After 25 years as a teacher and then a principal, I was in classrooms all of my life. That was 25 years of professional work that followed 16 years of formal education and a year or two of pre-school before that. I engaged in ending the factory-model school.
I feel confident asserting I am an expert on classrooms. And that I was unsuccessful in my quest to end the factory-model school and replace it with something more responsive to an individual student.
Through all that time, I was either preparing myself to be in the American workforce, or I was actually in the American workforce. And when I was teaching, I was preparing students for that promised leap into life after high school: the world of work.
To be sure, I only briefly believed that the purpose of education is to get a job. Initially I challenged students with the old trope, “What do you want to be?” And then I’d respond, “Well, you’ll need good grades in English.” This was my response no matter what job they told me they wanted.
This was a lie, of course. Not everyone needs to be an “A” student in English. Even writers hire writers.
As I grew in my profession as an educator, I came to understand that training is what prepares you for a job.
The purpose of education is far broader. Education should prepare you to think for yourself, evaluate options, sort fact from propaganda, experience beauty, love more fully, and live a meaningful life. If education can only promise you a job, it’s not an education at all.
The American classroom is the place where we should help students understand the world around them. That includes how biomes and democracies work, how sentences become short stories, and how bridges support the weight of thousands of 18 wheelers a day. But in the classroom and school we also purport to teach the rules for governing oneself. How to work with others. How to address people formally. The importance of showing up on time.
So in the process of providing an education, we also provide a great deal of training. This is a positive byproduct of the factory-model school. It should not be the goal.
But it wasn’t until I was 51 and working part time for a local bank that I had a daily work experience that matched what happens for the average student in the average school. I don’t have any pictures of this experience. I secured my phone in my locker all day, according to their strict regulations. Just like at school.
This perspective strengthened my belief. It is important for the US educational system to become more flexible about how we assess student progress, and how we promote students through the system.
At this job I experienced the worst parts of the American educational system and the traditional factory-model school. In part this is because I was essentially working in a factory.
There were very strict rules about time
In this job, I had a very strict start time. In fact, time was probably the most closely regulated aspect of this work. While there were people who worked much faster or slower than the average person, everyone accounted for and accepted this. Also people had a range of accuracy in their work, with some making more mistakes than others. (Minor mistakes were easily forgiven and repaired. Employees were quickly dismissed for making major mistakes.)
The floor leaders micromanaged our time.
Like in education, getting there too early was discouraged. One had to arrive at roughly exactly the right time each day. This was easy for me because I had a car. If my transportation would have been the public bus, my challenges would have mounted.
Bus riders always have to plan on being early, sacrificing more of their personal time in order to precisely meet the demands of the company’s time.
Arriving exactly on time is not a real hardship. I get it. Things start on time. That’s life.
But also in this job, I was told when I would go on break (15 minutes) and when I could eat lunch (30 minutes). In some ways, my experience here was worse than in the factory-model school, because these times kept shifting. At some time during the day, one of the supervisors would pass our table and announce the time for our first break. Then later they’d announce our lunch time, and let us know if we would be having a second break or going home early.
We’d have to swipe our badge to enter and exit the floor. The badge might even unintentionally have the wrong name on it – but that was a different sort of problem.
At least at school, the breaks and lunches happen on a regular schedule that can be anticipated. One’s body can get used to eating at an unusual time, as long as it is consistent.
But in this job, time was not my own.
And my space was not my own.
I had no space that was mine
At the bank, we sat at long tables. Instead of sitting on benches like at a cafeteria, the bank provided soft office chairs, some with arms, that we could adjust for height and various levels of back support. Comfort mattered, and it was not uncommon for people to spend their first few minutes on the floor securing the best available chair for the day.
Of course, in most factory-model school classrooms, children sit in molded plastic chairs. Sure, their younger bodies can take it, and we let them move every 50 minutes or so to a different molded plastic chair, but it’s not ideal. Children want to sit in unusual positions to get comfortable. I’d argue that they need MORE choices than adults, not fewer.
I mean, who hasn’t seen their kid turn their whole body upside down on the couch and continue reading a book? Their idea of comfort is far broader than ours, but all too often we severely limit their seating options at school.
One key difference between the bank and school is that we didn’t have assigned seating. Seating was dependent on the type of work we were doing and our assignments were given based on the work that needed to be done.
In the American factory-model school, in contrast, seating charts are often weaponized. Teachers seek to keep the classroom quiet by separating friends and putting the most talkative students up front. This didn’t happen at the bank. There they had a different approach to talking.
I was not allowed to talk
This, I’ll admit, was a bit of an exaggeration. You were allowed to talk – if you didn’t get caught by the floor managers.
But if you got too loud, the managers would demonstrate the importance of maintaining silence in the workspace by shouting “We need to get quiet so we can concentrate and get out of here.”
The perverse incentive to not do something enjoyable (talking while we work) was to get the job done more quickly in order to earn less income. It’s not like we didn’t have anywhere to go, but we were also working to get paid, not merely to go home again.
At school you don’t get the rest of the day off if you finish early.
And yes, they would shout at us to emphasize the importance of silence. In this way, the floor was exactly like school. Countless times I spoke to a teacher after an observation and asked them who the loudest person in their classroom was. Countless times they named a student. Every time it was the teacher.
And I learned this lesson after videotaping my own teaching and seeing that time and again in the classroom, I was the major interruption.
I had to work alone
As a corollary to working in silence, my work for the bank was almost always solitary. I had a specific task to do several hundred times each day, and so did the person beside me. We were not contributing to a larger project. We weren’t adding our “special touch” to a new creation.
Each day we would sit down next to each other (or six feet apart with COVID restrictions in place for safety) and parallel play.
This is reflective of the worst part of many school days. Or, more accurately, factory-style work is likely related to why schools often look like this. Students sitting in rows, all facing the same direction, doing essentially the same work at the same time, independently.
I am not saying this should never happen. There must be time for silent independent work at school. Children need to learn to manage their concentration and their work space. They need to learn to manage their distractions, perhaps first by removing those distractions altogether with smartphone restrictions and other rules. The best place for many children to practice this is at school.
If education can only promise you a job, it’s not an education at all.
— Jack Jose
I am saying that silent independent work should not be an all-day affair. There should be periods of silence and concentration. Classrooms should not be loud, bustling entertainment centers either. There must be respect for the needs of others to concentrate to do quality work.
There should be balance. A lack of balance between types of work and engagement creates a factory-like atmosphere in some schools that prepares students to only work in factories and to create widgets all day.
That brings up another problem: creating widgets all day.
I was not in charge of the end product
In the classroom, teachers almost always ask students to do work where they already know the answer. There are no surprises here.
If you are applying Avogadro’s constant in chemistry class, and you don’t get the expected answer, you haven’t “scienced.” You haven’t discovered something new. You messed up the math. And the teacher knows it because they set up the work to deliver a very specific set of answers.
This makes sense. Teachers have a great deal of content to cover. And a lot of education is helping students attain formal knowledge that is best gained through practice and rote memorization. This is especially true in math and social studies.
This practice and these concepts are the building blocks from which future inventions and discoveries will come.
In my factory bank job, I was not creating anything. I was a machine, coming up with the right answer every time. Or, more accurately, I was a highly perceptive sorting machine. They haven’t invented a computer that could open and sort the product like a human could. Yet.
Should schools prepare children for work?
The short answer is “no.”
The slightly longer answer is “no, and yes.”
Years ago at a high school fair, the parent of a prospective 7th grader sighed with exasperation, “they can’t ALL be ‘college preparatory’! Not EVERYONE is going to college!”
She was right. Almost every Cincinnati Public School was discussing their college preparatory approach to education at that fair. But certainly we did not expect every graduate to go directly on to more education. We used the term “college prep” to encourage students who were interested in learning to enroll. It was a sort of winnowing phrase.
We wanted children to pick the school that was the right fit up front, so we didn’t have to winnow them or move them on after they had already experienced failure and frustration at the school that was wrong for them.
Schools should prepare students for a rich and full life. Along the way, students should acquire the skills that contribute to success in a job or in anything else. These include timeliness, sociability, concentration, project management, and perseverance.
But our only goals can’t be to teach future citizens to sit silently, repeat the expected answer and the expected time, and not question authority. That is training. And while they might be useful in a factory job, those skills are not enough for a joyful, productive, and meaningful life.