Mass Education Was Designed to Quash Critical Thinking

While I was advising education policymakers in different countries, I dug into the history of their education systems, and I noticed an intriguing pattern: Primary education was created well before the arrival of democracy, sometimes under oligarchic or absolutist regimes. That made me doubt the conventional wisdom that democracy was the main driver behind the expansion of primary education.

I was curious to know if the pattern I’d noticed in a few countries held globally, so I analyzed data on the rise of primary education worldwide and discovered that the majority of children in most countries gained access to primary schooling long before democracy took root. This is true not only for countries like China or Russia, but also for most Western countries.

This led me to ask: Why were non-democratic regimes so interested in mass schooling, and what legacies and implications do these non-democratic origins hold for modern education systems? These questions ultimately became the heart of “Raised to Obey.”

In the book, you argue that elites introduced mass education as a way to control and discipline lower-class children. How was this done, and why was it seen as necessary?

Mass education was really crafted as a clever system to instill obedience to the state and its laws. Schools used rewards and punishments to enforce rules, moral education dominated the curriculum and even basic reading and writing exercises taught compliance, like when students were asked to spell words like “duty” and “order.”

School routines — following schedules, marching in lines, asking permission — all reinforced discipline. The entire system, from teacher training to school inspections, aimed to create citizens who wouldn’t question authority or disrupt the status quo.

Governments saw schools as essential to maintaining internal security, viewing primary education less as a means to reduce poverty or promote industrialization than as a way to prevent social disorder.

The timing of when primary education expanded is revealing: It often followed episodes of mass violence or rebellion. Prussia created its public primary education system after peasant revolts, Massachusetts passed its first education law after Shays’ Rebellion in the late 1780s and Colombia accelerated education access after La Violencia, which lasted from 1948 to 1958.

In each case, internal threats heightened elites’ anxieties about mass violence and the breakdown of social order, intensifying their fear of the masses and driving them to support mass education to transform “unruly” and “savage” children into compliant, law-abiding citizens.

How can your findings about the history of education inform current political debates over textbook bans and curriculum changes?

The anti-critical race theory curriculum reforms and textbooks bans of the last four years and Donald Trump’s recent announcement that he’ll promote “patriotic education” and prohibit “radicalized” ideas from entering the classroom — while these may sound unprecedented, are no anomaly. They fit the cross-national pattern I uncover in the book. For the last 200 years, politicians in Western societies have become especially interested in teaching children that the status quo is OK following episodes of mass uprising against existing institutions.

This is precisely what has happened in the U.S. The Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 made Republican politicians especially anxious about institutional reform. Then-President Trump responded by setting up the 1776 Commission to strengthen patriotic education and to prevent children’s exposure to the concept of institutionalized racism. Republican state legislators and governors followed suit with curriculum reforms in red states, and the president-elect has made it clear he intends to extend these efforts to blue states too.

A key lesson from my book is that curriculum reforms tend to stick around for a very long time, outlasting the government that adopted them. It’s important for people to be aware of this fact. If you care about the content of education, now is the time to become involved in shaping the curriculum.

How do you respond to those who might argue that, despite its origins, mass education has been a positive force for societal progress and equality in many places?

I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for teachers who equipped me with the capabilities to live an autonomous and prosperous life. Education should do this for everyone, but schools worldwide are failing to deliver on that promise. Most education systems are still more focused on instilling a specific set of values than on cultivating the critical thinking skills essential for individual autonomy.

Roughly a third of children remain unable to read a simple sentence even after four years of schooling. This deficit of skills disproportionately affects low-income students. It exists in both developing and developed countries, and the problem has been recognized by numerous international organizations.

In the U.S., for example, children from high-income families enter kindergarten with much stronger literacy skills than low-income children, and K-12 schools fail to close that gap. I argue that these problems are rooted in the very origins of modern education systems, which were not designed to promote skills or equity.

What do you hope policymakers, educators, and readers in general will take away from “Raised to Obey” in terms of how we approach the future of education?

For public schools to live up to their promise, education systems need to be deeply  transformed. The systems we have today were inherited from a time when promoting compliance was the goal, a time when critical thinking was considered dangerous. In the 21st century, critical thinking skills are essential to safeguard liberal democracy, to get a good job and to remain internationally competitive. The task ahead is not about fine-tuning the specific subjects taught. The challenge is to reimagine K-12 public schools as spaces that genuinely foster critical inquiry and creative, independent thought.

As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into education, do you have any words of hope or caution with the advent of these technologies?

The rise of AI has made the need to promote critical thinking skills urgent. Because of how most schools operate, students often develop a tendency to memorize and repeat what their teacher says. In doing so, they give away their power to think for themselves. AI tools are no different in this respect; the main difference is that we give our power to think for ourselves to an algorithm instead of a person. Having strong critical thinking skills can help guard against this, which is why such skills have never been more important.