Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Public education always seems to be under stress. Students spend the school day lost in their phones, we hear that they're horribly behaved, they are crippled by social and other anxieties. My guest today has an interesting take on public education's main origins and its goals, and it casts those problems in a provocative light. Agustina Paglayan is a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and she's the author of a recent book titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education". Professor Paglayan, welcome to the program.

Agustina Paglayan: Hi, Grant. Thank you for having me.

GR: It's a pleasure and we really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with a very basic question that takes us back to the beginning, because, you know, your book tells a story about history in many respects. When and where did mass public education first really take root in the United States and really get going.

AP: In the United States, well, it's an interesting question, because the United States was not the precursor in providing access to primary or elementary education. So, within the U.S., I would say Massachusetts was the first state to pass state law to require local areas to fund public schools, which were called common schools at the time. But the precursor was actually Prussia, in Europe, which was an absolutist regime, so, happy to talk more about that. And the U.S. model very heavily emulated the Prussian model. And the Prussian model, so the Massachusetts state law that I was referring to goes back to the very end of the 18th century. I don't remember the exact date, I think it was 1790 or 1789, but it was soon after Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts, whereas, in the Prussian context, the first compulsory primary school year dates to 1763, so a few decades earlier than that.

GR: Well, you argue in your book, and you already mentioned when you said Shays' Rebellion, sort of, it sounds like there's going to be a relationship there that you're going to want to draw, but, you argue in the book that the main purpose of public education was to indoctrinate and, I'm going to use a pretty provocative word here, control the unvarnished masses of people to make the public more obedient and well behaved. What is the evidence that you found in doing your research that supports that? What kind of things leapt out to you?

AP: There's lots of different types of evidence that I, probably, you don't want me to summarize within the short span of time. But I'll, let me clarify a couple things, because you mentioned the word indoctrination. That's a charged word. I think people think of, ah, indoctrination, it's what communists do, it's what fascists do. We don't do indoctrination in the United States. So, let me clarify it first, how I use the term indoctrination. And if you look at the dictionary definition, indoctrination refers, according to the dictionary, to the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It doesn't make indoctrination dependent on what's the content of those beliefs. Indoctrination occurs whether you're teaching someone that communism is wonderful or fascism is wonderful, or also that democracy is the best form of government. As long as you're teaching these beliefs in a way that doesn't allow for questioning or for students to ask, oh, but why are you saying that? For them to think critically and keep an open mind about what they're being taught when that is not taking place, that's what would be consistent with the dictionary definition of indoctrination, and that's the way that I use it. When I make the claim that when mass education systems emerged around the world, particularly in the Western world, the primary goal was to instill in students, future citizens, essentially, the idea that they needed to respect the government's authority on the government's laws, that it was the right thing to do from a moral standpoint. And that if they behaved in ways that challenged the state's authority, or they behaved in ways that deviated or didn't comply with existing laws and rules that the government was setting, that that was going to bring them to be rejected by their peers, or go to hell, or whatever the basis of morality was, it could be secular, it could be religious, but that it was morally reprehensible to challenge the authority of the state. So, it was essentially, project that states advanced as a way to legitimate their authority and consolidate their power. So, very different from the ideas we have today about what education means.

GR: No, I appreciate that, thank you. So, in uncovering that, did you find evidence of this in like, what people at the time were writing about what they were doing? Was it like, correspondence with other leaders, diaries? I'm just trying to figure out sort of where you'd go back and sort of say, ah, you know, I see. One thing you do do, I understand is, you know, you have this association between efforts to do this and perceived threats. I mean, you mentioned Shays' Rebellion there. And so just tell us a little bit about, sort of, what things you're pulling out of the historical records that convinced you about this.

AP: Right, because I didn't even speak about the evidence before, which is what you wanted me to talk about. So, the first, I started with this, this was not the idea that I started with. The argument that I shared with you was not, it wasn't kind of where I was a priority. I grew up hearing that agitation spread around the world because of democracy, that it was driven by democratic ideals. So first I started by investigating the truth to that conventional wisdom and looking at, okay, did this education systems, mass primary education systems, did they emerge before the spread of democracy or after the spread of democracy? Well, it turns out they spread well before the spread of democracy, on average, six decades before our country first transitioned to democracy. And then, okay, could it have been that it was driven by prejudice to industrialize on the economic needs to have a skilled workforce in order to sustain industrialization? So again, I looked at, okay, let's compare the timing of when these systems emerge and when they reach a critical access level, versus when industrialization takes place. And again, not a strong relationship there between those two, and in particular, I was mentioning Prussia before as the pioneer of mass primary schooling. Well, it did in 1763, a time when Prussia was an agrarian country, and England on the other hand, an industrial power and leader, was the last country in Europe to introduce compulsory primary education though, or to start legislating primary education. So again, not a relationship there. Another possibility, people said, oh, what about interstate wars and threats from abroad that lead governments to want to teach everyone that patriotism? Could that be something that that led to education expansion? Again, looked at the evidence, no, not actually. It turns out that wars did not spur the expansion of primary school. And through this, as I was doing all of this, which was quantitative statistical analysis, I also was reading about the evidence that politicians at the time, when they were setting up these primary education systems regulated by states, what were they arguing? What was the point they were making? And in those, I mean, you were wondering were they letters they were writing? Some of them were letters, some of them were, like, debates during parliamentary debates. You know, some of these were special reports that they were writing about, the status of education and why it was necessary to expand it. So, there's all different types of evidence. But one thing that became very clear from that was that what they were worried about was the masses being a threat to the state's authority, especially if the masses became organized, and mobilized in violent ways. And so through that, then, back to the Shays' Rebellion and the other evidence that I uncovered, I developed this idea, hypotheses, that perhaps one of the things that spurred the government's fear of mass rebellion was precisely the occurrence of mass violence against the state, and that if it was indeed the case that those kinds of episodes of mass violence against the state, where things that activated or heightened the government's fear of the masses, then we should observe that after those episodes, there should be more efforts to regulate and expand primary education. So, then what I did was look at civil wars as one example of a type of mass violence against the state, and focusing specifically on those types of civil war study involve mass violence against the state. And then I looked again, quantitatively, at the expansion of primary education after episodes of civil war cross-nationally in Europe and Latin America, and found, indeed, that civil wars led to a big expansion of access to primary education. I can keep talking about the evidence because then, but I'm sure you have follow up questions for me on this.

GR: Yes, I do. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Agustina Paglayan. She's a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of a recent book on education and its history titled, "Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education." No, I appreciate that, I’ve a much better...

Agustina Paglayan on the Campbell Conversations