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Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

It's not wrong. Compulsory school attendance was established in Austria-Hungary by Maria Theresa and while these schools were different, just 50 years passed and the schools looked almost exactly like they do today, because of Prussian pressure. Prussian schools invented the system of sitting in a classroom, learning a topic by drill and then exams, and we still do that today. The schools here in former Austria-Hungary and Prussia are actually proud of this heritage... There are many books (both novels and not) from that time period that are also describing the schools, you can read one for yourself.

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I don't understand your comment. What is not wrong?

Maria Teresa's reign started in 13 September 1745, yes? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Theresa

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_Un... :

> All the New England colonies required towns to set up schools, and many did so. In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony made "proper" education compulsory

The link I gave points to several other educational models in the US before the importation of the Prussian model, and points out:

> In fact, the “Prussian model” superseded an education system that actually did look like a factory. The monitorial system and its variants the Lancaster, the Bell, and the Madras systems, involved schools that were housed in large warehouses – larger often than many of the nascent factories at the time – with hundreds of students in one massive classroom with one teacher. Students were grouped (30 or so together) not by age but by reading proficiency, with more advanced students – “monitors” – assigned to tutor and train the others.

adding also that "the major innovation of the Prussian model was in levying a tax to fund compulsory schooling, not in establishing a method for instruction".

I also don't know what "exactly like they do today", given that my experience in the US school system during the 1970s and 1980s seems rather different than what I read about during, say, the Depression era or the late 1800s.

> > All the New England colonies required towns to set up schools, and many did so. In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony made "proper" education compulsory

That didn't mean compulsory daily school attendance. It worked differently at the time - mostly religious figures were teaching children every Saturday. Maria Theresa was the first to set up compulsory daily school attendance.

> > In fact, the “Prussian model” superseded an education system that actually did look like a factory. The monitorial system and its variants the Lancaster, the Bell, and the Madras systems, involved schools that were housed in large warehouses – larger often than many of the nascent factories at the time – with hundreds of students in one massive classroom with one teacher. Students were grouped (30 or so together) not by age but by reading proficiency, with more advanced students – “monitors” – assigned to tutor and train the others.

Yes, and this Prussian model is exactly what education looks like in Europe today. Might be different in the USA, I am European so I don't know. That the previous model was even worse doesn't change anything about our today's comparison to factories. Factories changed too.

> adding also that "the major innovation of the Prussian model was in levying a tax to fund compulsory schooling, not in establishing a method for instruction".

If the schools and literature here in former Austria-Hungary and Prussia are to be trusted, this is wrong. The Prussians did this and a lot more to improve their military, and the Austrian-Hungarians did it for the same reason as the Prussians were beginning to outcompete them.

> I also don't know what "exactly like they do today", given that my experience in the US school system during the 1970s and 1980s seems rather different than what I read about during, say, the Depression era or the late 1800s.

Lucky you.

> That didn't mean compulsory daily school attendance

"Compulsory" meant that children were required to be educated, either by parents or by a school, in reading. In Massachusetts, towns with at least 50 families were required to fund (either by tax or by school fees) a primary school. Towns with at least 100 families had to fund a grammar school that could prepare children for Harvard, which at that time was a religious school.

See http://lburlbaw.cehd.tamu.edu/edci658/webb%20hist%20of%20am%... page 93 for what a typical school master's duties were, in this case for Dorchester. You can see it was not once-a-week education.

Note that it was not compulsory to attend grammar school. But from what little I could tell, the children who went to primary school were going in winter, and not just one day per week. So I think you are talking about your country's historical experience?

But this article is about the US, and the US interpretation of the Prussian model, and as I point out, viewed through a specific lens that libertarians and charter- and home-school proponents often use - which somehow seems to minimize the parts of history which contradict their viewpoints.

BTW, the US allows home schooling, so does not have 'compulsory daily school attendance', strictly speaking.

> this Prussian model is exactly what education looks like in Europe today

I have no idea of what you are talking about. I have a friend who teaches at a comprehensive school in England. They do not have 100s of students in one classroom with one teacher. I know Germans and Swedes with school-age children, and their children are also not taught this way.

When you write "this is wrong", what do you mean? What were the other innovations on the Prussian model compared to other systems?

What you write seems to concern the downstream effect of education reform on, for example, the military. But that's a different aspect than what the quote was about.

Homeschooling laws vary by state in the US, from easy to bureaucratic hassle. Education is compulsory in the US, even for homeschoolers. Generally homeschoolers have to comply with various state standards, with enforcement ranging from lax to strict.

Regardless of the history or how schools got the way they are, they do follow an industrial model that teaches conformity, obedience to authority, and that individual ideas and interests don’t matter much. Not every teacher or every school is a terrible environment, but too many of them are more like prison than a place to learn and grow.

My three kids chose homeschooling, actually unschooling, for all or part of their childhood and teen years. When they chose to attend public school it was because their friends did. I think they got very little “education” in that environment. They were always free to choose, which is not an option for most children forced to attend the nearest school.

Yes, and I wrote that to point out that emteycz's comment about "compulsory daily school attendance", which wasn't true in colonial MA, still isn't true now in the US, so if that's the key point for what the Prussian model means, then we don't have it.

> they do follow an industrial model that teaches conformity

I earlier pointed to http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model and its objections to that characterization of the history of US education.

See the section starting "Sal Khan is hardly the only one who tells a story of “the factory of model of education” that posits the United States adopted Prussia’s school system in order to create a compliant populace. It’s a story cited by homeschoolers and by libertarians ... the history of schools doesn’t map so neatly onto the history of factories (and visa versa). As education historian Sherman Dorn has argued, “it makes no sense to talk about either ‘the industrial era’ or the development of public school systems as a single, coherent phase of national history.”"

I'll ask you - what do you mean by "conformity" and "obedience to authority"? As an example to test an extreme case, if your children decided to set fire to the house, to see what would happen, would you prevent them? If so, is that enforcing obedience to authority or conformity?

We can look back to colonial MA to see that part of "conformity" and "obedience to authority" was that children should be taught religions beliefs and the laws of the colony. Your children had to learn at least the latter, so how is that also not teaching conformity?

We can also look to, say, the charity schools in England during the 1600s (definitely pre-industrial) and see that there too was some sort of teaching of conformity and obedience to authority.

So you can hardly single out the industrial model in that regard - it seems intrinsic to education at some level or other. Even in unschooling.

Furthermore, the US education system is both class and race based. See https://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897s05/files/hiddencurric... for an overview from 1980. ("In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure.", "In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer.", "In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently.", "In the executive elite school, work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers.")

Your characterization of US schools does not seem to include all of that diversity.

As for "individual ideas and interests don’t matter much", certainly my own experience in the US education system doesn't agree with your characterization.

In the 1970s I was placed in the gifted program, with a once-per-week "enrichment program". Among other things, I remember that at the start of the day the teachers listed available classes and we got to choose which ones we would attend.

That's certainly a school system which supports the differing needs of individuals, yes? I stopped that program in 3rd grade, but even then I still remember options like being able to volunteer in the library instead of going to some classes, or career period where we tried different activities that interested us. (I learned how to use a printing press and ended up making a end-of-the-year signature book for the 5th and 6th grade classes.)

Then by 7th grade we started having electives, where we could choose those classes which fit our interests. In my case it was math (up to ODEs), physical sciences (up to AP chem and physics), CS (up to AP programming), and history (up to AP US and European history). In particular those math classes were set up special for the handful of us interested in courses beyond AP calc, and were taught for college credit.

While others were interested in art, or shop, or music, or foreign languages, or one of the many other courses taught at a large urban high school. (Something it appears your children did not get to experience.)

So the idea that the "individual ideas and interests don’t matter much" is foreign to my experience. Note that my high school was border line between middle-class and affluent, of those 5 school types I referenced.

Also, this was in the 1970s and 1980s, with teachers who lived through the counter-culture 1960s, and before the Reagan tax-cuts and following neoliberal era destroyed public services while pushing for an authoritarian "business" organization of what was left.

But the point behind my anecdotal evidence is to reinforce the point I quoted earlier - “it makes no sense to talk about either ‘the industrial era’ or the development of public school systems as a single, coherent phase of national history.”"

Going further afield, schools like NYC's School of Performing Arts (which provided the base for the movie and TV series 'Fame'), Bronx Science, and other magnet schools are meant to support individual interests, and aren't necessarily the nearest school. Are those part of the industrial model that says individual ideas and interests don’t matter much?

Or I'll quote from my grandfather's autobiography of his experience during the Great Depression:

> [At trade school] you could get full high school credits besides learning a shop. In those days (in Canada) there was virtually no graduation anyway. You "got your diploma" from Regina the Capital by mail and so you were finished. I think [my brother] got his. I didn't. I opted not for one by for 4 shops. You did classroom work with competent teachers, but (if you so desired) you could spend most of your time in the shop. I took electric wiring. (We actually romex-wired an entire house which we had framed in the shop. I also took woodworking which included the building of the frame house and many finer shop learning experiences, such as lathe work, jointing, mortising. But my greatest interest was machine shop and motor mechanics. These were valuable to me. The machine shop was well equipped with shaper, lathes, forge, grinding & cutting tools. I worked there all hours on my special project – a little one-cylinder gas engine. I cast the crankcase of aluminum (recycled) and dressed it out on the 8 foot lathe. I cast the piston, built crankshaft, turned flywheel made connecting rod & cylinder head on shaper. Turned valves, but didn't get to making the manifolds. We had our classes which included designing & putting projects into mechanical drawings.

> The auto mechanic shop was just as interesting. I did oxy-acetylene welding, wet battery construction, engine disassembly and reassembly. Classroom projects were very valuable. We studied internal combustion, transmissions (it was before automatics) drive systems rear-ends, suspension systems etc.

Again, is this part of the industrial model you describe?

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