Spinal Fire Scientia Est Potentia

The Forgotten Purpose

In 1918, the Alexander Inglis, an emeritus professor at Harvard, who now has a lectern named after him, wrote a book called "Principles of Secondary Education." We can trace the origin of our overall school structure in the US to this book and this time. This is because Inglis was specifically writing a book that would be pushed by the major industrial foundations in order to change the paradigm of American education.

In the book, Inglis describes the six main functions of secondary school. They are the adjustive or adaptive function, the integrating function, the diagnostic and directive function, the differentiating function, the selective function, and the propaedeutic function. The school system laid out in Inglis’ book was designed to promote these six functions and we can still find evidence of their presence today.

1) The adaptive function (schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority the bells, the trivial rules, and rewards and punishments are nothing more than a Pavlovian training method designed to accustom students to a life of top down instruction).

2) The integrating function (this might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. Standardized testing is the epitome of this function. Every unit will be strictly controlled for quality like a McDonald’s cheeseburger).

3) The diagnostic and directive function (school is meant to determine each student's proper social role. The numbers and letters that we assign to bits of knowledge and acts of behavior are to be used to determine a student’s future despite the assumptions that went into their assignation).

4) The differentiating function (once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. Development of the mind beyond that which is required for basic instruction in social roles is not only waste of resources, it is dangerous for social order).

5) The selective function (schools are meant to tag students with poor grades, remedial placement, and other diagnoses in order to identify the “unfit” for further intervention. This is a eugenics program as defined by Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and whose ideas spawned a program that was funded in the United States by John D. Rockefeller. We used to direct these “tagged” individuals into forced sterilization programs, now we cram them full of pharmaceuticals and deny them opportunities for social advancement.

6) The propaedeutic function (the societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. School trains students for managers. The etymology of the word pedagogy comes from the Greek word paidagogos, who were a class of slaves whose responsibility it was to guide students through the lessons of the masters. Students will learn fixed habits of reaction to authority, how to shift from one person giving instruction to another, and how to obey without question and without the weight of troubling ethics).

Consequently, a generation later, many academics found all of this to be abhorrent. The eminent Jacques Ellul related his ideas on the effect of government propaganda in schools by stating:

The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by the word of experts. The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under the best conditions. Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed. Years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The student, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.

Ellul’s comment could very well have been made in 2010. This is because the structure that Inglis laid out still exists and bears fruit. We can see the branches on the tree taking the form of ritual boredom, constant shifting of subjects despite individual interest, the lack of real application, the rote memorization, the humiliation, the constant testing of government approved content, the degradation of opportunity for personal expression. The list goes on and on. We attempt to teach children that there is joy in learning yet the structure of the institution crushes that sentiment before it ever has a chance to grow.

The set of assumptions that the structures of education now use, are still passively churning out the designed results. In order to truly change the system, we need to tackle the assumptions and the structures that act as its foundation. This is necessary to affect any meaningful reform for education in our time. This is why research into the foundations of the educational system is so important and this is why I want to be a part of it.

There is an old saying that states, “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” I would like to amend this statement in order to reflect the nature of institution that we belong to say, “If every student is a nail, then all you’ll ever need is a hammer.” That is the blindness that guides our institution. That is why we need to open our eyes.