Education's Not-So Hidden Agenda
Book review: Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education (Paglayan, 2024)
At the centre of Katzuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go is Hailsham, ostensibly a British boarding school, in reality a well-appointed indoctrination centre geared towards raising biddable clones to serve as organ donors for absent originals. Much of the horror of the novel’s first half lies in its placement of an amoral institution in loco parentis for the novel’s diversely doomed protagonists Kathy, Ruth and Tommy.
A new history of the origins of public education suggests that Hailsham is not so much a distorted reflection of the role of schools in society as a window onto their deeper purpose. In Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, Argentinian political economist Agustina Paglayan points out that the origins of public education, and perhaps its core purpose, lie in an attempt to recconcile the masses to their fate.
Paglayan’s book contains two central arguments. The first argument is historical: the expansion of public schooling is best understood as part of a long-term elite project to consolidate state power through the promotion of spontaneous social conformity. “Before the eighteenth century,” she writes, “the idea that the state could or should educate children was virtually inconceivable. But during the eighteenth and especially in the nineteenth century, mass education came to be conceived as a policy tool that could strengthen the state.” Paglayan’s second argument—part sociology, part public policy analysis—is that this essential conservatism, hard-coded into the design of mass public education systems, helps to explain their patchy record in areas such as enabling social mobility, promoting civic engagement and fostering critical thinking. “Today, like in the nineteenth century … docility and obedience [remain] important goals of public education.” The first of these arguments is comprehensively well-evidenced and tightly argued. The second less so.
Paglayan effectively demolishes four conventional explanations for the rise of universal primary education: democratisation, military competition, industrialisation, and emergent nationalism. The spread of democracy, she points out, cannot explain the rise of public education systems, since across Western Europe and much of Latin America, primary school enrolment was at 70 percent or more decades prior to the achievement of anything like comparable rates of suffrage. Military rivalry between states also fails the test of chronology. Historians’ who have pointed to increases in primary school enrolment following inter-state wars, such as took place following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, have mostly overlooked the extent to which such surges represented a return to pre-conflict levels of enrolment rather than a genuine extension of the schooling system to new social groups.
The advent of industrialisation provides no better an explanation. Early schooling systems placed relatively little emphasis on the development of ‘technical’ skills such as reading, writing or basic arithmetic; and, in any case, recent historical scholarship has tended to stress how the factory system tended to de-skill its workers versus mixed agricultural employment. Finally, the potential utility of primary education as part of conventional nineteenth century nation-building, overlooks both the stubborn persistence of regional languages of instruction in many states and, again, the fact that moral instruction on the importance of respecting the social order significantly predated active attempts to promote national identity.
By contrast, Paglayan argues, not only does a focus on social conformity and control better fit the facts, it has the virtue of taking seriously the motives expressed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century policymakers themselves. Ministers, legislators and municipal officials not only in autocratic Prussia but in the United Kingdom, the United States and across Latin America, routinely trumpeted the value of primary schools as the proper location for moral instruction that would lead working class students to accept their place in the social order. Even celebrated progressives such as Horace Mann were attracted to the Normal School movement as much by its potential to pacify as to liberate. This, Paglayan argues, is a values-based explanation for the growth of public education—here contrasted with explanations based on the development of human capital, which stress the value of acquired expertise for economic development. The originality of her thesis is that the values in question are reactionary rather than progressive.
Paglayan is admirably clear about the limitations of the social scientific method, which often relies on building simplified versions of reality for the purposes of reaching generalisable conclusions. Still, her argument has a homogenising effect on almost all participants in the education system that dilutes its force as an explanation in any specific context. Even if the social and political elites that sponsored the expansion of primary schooling across Europe and Latin America had a shared motivation to promote social conformity, it does not follow that this was an exclusive motivation, that it was equivalent from case to case, or that elites were operating from a shared understanding of social conformity. This remains true today. Both the Coalition government’s mandate that British schools teach ‘fundamental British values’ and the ‘framework’ curriculum introduced by Viktor Orban’s Fidesz government in Hungary could be described as promoting social conformity; this does not make them equivalent.
Likewise, Paglayan’s emphasis on elite motivation seems to under-estimate the complexities of policy implementation—something that is surely critical to understanding the heterogenous performance of actual schooling systems in the twenty first century. States, and the elites that typically run them, have varying priorities, but also varying degrees of capacity to pursue those priorities. Is it really the case that the Canadian schooling system, with its low levels of school inequality and high rates of social mobility in schools, is as compromised by its origins in elite attempts at pacification as the Belgian, which is its opposite in both respects?
Nor is it a given that policies which are conservative in design cannot be progressive in effect. The welfare state was another Prussian innovation, introduced more than a century after primary education; it, too, was motivated by a desire to preserve social stability; it, too, resulted in significant social progress in Germany and eventually elsewhere. The expansion of state capacity across all areas of social life that took place in Europe and North America from the 1930s onwards, was clearly motivated by a desire to ward off the spectre of international communism.
Raised to Obey achieves a fierce clarity about the origins of public schooling, but the book’s account of the evolution of mass education in the twentieth century seems curiously out-of-focus. The gradual opening of secondary and, more recently, tertiary education, to most of the population represented an important, if imperfect, democratising of culture and technical knowledge. Moral education, the focus of universal primary instruction throughout the nineteenth century, remains an important component of public education at all stages, but its importance has shifted as a general concern for the quality of human capital has raced up the public policy agenda. Moral instruction, or at least its modern equivalent, character education, could yet return to primacy as a reaction to the growth of artificial intelligence.
Finally, the objects of all this education themselves seem almost to have been written out of the story. Students feature only passively and at the margins of Paglayan’s narrative, as uncritical recipients of “indoctrination by primary schools”. Education, she argues, is an elite cure-all for social disobedience and political dissent. This conclusion seems to underplay the extent to which education has proven a stimulus to both—a phenomenon by no means restricted to Berkeley or Paris in the 1960s. Resistance to authority is such as natural instinct among the young that the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci famously called for schools to be as conservative as possible, as a virtual guarantee of progressive attitudes in adult life.
Raised to Obey is an important work of history. As a work of policy analysis, it is more critique than manifesto. In reminding us of the conservative origins of mass public education, it offers a corrective to the tendency to see all education as inherently progressive.
Paglayan, A. (2024) Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. Princeton University Press