Trump Should Cut the Department of Education. History Tells Us Why.

0:01 in 21st century America the only thing we know in living memory is the public school system very close to how it exists today you have school districts all across the country there's State oversight of the districts there's the Federal Department of Education that's been around since the 1970s the public schooling model was pretty much universally adopted by the early 19 or 20th century your parents went to it your grandparents went to it it's likely that your greatr parents went through it

0:31 like nobody remembers going to a one room Schoolhouse anymore being locally educated if you do that you're weird like and that's how every generation that is still alive thinks about it so it feels like this very static status quo thing like this is just how it is this is the way you learn yeah uh it's the way you don't learn but and I will I'm not just going to throw around bold juicy statements I'm actually going to back all of this

0:56 up for for the majority of human history that is not we learned for the majority of human history we didn't have recorded history as we know it now um and children learned and grew up and became functioning members of their tribe or their society just fine and then over the course of more modern history most people were educated on a local level there never was a National Institution of education and then in the mid 19th

1:27 century America was expanding very quickly it had a very large influx of immigrants who came from very disperate cultures very disperate places um Everybody homogenizing nicely was not necessarily organically happening as quickly as people wanted um particularly in the Northeast and particularly in Massachusetts there were concerns about how well all of these incoming immigrants were going to integrate into American society and so

2:00 the first stab at designing a more centralized education system was embarked upon and by the early 20th century it was esta it was you know put into place across the country um the system was designed with you know it was designed to be a system it was designed to be as cohesive and as consistent as possible and so it was and it was also designed to educate kids at scale at one level that makes a

2:32 lot of sense right so you have a lot of kids youve got a lot of kids coming into the society you could say well when we got that happening right now we got a lot of immigration in the country and you want there to be a culture that's a thing right so how are you going to do that and have some notion that a minimum standard is being delivered right isn't that seems fair seems like a re seems like reasonable

3:00 goals it sounds very humanitarian honestly you're going to educate children who wouldn't necessarily have access or resources to education otherwise you're going to mandate that it is paid for by the government so even if your family doesn't have any resour resources to put towards education your child will still get a very equal they have an equal opportunity to education it sounds very Noble in practice it works very poorly there were a couple sort of prerogatives of the way the

3:26 system was set up in the first place one is that it had to be scalable so you had to have a fairly substantial number of kids in a classroom like pretty high student to teacher ratio because you need to be able to staff a school and educate kids at scale and so you have 20 to 30 kids in a classroom you're dividing them by grade level so that the teacher can focus on instructing everybody at the class in the class at

3:50 the same time but children do not all learn at the exact same Pace you don't come with factory settings it's like okay on day 183 of being a seven-year-old you're going to be ready to you know learn how to divide something like it doesn't work that way and so the needs of the children inside the classroom are never being universally met it was also designed to be sort of a bridge between childhood and the rapidly industrializing world so it was intended

4:22 to train kids for gainful employment and integrate all of these children of immigrants into being useful members of the adult Workforce and so it was not intended to cultivate curiosity creativity any of the virtues that we like really appreciate in Innovative and industrious people uh those things aren't useful and so none of those were put in the equation at all I've been uh going back and reading um John Taylor God's Weapons of Mass

4:52 instruction fantastic book there seems like there's two threads as he lays out and I'd love for you to expand on this from your from all your work which is you have this sort of this Prussian system established under autovon bismar that is very much a produce willing can cannon fodder and loyal Prussian citizens as its North Star pledge allegiance to the flag Nazi style salutes and all that kind of stuff then

5:24 you also have I think the Rockefellers and other uh players in American industrial society which is very particular to the time the time of the beginning of the of the assembly line which we aren't living in anymore actually but but there's this sense that like oh how are we going to have people get into these almost widget like jobs let's turn them into widgets and that's seen and talked about quite explicitly like let's knock off the

5:56 edges here and the third piece of the puzzle as I understand it is this is the dawn of the Progressive Era and so you have this like early trust the science Eugenics we we know how to create the perfect man you look at like the con like the art at the time and like the world fair and it's all got this sort of kind of optimistic futurism that also is like a kind of creepy totalitarian worldview at the same time

6:28 is that how you see this this mix going on like what how do you understand the different forces at work at the birth of public education in the US so Horus man who's the the granddaddy of Education in America as we know it was responsible for the Inception of the public education system in Massachusetts which is where the Forefront of public education Across America was established he went to Prussia to study the Prussian education model which as you said it was

6:58 intended to make build a cohesive Society where everyone was a good Prussian Citizen and was would be a willing member of the military it's ideal graduate was someone who didn't think too hard for themselves because if they did they might say well why am I going to fight in this War and why am I going to be Canon F that doesn't sound like a good life I'm what if I want to be a farmer or a writer or

7:23 a poet those types of Divergent thinkings are not helpful to a system a system always always cares about the sustaining of said system that's its number one priority so if you're causing problems for the system not good and so that was very explicitly lauded as the gold standard of what education ought to be and in the late 19th early 20th century how we should educate our children was actually like a very popular thing to discuss it was like a

7:52 very common conversation topic much more than it is today like it was fashionable to have an opinion about it and so people were ly thinking about this and it was much more part of the cultural millu now we just kind of assume well the Department of Education exists and this is how we've always done it even though that's not true the average person doesn't have strong opinions about which modality of education is the best and which pedagogical approach is

8:16 superior should we teach kids through the Socratic method should we teach them with a teacher in front of the classroom lecturing or should we use AI driven apps that can you know help each kid learn at exactly their Pace should we have kids with a teacher in front of the classroom at all or should we have them doing independent work Cycles like in montauri classrooms where you know four and 5-year-olds are working all by themselves without any adult

8:39 intervention like nobody had opinions on these things or nobody has them now or very few people do it's kind of like a weird Fringe area of interest but at the time people had opinions about it but there was this sense of like we were building towards a rapidly industrializing world so you had to be effective at being on the assembly line or working of of rapidly industrializing job in order to fit into the emerging economy so I think you're right the

9:04 forces were very very explicitly pulling strings within the development of the education system and when you go back and read the literature it's very explicitly there no one was hiding it if you like this clip you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at dad Saves America so be sure to hit the like button subscribe and ring that Bell so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week