Raised to Obey

“The expansion of primary education in the West was driven not by democratic ideals, but by the state’s desire to control citizens, and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority.”

This is a quote from Agustina Paglayan’s new book Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. Paglayan is a professor of political science at UC San Diego and was a recent guest on The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas’s podcast Good on Paper. Here are a few excerpts from Demas’s conversation with Paglayan:

Paglayan: “…what I saw was that some of my siblings who needed more support from school in order to do well – they weren’t getting that support. And so that was always something that was a little troubling to me to try to understand. Why is it that those who get more easily distracted, those who maybe have more behavioral problems or more difficulty concentrating, they’re not getting the support they need? That’s what schools are supposed to do and who they are supposed to be helping the most. At least, that what I grew up thinking.”

“And so that always was at the heart of my interest in education. I mean, the other really relevant piece of what drove me to study education, in terms of my personal experience, is just that I grew up in a family where education was the most important thing. And my mom, in particular – she sacrificed a lot to be able to afford one of the best schools in Argentina, which is the country where I grew up. We didn’t have health insurance for a while. There were a lot of different things that she sacrificed along the way. And so I grew up with this sense that education is the most important investment you can make in order to live a life that is not just a prosperous life but a life with individual autonomy, where you can pursue your dreams, if you want.”

“And then what I started seeing as I started working on education – I worked both at the World Bank, helping with education reform in different countries, and also at Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis – as I started getting to know more about education systems, I started noticing, well, we have these ideas about how education is supposed to be about improving living standards, promoting individual autonomy, etcetera. But education systems worldwide are not living up to that promise.”

“And so that was also something that led me to be further interested in education systems and figuring out this puzzle, which began as a family-specific puzzle, but then I started observing these broader patterns cross-nationally.”

Demsas: “Do you still believe that education holds all those values that you did growing up?”

Paglayan: “I think education certainly has the promise to accomplish that. I don’t think education systems were designed to accomplish that, and I think that’s a big part of the explanation why they don’t live up to that promise.”

…

Demsas: “So I think it’s a good time for you to give us your thesis, because I do think there’s a pretty-convincing refutation of many of these traditional explanations, and people are probably left wanting more now.”

Paglayan: “Sure. So what the book argues, essentially, is that the expansion of primary education in the west was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at any age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority – with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo, from which these political elites who are using primary education benefit from.”

…

“The other core argument of the book is about when exactly governments are likely to turn to education for this indoctrination and social-control and instilling obedience purposes. And that’s another key part of the book, which is to show what we were talking about earlier, that these efforts to use education as a form of indoctrination are particularly likely to intensify when political elites experience social unrest and mass protest against the status quo that these elites benefit from.”

…

Paglayan: “…So these days, it is absolutely true that if you ask a politician why they want to provide education, they’re going to tell you, Well, to promote economic development, to reduce poverty and inequality. In public, that’s what they’re going to say, because to say, We want to provide education to create docile and obedient citizens, would be political suicide, right? So usually that’s not what they’re gonna say.”

“So what this group of researchers at the Center for Global Development did was to try to get policy makers – they surveyed 900 policy makers across developing countries – to try to get them to reveal their true motive for providing education, without these policy makers knowing that’s what they were revealing.”

“And so what they used was these forced-choice experiments, where they essentially gave policy makers the option to choose between two different sets of education systems….And what they saw, by having many different pairs of comparisons and having these policy makers choose between these pairs, was that, by far, forming dutiful citizens was the goal that they prioritized over these other options [skilled workforce or literate individuals were the other options].”

So when we lead learning, what is the overall outcome we’re after? Agustina Paglayan’s answer is to create a class of people raised to obey. Maybe that’s the reason our traditional public school system struggles so much these days – there’s too many conflicting outcomes being worked on in classrooms so that “raising to obey” struggles to win the day? And, if young learners and their families are interested in something different than showing up everyday to learn how to obey, then isn’t it time to create a new model of learning that better meets their needs?

Til tomorrow. SVB