Factory model school

Factory model school and factory model education are terms describing both a style of learning and of educational facilities. The educational style, or pedagogy, first emerged in Europe in the late 18th Century and then in North America in the mid-19th century. The key characteristics of factory model education are top-down management, separation from the community, emphasis on management, centralized planning, standardization, outcomes designed to meet societal needs, and efficiency in producing results. They are frequently compared to the factory system of production. Factory model school facilities are typified by the school design of the mid to late 20th century - the modern or international style of architecture typified by efficiency and uniformity, often resembling a factory building. The system has been described as being "designed to create docile subjects and factory workers.”

The origins of factory model education and schools date back to the Prussian educational system introduced into what is now eastern Germany in the late 18th century by Frederick the Great. In North America, it emerged in the constitution of Michigan in 1835 before being brought to national attention by Horace Mann after a visit to Prussia in 1843. Mann, then secretary of the Massachusetts board of education (the first in the United States) has been styled as "the father of the American public school system." He studied many educational systems before promoting and introducing universal, free, and secular education based on the Prussian model as the most efficient way known to teach literacy on a large scale. Within six decades every state in the USA had introduced a similar system.

King Frederick's system was designed to teach obedience to solidify his control of the country. In the United States it found favor for its efficiency and secular form. American educators such as Ellwood Cubberley emphasized the rise of American education as a powerful force for literacy, democracy, and equal opportunity, and as a basis for higher education and advanced research institutions. Cubberley and social engineering theorists promoted the system as a way to industrialize the educational process as well as a tool for social engineering. In Public School Administration (1916), he described "schools as, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.” Cubberley wrote that a school's role is "to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as part of our American race, and to implant in their children so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order and popular government."

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