The Boy Who Could Change the World (37 page)

And indeed, such studies did not improve a student's performance
in the mills. Careful records kept by the mill owners allow us to compare mill workers who did and did not go to school. Just as with modern students, there is no evidence of any impact of increased education on worker productivity.
^*
*

So why did the mill owners spend so much money building and running these schools? They were quite clear about their intent. The classes were justified not for their usefulness but because memorizing them was a form of “moral education” leading to “industrious habits . . . and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large.”

As one Lowell manager explained it, “I have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good common-school education. I have uniformly found the better educated, as a class, possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.”

Not only were those who went through school better at following rules, but they were less likely to stir up trouble: “In times of agitation I have always looked to the most intelligent, best educated, and the most moral for support and have seldom been disappointed . . . . But the ignorant and uneducated I have generally found the most troublesome, acting under the impulses of excited passion and jealousy.”

In other words, “that class of help which has enjoyed a good common-school education are the most tractable, yielding most readily to reasonable requirements, exerting a salutary and conservative influence in times of excitement, while the most ignorant are the most refractory.”
^†
†
In short, “the owners of manufacturing property have a deep
pecuniary
interest in the education and morals of their help.”

Another Lowell manager: “I have observed that when the demagogues have found it for their interest to persuade the
dear
people
that are employed in the mills that their employers are exacting, over-reaching and oppressive, the minds and morals of the ignorant are usually more readily poisoned.”

As the Lowell School Committee summarized their findings: “The proprietors find the training of the schools admirably adapted to prepare the children for the labors of the mills.” Why? “When [their laborers] are well educated . . . controversies and
strikes
can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factitious considerations.”
^*
*

Students, they noted, “have to receive their first lessons of subordination and obedience in the school room. At home, they are either left wholly to their own control, or, what is almost equally bad, the discipline to which they are subjected alternates between foolish indulgence, and exasperated tyranny.”
^†
†

Indeed, school was so important that the mill owners quickly decided to make it mandatory. “No language of ours can convey too strongly our sense of the dangers which wait us from [those who] are not and have never been members of our public schools,” warned the Lowell School Committee. Universal schooling is “our surest safety against internal commotions.”
^{‡
‡}

The children who didn't attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine,” warned the committee. “Unsuccessful attempts, during the past year, to burn two of our school-houses . . . are an index to the evils which threaten from such sources.”
^§
§

More accurately, such burnings were an index of public resistance to such coercion. In 1837, 300 teachers were forced to flee their classrooms by riotous and violent students.
^||
||
In 1844, the Irish population went on strike from the schools, reducing attendance by 80%.
The School Committee stepped up their anti-truancy efforts to force them and others back to school.

And just as the factory model spread out from Lowell, so did the model of mandatory schooling. An analysis of census data by Alexander Field found that what led to a town getting a school was not its growth into a city nor a rise in incomes nor the introduction of expensive machinery, but instead the introduction of the factory system itself. As factories marched across the country, public schools followed.

And their justification didn't change either. As historian Merle Curti notes, “Hardly an annual meeting of the National Education Association was concluded without an appeal on the part of leading educators for the help of the teacher in quelling strikes and checking the spread of socialism and anarchism. Commissioners of education and editors of educational periodicals summoned their forces to the same end.” Commissioner of education John Eaton argued that businessmen must “weigh the cost of the mob and tramp against the expense of universal and sufficient education,” while NEA president James H. Smart declared that schools did more “to suppress the latent flame of communism than all other agencies combined.”

“Again and again,” Curti writes, “educators denounced radical doctrines and offered education as the best preventive and cure.” The titans of industry agreed—business leaders like Henry Frick, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Pierre S. du Pont eagerly supported the spread of education programs. As social reformer Jane Addams put it, “The business man has, of course, not said to himself: ‘I will have the public school train office boys and clerks for me, so that I may have them cheap,' but he has thought, and sometimes said, ‘Teach the children to write legibly, and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits of punctuality and order; to be prompt to obey, and not question why; and you will fit them to make their way in the world as I have made mine!'”
^*
*

*
  
*
  
*

And this has been their attitude ever since. Despite all the talk about educators and education priorities, the most important people in any school have always been businessmen. They constantly complain that our schools our failing, that they need to cut out modern fads and go “back to basics,” that unless schools get tougher on students American business will be unable to compete.

As Richard Rothstein has shown, such claims are hardly new. Because schools have never been about actual education, businessmen have been easily collecting studies about their failure at this task since the very beginning. In 1845, only 45% of Boston's brightest students knew that water expands when it freezes. In one school, 75% knew the U.S. had imposed an embargo on British and French goods during the War of 1812, but only 5% knew what
embargo
meant. Students, the secretary of education wrote, were simply memorizing the “words of the textbook . . . without having . . . to think about the meaning of what they have learned.”

In 1898, a writing exam at Berkeley found that 30 to 40% of entering freshman were not proficient in English. A Harvard report found only 4% of applicants “could write an essay, spell, or properly punctuate a sentence.” But that didn't stop editorialists from complaining about how things were better in the old days. Back when they went to school, complained the editors of the
New York Sun
in 1902, children “had to do a little work . . . Spelling, writing and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn.” Now schooling was just “a vaudeville show. The child must be kept amused and learns what he pleases.” In 1909, the
Atlantic Monthly
complained that basic skills had been replaced by “every fad and fancy.”

That same year, the dean of Stanford's school of education warned that in a global economy, “whether we like it or not, we are beginning to see that we are pitted against the world in a gigantic battle of brains and skill.” Because of their failing schools, of course, Americans were coming up short.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson appointed a presidential commission to study how to improve our international educational competitiveness. They found that more than half of new recruits to the Army during World War I “were not able to write a simple letter or read a newspaper
with ease.” In 1927, the National Association of Manufacturers complained that 40 percent of high school graduates could not perform simple arithmetic or accurately express themselves in English.

A 1938 study complained that newfangled teaching methods were forcing out basic instruction in phonics: “Teachers . . . conspire against pupils in their efforts to learn; these teachers appear to be determinedly on guard never to mention a letter by name . . . or to show how to use either letter forms or sounds in reading.” A 1940 survey of business executives “found that by large margins they believed recent graduates were inferior to the previous generation in arithmetic, written English, spelling, geography, and world affairs.”

A 1943 test by the
New York Times
found that only 29% of college freshmen knew that St. Louis was on the Mississippi, only 6% knew the original thirteen states of the Union, and some students even thought Lincoln was the first president. It was, the
Times
declared, a “striking ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history.”

In 1947, the
Times
's education editor published a book titled
Our Children Are Cheated
. In it, businessmen lamented the poor state of American schools. One complained he had to “organize special classes to instruct [his new hires] in . . . making change . . . Only a small proportion [can] place Boston, New York . . . Chicago . . . Denver . . . in their proper sequence from east to west, or name the states in which they [are located].”

A 1951 test in L.A. found that more than half of eighth graders couldn't calculate 8% sales tax on an $8 purchase. The newspapers complained that students couldn't even tell time. In 1952, the journal
Progressive Education
complained about the “attacks on textbooks that encourage inquisitive thinking and individual reasoning, . . . mounting pressure to eliminate the ‘frills and fads'—by which are meant such vital services as nurseries, classes for the handicapped, testing and guidance, programs to help youngsters understand and appreciate their neighbors of different backgrounds,” what today would be called multiculturalism.

In 1958,
U.S. News and World Report
lamented that “fifty years ago a high-school diploma meant something. . . . We have simply misled our students and misled the nation by handing out high-school
diplomas to those who we well know had none of the intellectual qualifications that a high-school diploma is supposed to represent—and does represent in other countries. It is this dilution of standards which has put us in our present serious plight.”

A 1962 Gallup poll found “just 21 percent looked at books even casually.” In 1974,
Reader's Digest
asked, “Are we becoming a nation of illiterates? [There is an] evident sag in both writing and reading . . . at a time when the complexity of our institutions calls for ever-higher literacy just to function effectively. . . . [T]here is indisputable evidence that millions of presumably educated Americans can neither read nor write at satisfactory levels.”
^*
*

In 1983, Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education declared that our failing schools made us “a nation at risk.” “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” it declared. In 1988, the chairman of Xerox warned that “public education has put this country at a terrible competitive disadvantage. . . . If current . . . trends continue, American business will have to hire a million new workers a year who can't read, write or count.”

In 1993, the government was singing the same tune. “The vast majority of Americans do not know that they do not have the skills to earn a living in our increasingly technological society and international marketplace,” lamented education secretary Richard Riley. In 1995, the chairman of IBM told state governors that our schools needed higher standards for “an era that demands improvements in skills if Americans are to succeed in the world marketplace.”

Similar complaints continue right to the present day. They are always followed by calls for “education reform” and “higher standards,” which in practice always translates into the same old “drill and skill” of old. And, of course, that's exactly the point.