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Education's history and present
In Walking on Water, Jensen draws on the work of John Taylor Gatto to trace the history of American public schooling:
In 1888… the Senate Committee on Education, nervous about the high quality of education provided by nonstandardized, localized schools… reported, “We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.”
Industrial educators set out to rectify this problem. How? As industrial educator and philosopher John Dewey said, “Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.”
Next questions: What are the proper social order and the right social growth? In 1906, Elwood Cubberly, who later became dean of education at Stanford, gave his answers: Schools should be factories “in which raw products, children, are shaped and formed into finished products… manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.”
Then in 1906, the Rockefeller Education Board, major backer of the movement for compulsory public schooling, gave its reasons for putting its money into that movement: “In our dreams… people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [i.e., the development of children’s intellects and characters in homes and local schools] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children… and teach them to do in a perfect way the things the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
Those in charge could not have been clearer. William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote: “Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”
I can't speak for all teachers, but I doubt that many of my colleagues in the profession think of their roles in this light. But then, part of the problem, I suspect, is that we teachers don't necessarily think of our roles in any light, because not only teachers but the public in general do not have a clear idea of what an education should be. As a result, we tend to focus on our subject area, teaching it the way it's always been taught, or the latest way of teaching, or something in between, but in any case focused more on methods than on the larger questions of what a student should get out of an education.
In such circumstances, the structures of schooling, which still owe much to their origins, take on a heightened role. We usher students from class to class at the ring of a bell, we move toward bigger and bigger schools to march toward ever-greater efficiency, and as a result teachers have to "manage" larger and larger classes, necessitating more and more standardization, more and more of a focus on "discipline" and conformity.