Cathy Davidson - 2.3 - Training Farmers to be Factory Workers lyrics

Hi, welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about 19th century industrial age schooling. And I'm beginning today with a book that I wrote back in the late 1990's with a documentary photographer named Bill Bamberger. This is a book about the closing of the oldest furniture company in the south. The furniture company is called White Furniture. It opened in 1881 which was the same year that town it was in-- Mebane, North Carolina-- was incorporated. It was a post Civil War town, as many towns in North Carolina are, and some would say a carpetbagger's town. It opened because the laws about child labor; about overtime; salary; worker protection in Ma**achusetts and Michigan, which were the 2 primary furniture centers at the time, were pa**ed. And so, North Carolina was basically the 3rd world, to which the furniture industry was transported in 1881, in order that it could be more profitable. The shipping method at the time was steam engine. And you can tell even in this photograph, which is a photograph of the closing, it was a very old factory; no air conditioning, no heat. So it was very, very hot in summer and very, very cold in winter. But furniture's interesting. It's part of some big line: you had a job that you did and a sk** you did rather than work on an entire piece, of furniture like a craftsman. But the craftsmanship in getting a perfect finish or perfect varnish or a perfect cutting of the furniture was indeed a lot of craftsmanship. So in writing this book we interviewed people about the closing and, as much as this was dehumanizing factor labor, people were often second; third, even fourth generation workers at White Factory, and they were devastated by the closing. The closing, of course, is because now, the labor is cheaper not in North Carolina, but in China; in the Philippines; in other places to which the furniture industry has been transported. And more and more small third generation factories like the White Furniture Factory of Mebane, North Carolina have closed. That's the end of one kind of industrialism and the beginning of a new industrialism. Today, we're going to go back to those beginnings of industrial labor to think about what it meant to educate for what was called "the filter of the mind" for the Industrial Age. So we're going to be looking at some compulsory education, and how all forms of education were geared to be the filter for industrialism. And then we're going to look specifically at higher education, particularly in the time period from about 1876 when the first research university was invented in America and opened in America-- the Johns Hopkins University-- to 1925, which is the year the Scholastic Aptitude Tests are designed and adopt, multiple choice testing. The 19th century had a huge chore, and that was to convince farmers to be factory workers, and shopkeepers to be members of corporate America. The new conglomeration in cities of capital, of industry in the 19th century, meant you needed a certain kind of worker. And, in that progress from farmer to factory; from shopkeeper to corporate worker, education became a major, major component. And the secret weapon of Industrial Age education is the schoolmarm-- the stiff, stern schoolmarm-- whose job it was to enforce a certain kind of rigidity and hierarchy. Interestingly, compulsory in the education in America basically goes from Ma**achusetts to Mississippi. Ma**achusetts is the first state to pa** compulsory public education; Mississippi, in 1918, is the last one to do so. So from 1852 to 1918 are the dates of compulsory primary school education. I haven't looked at the archives of all of the states, but I've looked at a lot of them. And what's fascinating to me is that, in almost every state, the justification for having state funded support for public education is timeliness. How in the world are we going to teach these farmers to do things on time? Think about it. Think about the life of a farmer. If I'm a farmer, and I have a mental to-do list that I'm, today, going to go fix my fence, I change my plans if it turns out it's a pouring down raining day and there's no way I'm going to be able to go out into the field-- or my horse or my truck, depending on the era; it's going to get stuck in the mud. So, I change my plans. I don't have my to-do-list say I'm going to do it from 9:00 to 5:00. I going to go out into the field on a sunny day when the weather's appropriate and when the sun is up; I'm not going to go out in the dark. And that, of course, changes seasonally. So, a farmer's making constant changes about time; constant decisions, independent decisions about time. Also, let's say I go out into the field, and see that-- yes, indeed-- my fence is down, it needs mending, but my prized horse has gotten caught up in the fence and is bleeding from being cut up by the barbed wire. I'm an idiot, and in fact I'll probably lose my farm if I say "Oh, I said I was going to mend my fence today," instead of tending to the bleeding horse. I'm constantly making decisions based on what's the best thing that I think for my own survival and my farm's survival. Mostly probably collaborating; I mean I may be great at mending fences, but not so good at tending horses. So I call my neighbor, who can put some savon bandages on the horse, and in exchange I might fix his fence as well as my own. So again, there's a constant peer-to-peer learning-- one of our terms in this course-- a constant decision making based on the numbers of choices that are available and what one deems inside internally to be productive. Very different from the Humboldtian idea of productive new knowledge as measured by somebody else, by somebody hierarchically. Public compulsory education instilled the virtues, from early childhood on, of timeliness; hierarchy; orderliness; and standardization. We talked a little bit about this last time, and I just wanted, talk about a few examples. For example, no cla**room that I have ever found or heard of in the 19th century in public compulsory education was organized in any other way except in rows and in lines: each child in a row, each child in a line. Why? Because they're getting trained for the a**embly line. They're getting trained for that kind of orderly response; not towards figuring out if you're going to fix the fence or fix your horse, but sitting in your desk, taking out your paper at the same time, reading your book at the same time, learning your subject matter at the same time. It's the second thing I found in the archives: every state that I could find that was recommending publicly supported compulsory education divided up small units of learning. So you might do math from 8:00 till 9:00 in the morning, geometry from 9:00 till 10:00, reading from 10:00 to 11:00, geography from 11:00 till 12:00. It didn't matter if your kids were crazy for geometry and wanted to spend 2 hours on it, or totally puzzled and didn't understand. 10 o'clock, you put away your books and you take out the new ones. Think about it. It's an odd-- very odd-- view of learning that works so hard to segregate one subject from another. It's hard to imagine any other area of life where you're constantly segmenting what you learn in one area of knowledge, one sk** from another; we tend to blend those. And very little in our educational system-- that's true for industrial education, or the industrial educational system we've inherited now-- works to re-blend. In fact our testing, our idea of who's good in math or good in writing, all of that is based on a human ability that segregates knowledge. And that was enforced by public compulsory education; it's actually in the structures of the laws. Another thing that I found when I looked at the archives for the establishment of public secondary public primary education, and later secondary education, was an emphasis on how old you were when you started school. Some states said you had to be no more than 6 years and 1 month, or 5 years and 4 months; there's, there's a range. But somewhere between 5 and 6, the state will decide, that is the cutoff point for education. Now, anyone who's ever had a child, or been a child, knows that not every 6-year-old is ready for 1st grade, and some 4-year-olds are ready. But what was fascinating is this is about the regulation of the body, the regulation of human life, the regulation of cognition and maturity by an educational system that's trying to create the filter of industrialism; the filter of uniformity; the a**embly line of Fordism, even in the way it structures education. I'm fascinated by that. And in our next segment, we'll talk about 2 major thinkers who epitomized different views of attention and different ideas of scientific learning management. But for now, I just want us to all think about the beginning and the end of industrialization: from its opening and its closing, and the role that education-- not just learning, but education; the institution of education-- plays in creating us as industrial beings. And to ponder the next question-- the activist question: What role do we want education to play, in, not this world, but this world, the world of the iPod: "iPod, Therefore I Am"; "I Think, Therefore I Am." That's the big question. We'll be returning to it in our next segment. Thank you so much.