Alexander Inglis six basic functions of school
Alexander Inglis makes it perfectly clear that public schools serve to manufacture a manageable population and to put down dissent and originality: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical intervention into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
In his 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, Inglis breaks down the purpose of modern schooling into six basic functions. These are:
- the adaptive function
- the integrating function
- the differentiating function
- the selective function
- the propaedeutic function
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you consider Inglis an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. James Conant, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system (The US public schooling system has its roots in Prussia) was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
References
- Gatto, T., John. (1992). Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Chapter 6. Against School (p. 112). Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers.