Educated Guessing

Schools as factories for social order

The following post is excerpted from a project I’ve been tinkering with for some years now with the working title “Twilight’s Last Gleaming: Everyday Life in the Late American Empire.” This one, and the next few, will focus on education. I hope you like them. —Jim

Schools are one of those things that make a civilization a civilization.  They’ve existed in countless forms in countless societies, going back thousands of years. As such, they serve a wide variety of purposes. Sometimes schools are a matter of developing a bureaucratic elite, as in Confucian China. In others, they’re a matter of training a military class, as in the agoge of classical Sparta. For most of human history, schooling has only been an option for a minority of a population, though schools have tended to loom large in collective imaginations in a great many cultures.

In more recent times, industrial societies have used schools as a means of developing a competent labor force. This has meant a broadening of schooling to the point of mass public education, paid for through general taxation. Almost incidentally, mass public education has also developed a warehousing function, something that has become clear during the Covid-19 epidemic. Besides a desire to shield children from the ravages of enervating labor, the growing presence of women in the workforce has made it necessary to at least partially liberate parents from the burden, and financial cost, of childcare and allow them to participate in the paid labor force, as well as to create jobs for those whose occupation is the education of children.

Alongside the creation of a mass education system, many societies have also fostered specialization in terms of vocational schooling for specialized work. Though not always the most prestigious or lucrative professions—we’re talking about jobs that range from nursing to plumbing—such trades require more than a general background and offer relative security to those willing to undertake them. Such training had often traditionally taken the form of an apprenticeship, whereby a young charge acquired skills under the supervision of a master, before going on to become a journeyman and then a practitioner in his own right (such professions generally being male, notwithstanding exceptions like those of a midwife). But in modern societies, mass production of such trades now typically rests with trade schools, public and private. As the value—literal and figurative—of a college education gets called into question, as it has in recent years, this may change.

Meanwhile, all modern societies have also continued the older practice of developing public and private education institutions meant to foster the development of a leadership elite.  Contemporary schools have been breeding grounds—sometimes literally so—for an unofficial aristocracy, whether in terms of exclusive enclaves in which the privileged place their offspring, or hatcheries where promising prospects from families of limited distinction get a chance to excel (sometimes, especially recent times, they mingle). Elites want to hold on to what they have, but those with the responsibility for governing a society understand that a steady infusion of fresh blood is an important consideration for its long-term survival. The failure to accommodate newcomers will accelerate a ruling class’s demise, whether by fostering resentment or sclerotic thinking.

Note that in the preceding paragraphs I’ve been viewing schooling from the top down—how it looks, how it works, from the standpoint of those in power. Schooling from the perspective of students and their families is a somewhat different matter. For less imaginative students in schools of reasonable academic quality, formal education is a matter of passing time with greater or lesser degrees of pleasure. Classes are something to be endured, while the social and ritual functions of schooling (friends, sports, summers) become the locus of a student’s real life. For the most imaginative students, school is also a chore, but that’s because the most gifted seek to make something new, not fit into the old. Some will try and fail; others will bend and accommodate; a few will succeed and revitalize their society (see: fresh blood). But for ordinary members of the elite, or those who wish to join it, the goal of schooling is to achieve as much mastery—for some this is academic success; for the rest it’s a matter of social skills as well as marketable ability—as possible. You try to gain tools and habits that will allow you to vault as high as possible into the leadership elite. Such tools and habits may prove invaluable; they may not. Instead, success may rest on other factors that range from an ability to improvise to sheer luck. In any case, after a certain point, your success, or lack thereof, is nothing personal. No matter who you are, you operate as part of a larger organism with a life of its own, whatever your role inside it. It might be an important one, but that role will always be temporary, because your life, as well as that of the organism as a whole, is finite.

This is how, after a lifetime of study as student and teacher, I’ve come to understand how schools work. I’ve tried to get outside my own experience here and think about them across time and space. I realize there’s something clinical about the way I’m describing the function of education. I hope, even where I may be mistaken, it points the way toward greater clarity. I’d be curious to hear what you think.