Recently, I was talking with one of my secondary school students. He couldn’t recall much about the actual science content from that day’s lesson. What stuck with him, instead, was that his teacher thought it was imperative that the chairs were lined up perfectly. So essential that nearly ten minutes of the lesson were devoted to it. This was followed by a lecture on how disappointed in themselves the students should feel, since the students ought to know GCSEs are coming up (in three years’ time).
Not much science was being learned in that science lesson. But something important was being learned. And it was exactly the kind of lesson schools excel at teaching.
As Alison Gopnik observes in The Gardener and the Carpenter, schools are remarkably effective at teaching children how to succeed in school. Mastering the rules, routines, and expectations of the institution itself. How to get house points and high grades. How to avoid demerits and sanctions. That is what this teacher was reinforcing. How to behave in this institution.
Historically, this is not accidental. Early schools in Europe were founded by religious institutions, with the aim of instilling doctrine and moral values. Later, states adopted and expanded schooling, often modeled on the Prussian system, which explicitly aimed to produce disciplined, obedient citizens and reliable workers. As John Taylor Gatto and others have argued, mass education was less about nurturing curiosity than about training populations to fit into industrial and national needs.
This legacy remains visible today. National curricula, standardised exams, and even initiatives like promoting “British Values” all point to the ways in which schools shape conformity over curious learning. As Paulo Freire put it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the classroom often functions less as a space of liberation than as a mechanism for reproducing hierarchy and obedience.
So when a science teacher spends a hefty chunk of a lesson lecturing about chairs and distant exams, they are, in a sense, fulfilling the system’s design perfectly. The children are not being educated. They are being schooled. Schooled into obedience, compliance, and staying in line. It is an efficient and effective system.
Having compliant people who will clock in on time, keep to the company's schedule, eat and go to the toilet in their alloted time, and essentially do what they are told for a large portion of their week without argument is great for businesses.
It is great for schools too.
But what is great for children?
What is great for society and community?
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