-languages largely from hand-written texts (not always clearly copied), which often required a word-by-word process of deciphering. Any help would be welcome. Such labour-intensive texts were also expensive, and difficult to come by.

Though the pursuit was the study of text, a strong oral tradition made this easier. Lectures by highly accomplished masters who were intellectual repositories enabled a certain degree of mass teaching.  In some times and places he was the only one to possess a copy of “the book”. This is not easy to appreciate today, except by those without internet access who cannot afford books, and must live without useful libraries. Transmission, moulding and shaping may not be the most efficient ways of mastering rules, conventions and the contents of difficult texts, but they are far better than nothing at all.

Our inner lives were not the matter of interest that they are for us today, and the turn in direction that we now take for granted did not begin until the Renaissance. Petrarch set a new agenda with a renewed self-consciousness, a renewed interest in the inner life, with a change in understanding of the quest for living well, and with an emphasis on nature, on friendship, of the foibles of his own character, on his uniqueness.

This was an emphasis “renewed”, because Petrarch picked up the individualistic interests common among intellectuals of the Roman Republic. This was still a preoccupation with ancient text, but involved a shift in emphasis toward aspects of that text that had formerly been neglected or avoided; toward the interests of the artist and the quest for personal virtue, rather than the search for collective disciplinary knowledge and utility, as it had been for so long. It signalled the beginning of Renaissance humanism.

This new Renaissance interest gathered momentum as the Reformation divided Europe and undermined the single, public religious authority, with the protestant emphasis on a personal relationships with God, including the importance of individual conscience.

This change required the emergence of a powerful merchant class, which was also a sign of how far the reconstruction and construction of European culture and prosperity had come.

In the division between those who fight, those who pray and those who work, the relatively simple consciousness of the noble warriors, with their “chivalry”, began to lose its dominant worth in favour of the entrepreneurship of some of “those who work”; of their wealth, of their initiative, of their need to discover a new life of their own befitting their emerging power and influence. This was the beginning of a post-medieval consciousness that has ultimately led to our struggles to create democracies and realise human rights.

It was therefore quite some time before this gathered into a widespread democratic impulse, or into a moral shift of sufficient significance to ground universal human rights; something that has only become articulate in the last two hundred years, and that has had little effect on our educational practices, which remain stubbornly medieval. It is a development that did not occur without considerable pain and trauma.

That development, and the human costs that accompany it, are still far from complete. Perhaps nothing displays this more vividly on the institutional level, both in scale and acceptance, than our creation of universal, state compulsory schooling itself. Here we have taken a medieval institution purpose-designed to represent a top-down authority that is consistent with purposes indifferent to personal agency, and even designed to suppress it, and made participation compulsory for everyone in their dependent and most vulnerable years. From any larger point of view that might take human rights seriously, it is hard to conceive a more thoroughgoing attempt to thwart their achievement.

That these institutions remain medieval in inspiration and conception seems hard to deny. For the medieval world intellectual and moral authority lay outside most individuals, remote from any modern sense of personal responsibility for what is believed or valued. For all of them, final authority was to be sought in the authority of ancient text. They were a “people of the book”, and the book justified and lent authority to its institutions and private practices.

It is no accident that the huge enterprise of recovering ancient text upon which they embarked was institutionalised in and around schools. The formal authority to teach was conferred by the institutions in which these came to be embedded, rather than by the students themselves. The processes by which schooling workshops developed into schooling factories occurred under religious control. Western schools arose in ecclesiastical institutions, and not secular ones, and for the most part the dependence upon religious authority continued to dominate long after many factory schools became stand-alone institutions – through the Reformation and even on into the nineteenth century.

When Ivan Illich – back in the 1970s – repeatedly identified modern schooling as a form of modern religion, complete with promises of salvation, this was not just some kind of radical extravagance or hyperbole, but a reflection of the purposes in which the development of Western schooling were grounded, and from which it cannot escape [ 2 ]. The connections, in terms of the assumptions about knowledge, about learners, and about intellectual authority and hierarchy should be immediately transparent to anyone who steps back and forth between the doors of a Western Christian church, and any default classroom.

“Experience”, in both, is to be predetermined by the structure of the environment; the more elaborately in terms of the symbolism and detailing of the church, because of its single-minded “curriculum”. Here, “divergent” experience is highly problematic, whereas in schooling it is merely potentially disruptive, and a nuisance. Otherwise the layout and activities are much the same with their pews all facing the point where the authority is concentrated, and both with their “lessons” and “readings” and “texts”, and sometimes even the music that they “share”. I have commented elsewhere on the religiosity frequently displayed in the “educational” community, and even the dangers of heresy.

Universal, compulsory state schooling is thus a medieval institution; perpetuating a medieval conception of intellectual and personal authority and responsibility that is wildly at odds with our modern (and post-modern) understandings of respect for our equal human worth; our duties to ourselves to take personal responsibility for our beliefs and values; and our lives.

But instead of developing educational arrangements properly suited to enable us to take charge of our own experience, our minds and our lives, we massively proliferated an institution purpose-built to achieve the opposite; requiring increasingly extended participation of everyone. We developed state-wide bureaucracies to manage them all. We developed huge research resources in an effort to refine the practices involved, and we will go to great length to develop new technologies to make these practices more effective – and to promote and encourage their use. All of this takes place – intellectually, emotionally and practically – within boundaries and assumptions set up in the medieval establishment of factory schooling.

Our contemporary concern for the right of each to pursue their own conceptions of worthwhile living under conditions of mutual respect requires an acknowledgement of the vast diversity of possible constructions that people may make. Our acknowledgement of this, and the part that is played by the uniqueness of our personal experiences, and of how we learn to make what we do of those experiences, provides the ground for the huge concern for human rights that we now have, and for the issues of agency and responsibility that they involve.

All of this concern that is so central to our common lives rests partly in the collapse of  the older, very broadly accepted hierarchies of political and religious authority. The other part lies in the intimacies of difference, and conflicts of difference, that have come to texture daily transactions at local, regional, national and global levels. These problems of difference had, however, been “handled” in the past by social structure;  public understandings and arrangements of power and authority that had evolved and persisted over many generations – if not thousands of years – regardless of who actually held the power, or of the many shifts in borders and the sizes of principalities.

The medieval purpose of the schooling factory

In the medieval world view, whatever the inner life contained, it had been of comparatively little consequence in the public sphere, except to the extent that its aberrations needed to be negotiated. In such circumstances, the issues that we should have with schooling today as an “educational institution” hardly arose.

The lack of interest in private experience was a cultural feature of the medieval world, and the development of Western schooling merely reflects this. There was no “putting the learner first” then – except when their ego might get out of hand – just as there isn’t today.

Schooling was textual, dominated firstly by the agreement in judgment that access to the text required, and then by the awesome authority of the text itself, as understood and managed by the priesthood of masters. The authority of text was largely unchallenged – except where it appeared to conflict with or undermine the authority of the church or the secular powers, in which case it could even be banned.

And the achievement of agreement in conventional, authoritative opinion through schooling was perfectly in harmony with the views promoted by these powers. In such a setting, it is appropriate enough to conceive of learners as buckets or clay, and to judge “educational” success from the outside. Such models might violate experience; but schools weren’t supposed to be about experience.

Experience, and the internal management or making of mind didn’t matter. Your difference might lead you to be picked out as being especially worthy, or of some use to your superiors, or lead you to pillage your neighbour’s property, but problems of difference were largely resolved through the designated place you were assigned in the social fabric, or by sanctions, with varying degrees of severity – up to, and including dismemberment – where you did not comply. You might even become a great or memorable master, but this would have to do with some innovation you introduced in the dealing with text; always within the single framework, the paradigm, that defined its value.

Agency was not something to be cultivated, and was much more likely to be a considered a problem. This explains the apparent brutality and barbarity of so much schooling – the constant beatings, and the tortures – both mental and physical – that could be very severe. [3] There was altogether too much wilfulness; a problem for any authority, and a problem that was well understood and interpreted in Christian terms that could be appreciated almost universally. There was “original sin”; a sinfulness built into our insides, and it needed to be kept in check. Even in the much later Enlightenment, John Locke, with his Thoughts Concerning Education his Essay in Human Understanding, and his letters on toleration, was an enthusiastic advocate of the efficacy of a good whipping. You could hardly be expected to grow up a good human being without it. And his enthusiasm was by no means the last of it.

Though we are likely to be shocked by that history that we now see as so abusive and traumatizing, it should not be difficult to understand, to the extent that we can grasp that earlier world-view. Equally – and unfortunately – it should also be easy to understand the role of punishment and control that backs up the compulsion in schooling to this day; a simple perpetuation of a medieval institution justified by a medieval world-view that was worried about what might be going on in our insides. In the name of “socialisation”, however, we barely notice what we do.

We might be appalled at the earlier barbarity, and congratulate ourselves on our modern kindness. We don’t like it getting “physical”, and we would prefer that everyone keeps calm.  Nevertheless most take for granted the continuing petty punishments and regulation of behaviour that include classroom, playground and corridor “management”, but that also extend to the larger compulsion itself, and to the manipulation of life-choices, chances and decisions. They are mere children, after all, and we have to be practical. This is how it has always been done. How else can we do it? If there was a better way, someone would have thought of it. Some may even have believed this way in medieval times.

This close regulation of behaviour, and the controlling systems of rewards and punishments that they involve, are not just “technical mistakes”, but are reflective of the key purposes that Western schooling was built to serve from times in which that brutality was consistent with them. Modern psychologies have shown us that we can manage most of this without resorting to thrashing and caning – particularly if we can back up these techniques with an adequate system of suspensions and exclusions, or by isolating “students” in sensory deprivation.  We now use this to reassure ourselves of our kind benevolence, our concern for their mental health, and relationship-building. There is even a science behind it.

Because the Bible and Christian writing came first, ultimate authority lay in ancient Christian writing. The knowledge in these works could not, however, easily be separated from the pagan world in which so many of these books arose, and that accompanied the development of later fields of intellectual curiosity. Access to the Christian work often depended on access to pagan literature, and that larger literature contained whole fields of understanding that surpassed anything else known to the West.

The highest epistemological authority therefore extended to them all, with the Christian ones at their peak. Real knowledge was something that the much more advanced cultures of the ancient world had possessed, and that knowledge was held in the books that had survived. The best claim that could be made to any authority in the medieval world was to ground it in the writings of ancient authors, pagan or Christian. We appealed to them, and if we disagreed – perhaps because they disagreed – we would quarrel about which of them should have the final say, unless we could reconcile them.

This different cast of mind, and its suppression of any interest in personal experience, can be illustrated by the impact on the medieval world of the rediscovery of Aristotelian logic. The power of this tool, as it emerged, was met with the kind of excitement that, today, we reserve for the role of mathematics in the “hard” sciences. In their case, the queen of the disciplines that dominated all others, and was the most prestigious pursuit, was theology.

But theology was fraught with the problem of conflicting interpretations and explanations, and interpretive tools such as allegory and analogy that defied any sort of testing. Like the fundamentalist Christian of today, It was all too easy to make stuff up, and find some bit of biblical text that can be wangled to serve any purpose that we might happen to have, or to support our most cherished beliefs.  It was important to the intellectual authority of theology to tighten this up.

Where a kind of anarchy can reign freely among individual fundamentalists, each claiming Biblical support for whatever their own consciences might dictate, it is hard to run an empire this way – to ground its laws and policies in such anarchistic intellectual strategies in the absence of a common understanding based on a coherent, widely demonstrable truth.

If there is any single dominant theme for Christianity in the later Roman Empire, it is the permanent struggle with heresy. As the size of the Christian community grew, so did the issues of maintaining the common fellowship that was so important to it. This had been made even worse through being a religion of the book, where dependence on any book involved drawing upon and coming to terms with the sophisticated literate pagan culture with which it was surrounded, and which originally owned the means for acquiring literacy. Sophisticated (or at least complex ) pagan concepts and philosophies were used time and again to interpret “The Book”. Christian ambivalence to pagan literature tortured the lives of many ancient Christian leaders, and the dilemma entered the later European recovery, along with the book itself.

The recovery of Aristotelian logic, however, seemed to offer the possibility of setting theology on a sound footing, separating the truth from the chaff, and demonstrating the authority of that truth. Regardless of equally long-standing anxieties about the dangers of contamination and seductions of  pagan sensibilities, the church was enthusiastic. And it proved highly effective. The crowning achievement of this marriage of Aristotelian logic and theology was, of course, the work of St Thomas Aquinas, which continues to remain vividly impressive and influential in our own time.

Nevertheless the process was viewed in a way that is quite out of touch with our own understanding of inquiry in which we would want to put the emphasis that we do on intellectual doubt, questioning, criticism, testing, and following an argument wherever it seems to lead. For them, the conclusions were already known in advance, and logic was a mere tool in their service. Theology already knew what the answers would have to be; the problem was to build logically valid arguments that could reach them. In such a fashion, inquiry reconciled itself with existing official convention.

That is: logic, a tool dependent upon fine agreement in judgment – a kind of rule-dependent calculus equivalent in its apparent power to a modern algorithm – would be used in the service of a conviction that otherwise defied reason, or else the use of the logic would have no point. Agreement in judgement was to subordinate itself to a pre-exiting agreement in opinion; albeit one held by the theologians – the people with the authority – based on their reading of text, and their faith.

This would mean that doctrine, which could now be based on such firm authority, could be created and taught with even greater confidence. Whatever a learner might make of the process would, under such circumstances, be irrelevant both to the choice of the content or the assessment of success – or to their personal responsibility for what they might believe. Teaching for apparent conformity in belief could hardly be less problematic.

The structure of the authority of knowledge that is disclosed in these origins of Western schooling persists in the social structure and purposes of schooling today in respects that are far more important than the differences in disciplines and apparent intent over time. In the beginnings of factory schooling, the final authority lay in ancient books, decoded by scholars. It was then passed down the hierarchy of schooling, teaching the rules of decoding text, but also with the weight of truth in those texts, interpreted with commentary and standardised interpretive methods. Knowledge was “given” to learners; passed on to them, hosed into them, along with the interpretations. It arrived at the learner with its authority ready-made.

Knowledge was not something to be “taken” by the learner; not made by them. Its authority and therefore the authority of their own belief, was not theirs. They had no responsibility – indeed, were denied it. They could “question it”, but legitimate questioning, then, as now, was of the form “have I got this right?” – where “right” certainly does mean “is this in conformity with the authorities?” “Is this what you want me to show you that I ‘know’?”

What we see, in this schooling development, is an expansion from learning the rules and procedures – achieving the “agreements in judgment” – to a greater and greater emphasis on “agreement in opinion”. [4]

Initially, the adoption of conventional opinion came in the form of “information” that was provided about the authors of texts, and the “general information” that the texts contained, for this was of value to the rhetorical uses for which the study in the earlier Western schools was undertaken. Over time this expanded, of course, to include more and more of the “information” upon which emerging disciplines were based. List-building of “facts” became a very common practice. But as the disciplines developed, their ancient explanations and interpretations embedded in the texts, both Christian and pagan, came with them. Insofar as there was “new knowledge”, the knowledge of theology became the exemplar.

Taking responsibility for our lives

The difference here, between our own practice and theirs, is little different in principle. There is a shift in kind – from theology to science, for instance, but not in the arcane remoteness of the authority. I have already discussed elsewhere how large the gulf is between the content that is taught in schools and the source of the authority for that content, lying as it does in almost mythically remote esoteric professional communities of inquiry. And it is also important to note that, under any educational scheme that falls short of induction into such communities, the content of learning that springs from them involves little more than the acquisition of publicly authorised common opinion. Little of this deserves to be called “knowledge”, to the extent that knowledge involves vouching for our beliefs in terms of evidence or reasons that are our own. We are so rarely “in a position to know” the real grounds for so much that we are taught.

Understanding our epistemic situation as individuals is critical to coming to terms with our world, our fellows and our lives. To the extent that these issues are concealed from learners, or covered up in the interests of sustaining some sort of surrender to institutional authority that is externally assumed, it is to this extent that learners are disempowered and led into inauthenticity.

The problem with schooling is not that the authority of the “knowledge” that it purports to teach is as weak as it is, for much of our “knowledge” will be just as weak however we acquire it. This is because, at best, we could only ever replicate a tiny proportion of the original inquiries, which means that most of our “knowledge” will be highly derivative – having passed through a number of interpretive and selective hands already, and with its authority dependent upon whole chains of “authorities” whose “authority” may be established in quite different ways.

Instead, the problem with schooling is the false pretensions to authority that it assumes and requires in order to justify the extent of the control and management of learners and what they are to learn, and the intellectual dependency, compliance, submissiveness and alienation from the world that all of this creates. The better that learners do in fact appreciate this, the more transparent the real workings of school authority would be, and the more difficulties with student motivation and control the schools would experience. The issues of authority have to remain suppressed.

The development of the factory school was valuable to the authoritarian administration of the Roman Empire. It was valuable to the enormous task of recovering the riches of ancient texts in a culture that lacked such riches of its own, as well as enabling the expanding administrative requirements of the equally authoritarian principalities of medieval Europe, and the universal medieval church. The authority of both the knowledge and the institutions made perfect sense in a world where the source of these things was understood to be divine, within a single and agreed scheme of divinity.

These values are no longer ours. We no longer share these agreements sufficiently to expect to live together under them. It should not be considered appropriate, in a democracy, that “knowledge” of any kind, stripped of its original grounds, and the contention in which it was made, should be passed down a formal hierarchy with the original justification transformed into the expert status of those represented at various levels in that hierarchy. Such knowledge can never, genuinely, be questioned by learners, and the problem is that the implications of this are concealed from them by the way that the institutional arrangements are ordered.

“Successful” schooling is likely to have built into those who “succeed”, a false confidence in their own “knowledge”; particularly those beliefs of theirs that lie outside their ultimate speciality, but that they take with them into those arenas of power that their “success” opens up for them.

As we continue to grow, however, and whether we rank among the “successes” or the “failures”, we are likely to experience the effects of a growing discrepancy between these schooling claims to authority and our ongoing experience of life. We might call it “growing up”, but it is a sense both that we have been duped, but also that we are ill-equipped to handle it. It becomes “the way things are”, and we reflect on it as an irony of life.

We discover that the institutions don’t live up to their marketing. As we continue to engage with them, we try to negotiate their hypocrisies and pettiness. We discover similar corruptions beneath the surface of our workplaces and professions, and their knowledge claims. Our politicians do not merely lie to us. They, and their administrations, wilfully turn against our interests, and we find ourselves in battles with them that we cannot win.

We have been discovering, as we grew up, that our news outlets, marketing themselves much as our schools were doing, have been weaponised as outlets of propaganda by their owners and investors  and many of their agents. Our “leaders” or would-be leaders – those who would control the actual chains of authority running down through the schools, as if they are our ultimate teachers – don’t merely lie; they frequently lie so transparently that we are right to accept, on the bald face of it, that their claims are lies. This is normal. Apparently they all do it.

All of this would be remarkable – incomprehensible – if it wasn’t for the fact that learners have been alienated from the authority of their own knowledge throughout. The responsibilities of belief were removed from them from the beginning, and as experience undermines the credibility of those who assumed that responsibility, and claimed that authority, the learners, as grown adults, have nothing with which to negotiate the corruption that they see before them but cynicism, disengagement, or to follow inclinations poorly thought through or understood.

Thus:

“There are two sides to every story”

“Who knows?” (the shrug)

“They are all liars”

If there was a trustworthy news, it would  give us “just the facts”

It all comes down to which of the lies you believe.

At the same time, since we can’t negotiate life at all without some stabilities, we have to put our trust, our faith, somewhere. And since we were never given the opportunity to learn to do our own due diligence, and were never encouraged to struggle with that as a practical problem that we each have to solve, we crowd together against this or that aspect of the system with people who appear to be “like us”, who talk and appear to think like we do, who appeal to the same fears and securities that we have come to depend upon. All of this in a world where we are now all “entitled” to our own opinion (as the medievals weren’t in matters of their own government, or faith, or belief or much of their behaviour), and which, in democratic citizenship, now seems to assume our own thoughtful participation.

When we are apt to blame the corruption of all those sources and visible pretenders at “leadership”, it is important to grasp just how our upbringing enables these institutions and practices. When we blame the institutions and practices, and want them to be replaced or reformed, we revert to a “teaching” model again, in which the educational process is from the top down – the political moulding of clay. We just want them to do it right.

Of course these institutions and practices are corrupting of democratic possibility. Nevertheless, if we look at the processes and practices that we have put in place to manage learning from birth, it is hard not to reach the sobering conclusion that this corruption is precisely what we have had in mind. We have constructed arrangements that suppress the development of the capacity to take personal responsibility for belief, and appear deliberately to have set out to ensure that our young people arrive at their adulthood ill-equipped to seek and confer authority judiciously. We have hollowed out our learners’ lives and delivered them to that corruption. When we blame those institutions “above us”, we are nevertheless incapable of demanding anything better.

A proper education – that was respectful, and that prioritised agency – would situate the question of the authority and integrity of the thing to be learned together with the importance of the learning itself. This authority and integrity would not be something to be decided by a teacher or curriculum planner, but by the learners themselves, with increasing awareness and skill. It is the learners’ minds that are at stake, and these minds are at stake for their own sake, and not some other agent.

If such an interrogation of the authority of our investigations was a standing accompaniment of all learning, we would find ourselves learning many things with an awareness and a proper wariness that the status of the authority behind them was very low indeed. Sometimes, we may act on this learning. We may have to. We can’t know everything.

But always we should do so with an appreciation of the likely quality of the authority properly flagged, so that we can accept responsibility for what we believe, and what we do. We will accept the necessity because we will understand it. And when we should change our minds, we will often be able to do so very quickly, because we will have a good charge of the qualities of the authority and the reasons that have so far sustained it for us, and will more rapidly perceive when that needs to shift.

Our willingness to do this should, of course, be accompanied by a proper appreciation of what is humanly possible here, and how this impacts the tasks of negotiating a life. These will require of us a proper compassion – for ourselves, and also for others who make decisions – particularly when they don’t turn out so well.

To be denied these powers of responsibility is to be imprisoned in a kind of childhood in which even children should not be arrested. The net effect of this infantilisation is to give power to our “caregivers”, whoever they turn out to be – even into adulthood, and to the end of our lives.  An “education system” that prevents us from taking charge of our own knowledge deceives us as to how much control we – or anyone else – may reasonably have over us, including the legitimacy of our systems of government, and their behaviour.

When the external authority of knowledge is a pretence in such ways, and the pretence becomes transparent, existential dismay and fury against authority and the universe should come as no surprise, for we have never learned to come into proper relationships with these things. Nor should there be surprise when we set out to blame others, or the powers that be, or the universe itself for what any of them “have done to us”; for what “should not have been allowed to happen”. “Daddy” has let us down.

The medieval schooling factory and industrial development

It is worth reconsidering, then, what it is about industrialisation that did so much to create the schooling systems that we have today, and my own conclusion is that the contribution of the industrial factory was not so great – simply extending and capitalising on the features of factory schooling that already existed. The real transformation was in making it universal and compulsory, and in the service of an increasingly managerial state.

That is, organising classes into sequential grades is reported in Protestant schools in Europe in the mid fifteen-hundreds. Extrinsic motivation is amply demonstrated in the prevalence of thrashing until blood was drawn. The correlation between the factory whistle and the school bell already existed in the organisation of school timetables and classes. Using schools as a way of seeking social mobility was always a motive, but accelerated with the rise of the merchant class; trade and banking well prior to industrialisation.

The bucket or pottery theories of mind, together with the top-down structure of command and wisdom were perfectly fit for purpose under monarchy and a universal church. And external conformity and dependency at the expense of agency was exactly what the existing school factory already required. As always, personal experience was of no importance unless it got in the way.

Making schooling universal and compulsory was, indeed, a radical shift, but it didn’t take industrialisation to get it into place. In eighteenth century France, it was common for Enlightenment thinkers to hold that schooling for all – but not education – would be a very good idea. France, however, had an agrarian economy, and not an industrial one, and most of the schooling was advocated for the sake of the emerging patriotism, for good moral behaviour, and for skill in agricultural labour.

Denmark was the first country to create a universal schooling system – in 1814. But it didn’t industrialise until the late nineteenth century. Prussia was the first to create a universal, compulsory state schooling system, but it did so to create a militaristic society – something that we might well think about a bit more seriously. It had yet to industrialise, however.

Prussia supplied the model that has been adopted elsewhere – almost universally. The United Kingdom adopted the Prussian model when it was already an industrial nation, but this surely isn’t true of most of its colonies that also adopted it at the time – such as New Zealand, which was wholeheartedly agricultural, as it still very much is.

Many of the colonies followed the concern for nation-building that was the major preoccupation of the colonising powers, but in doing so they were clearly more concerned with forging a common nationhood out of the diversity of immigrant and indigenous populations – creating a common narrative, and a “melting pot” of the indigenous and incoming ethnic diversity. We should, by now, be very uncomfortable with much of this – in terms of the deep inequalities and injustices of power, respect and resources that these colonial developments represented, and that were masked by this creation of a common “identity”. Some things didn’t melt too well in those pots; racial prejudice, gender inequality, power and privilege, for instance. Others, such as ethnicity, or religious difference, we should consider melting at our moral peril.

But however this is played, it is impossible to ignore that it was a massive process of social engineering – quite blatant in its indoctrination. It was about suppressing personal agency and the relevance of experience in favour of agreement in judgment and opinion. To be sure, this involved a massive compliance in serving the systems of production through vocational preparation, but it didn’t much matter what form of production it was – any more than it matters today.

In the nineteenth century, the West raised the schooling stakes by making Western schooling compulsory for all children, with the agendas determined by the state, and those interests with enough power to influence what might be done in its name. The justification for doing this are not often discussed. On the one hand, it has been claimed as a protection against child labour – both in the factories of England, or equally on the farms of New Zealand.

A second argument has been to lift people up from the domestic squalor in which they lived – squalor that so many were forced into after being driven, by enclosure, from their very domestic, rural economies into the extreme and debilitating demands of factory life.  Quite apart from their poverty, they had very little time or energy left for the maintenance of domestic lives and routines, let alone the passing on of skill. The belated answer to repairing the damage that industrialisation had already done, was home economics.

A third argument was the myth of the meritocracy – that schools would offer learners a chance to raise themselves to a better station through hard work and ability.

None of these arguments have anything about them that points directly to institutionalised schooling as the inevitable conclusion; such that compulsion requires attendance, not just within these sites, but in specific classes and programmes with the lives of learners micro-managed by overseers for five hours per day – and eventually for twelve years. These arguments for compulsion do not justify turning over young people to the social engineering agendas of the state at all. What they might justify is the creation and protection of educationally rich, stimulating and supportive spaces within which they can grow up safely, and with little, if any, compulsion beyond that. Such educational spaces might be utterly different from schooling factories.

It is in this extraordinary extension of the duration of schooling, and its compulsion, that is the striking difference between the two thousand year labour in the construction of factory schools, and what we have made of them. For those Western ancestors, and for the better part of a thousand years, the technology made sense in the recovery of older foreign languages that were dead or dying, their treasure lying in precious texts that were difficult to access. Here the mastery of the rules, and culturally strange customs were difficult in ways that we should find hard to imagine.

The significant difference is that, once a basic mastery was achieved, those with the freedom to do so quite naturally continued on their own. They studied for themselves on their own initiative, and in their own time. Since the resources they needed tended to be located in much the same places, however – in monasteries that had schools – these were apt to be, not merely schools, but educational centres. Here were masters who might offer mentorship. Here were fellow scholars. Here were books.

Bolgar describes this as

. . . two educational systems which blend sometimes, but are for the most part distinct: on the one hand the average classroom with its routine, its elementary text-books, and its limited aims; on the other, the individual student guided only by his own taste or the chance enthusiasm of a superior, with no bounds set either to his opportunities or his methods. [5]

At much the same time, in Italy, the difficulty with learning a remote second language from difficult texts was largely absent, and there was limited pressure for monasteries to develop schools, or organised learning.

There was no learned elite, only individual scholars, because the mass of the population had never sunk to the level of ignorance which might have made it necessary for someone in authority to take the educational question seriously in hand.

. . .

A citizen of Milan or Padua did not require an elaborate training in order to read the ancient classics. He did not need to spend years over his grammar or laboriously master a vocabulary which bore no relation to his daily speech. Once he was literate, once he had familiarised himself with certain difference in usage, the stored up knowledge of the past lay within his grasp. Even Greek could be learnt with comparative ease by those who, like Anastasius had the good fortune to make personal contact with its speakers. [6]

Of course this did not apply to the mass of the population – only to those with at least modest means, whereas modern schooling is supposed to open up education to all. But it does raise a huge and troubling question; why, in order to bring education to all, it should ever have been deemed necessary to do so by binding the whole population under schooling for such long periods of their lives; as we have done? In this peculiar way – the very limitations on the extent to which schooling could take over their educational lives – medieval learners may have been less subject to its harmful effects than we are now.

Yes, we have to learn the rules and conventions of written language. But it is likely – at least in the first instance – to be our language, and the tools and texts widely available to do this today are extraordinary compared with what would have been available to an affluent, ninth- century Italian. Our capacity, moreover, to facilitate and resource independent study, and bring self-educators together through various kinds of supportive educational centres today – should we choose to do so – equally dwarfs anything that they could have hoped to achieve. Consider, too, across the later centuries, how European scholars supported each other and discussed, despite great distance and difficulties of travel, simply through writing letters – and compare this with what is available to us today.

Just these small clues alone – from the history of the West itself – should lead us to look more closely at what we have done to ourselves and our children. We set out to crack obscure and difficult texts that lay outside our surrounding cultural life, and for that great task, the disadvantages of some of our methods may not have been too great, quite apart from the way that, from the medieval point of view, they are unlikely to have been seen as disadvantages at all.

If we look closely at the technology of the school in our own terms, of course, we can surely see the dangers – for the eventual suppression of curiosity, for trading off self-motivation for extrinsic incentives, and for the development and maintenance of mental dependence on custom, convention, fashion and conformity. But regardless even of this difference, they did not engage in this institution for very long, and since they were not compelled by the state, any incentives or coercive agendas involved are unlikely to have extended far beyond family and friends.

We, however, have submitted a far great portion of our lives to these processes as we have made them involuntary – so far that we have extended the years of childhood, creating “adolescence”, and holding off adulthood for the young by the better part of a decade. We have introduced a further virtual compulsion into adulthood by requiring schooling certificates and diplomas in order to have access to quite basic vocations. This virtual compulsion is partly sustained by the deliberate ambiguities in the vague, cultivated conviction that we must “all contribute to society”.

When learners are finally finished with our schools, most of them don’t ever want to study; not ever again. We have worked so hard and expended so much collective wealth to do our best to kill educational interest and opportunity, not to create it.

As we have done this, we have thrown up a sharp – almost intolerable – conflict with the incompatible idea of equal intrinsic human worth that has also been emergent in the last several centuries. This idea is now foundational in our common ethics that have come to be accepted far beyond the West.

Equal intrinsic worth is ethically prior to, and should regulate any use we may be to each other, and it goes to the heart of the legitimacy of our social orders. The European Enlightenment began an ethical turn that has evolved and been embraced world-wide, transforming our global sense of justice, and our appreciation of difference. It continues to evolve through processes that regularly involve conflict, and considerable pain.

In this, we each expect of each other that the meaning and purpose of our lives – indeed our identities – are for us to choose, develop and mould for ourselves. For the sake of this, we owe each other respect. This places an enormous demand upon whatever education must be. Even if some of us may not be clear about what education, in such an ethical environment, would require, it must be plain enough that, upon any close examination, universal, compulsory state schooling, designed to achieve public conformity and agreement – no matter how useful some of that may be to various undertakings – is fundamentally at odds with the problems of self-respect and personal responsibility that are now to be in our hands, and that any genuine educational project would have to address.

The incompatibility of this new ethic with the new universal schooling that arose in defiance of it is clear in the long history of schooling, and is hardly mitigated by the addition of compulsion. Schooling was important in the modest democracy of ancient Athens, but has more typically flourished in undemocratic regimes, and certainly for much longer.

As we have seen in Rome, the school was used for adding commercial value to slaves, and nothing about it is incompatible with slavery. That much-repeated pseudo-technical term employed everywhere by “educators” today – “pedagogy” – goes back to the Greek pedagogue, who was, of course, a slave.

Perhaps more sinister for the school in our time, however, is the practice of “re-education” in China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s; a practice that keeps returning, and is very much alive and well today. It is hard to mount a compelling criticism of such indoctrinational  practices, because the underlying institutional assumptions are much the same, particularly when our schools operate under compulsion, and their learning agendas are established by the state. All that we can really say of such practices is that “they” indoctrinate, and “we” don’t – which hardly bares close examination.

When democracies lapse into tyrannies or totalitarian oligarchies, or dictatorships, the only thing that is likely to cause disruption in schooling are the changes in some textbooks, and the disappearance of some staff. Education, however, is unlikely outside genuine democracies, and will not survive their loss, except in pockets of secrecy, defiance and resistance.

The issue can be summed up in terms of one widely acknowledged understanding – perhaps sufficiently accepted to be thought of as “universally” appreciated.

Education is a human right.

Unfortunately, in our world, this right is assumed to be a right to schooling, because schooling has overwhelmed, and come to suppress the idea of education itself. A right to schooling as we know it makes no sense, since schooling does harm to the agency and responsibility of the person who supposedly would possess the “right”. It cannot be justified, ethically, from the principles that enable human rights to be derived. As a result of the domination of this reduction of “education” to contemporary schooling, a human right to education can now barely be conceived.

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Notes and references

[1]  Bolgar, R. R. 1954. Classical Heritage & Beneficiaries.  London: Cambridge University Press.  p336

[2] Illich, Ivan. 1971. Deschooling Society. London: Calder & Boyars. P 40ff

[3]  . . . imprisonment on frosty nights naked in an unheated cellar, daily floggings also naked until the blood flowed, and one atrocious case where a lad was suspended for hours trussed hand and foot in a well. All this was between the ages of six and ten.   Bolgar,  p429

[4]  School is designed to address happenings between bodies; that is, judgments that are public, where only the externality of mind can be perceived by others.  For this reason schooling has very limited power to address the internal dimensions of mind that are vital to self-respect; and to education itself. This distinction between the interior and exterior of mind, with the consequence that schooling is designed only for the latter, rather than for the way in which mind is made by the learner out of their own experience (as are all educational decisions, in the end), is the key insight that brings the medieval character of our modern schooling to the fore and renders it problematic. It is the neglect of this insight that has allowed educators to give undue weight to the contribution of the industrial revolution and its factories. This mistake misses the much more important way in which the schooling model was educationally inappropriate from the beginning; given our contemporary circumstances. The distraction of the industrial factory merely adds to our confusion of schooling with education. This distinction and its implications are explored in much greater detail in
https:⁄⁄whatiseducationhq.com⁄articles⁄educational-system-at-odds, https:⁄⁄whatiseducationhq.com⁄articles⁄authority-and-ego and https:⁄⁄whatiseducationhq.com⁄articles⁄education-inside-and-out, particularly the first and third of these

[5] Bolgar, R. R. The Classical Heritage And Its Beneficiaries. Revised edition. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. p118

[6] ibid.  p 120-121

© R. Graham Oliver, 2020

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