Contemplating the Metaphor of Schools as Factories

Firstly, to my fellow cohort-mates:  if you haven’t read the Introduction to William Ayers’ To Teach, I highly recommend that you do so!  You may recall during the first week of classes that one of our teachers talked about the assembly line structure of our school systems in terms of the physical structure of our schools as well as the fact that all children start school at basically the same age (the “wax test”), whether they are developmentally ready or not, and are “pushed” through the system at the same pace regardless of their abilities or maturity levels.  Well, Ayers also touches on this metaphor in his Introduction.  On page 7, Ayers describes “the controlling metaphor that posits education as a commodity rather than a right and a journey and that imagines schools as little factories cranking out products.”  This view of education that sees schools as factories, children as raw materials and education as a product is a very impersonal and inflexible perspective, in my opinion.  Given our limited tax dollars (especially in light of the recent economic downturn), it is understandable that the “powers that be” want to make educational institutions as cost-efficient as possible, however, we have to question whether it is really ethical to apply strict economic principles to the “business” of education which is, at its heart, so very human or to apply principles of mass production to children who are such a wide array of unique individuals rather than uniform parts and products.  As Ayers points out, if we commit to run schools as businesses, do we then justify sacrificing students that aren’t “performing” at acceptable levels, letting them fall to the wayside because they cannot keep up with the “production line”?  I really like how he contrasts this view to that of viewing schools as models of democracy where each child is valued as an individual – being “person-oriented” [democracy model] versus “thing-oriented” [factory model] (Ayers, p.3).  This stark contrast really caught me off guard and challenged my thinking because I have always thought of our American values of democracy and capitalism as being so intertwined.  But now I see that with respect to education, they are very much opposed to one another.  Democracy values individuality and equal rights whereas capitalism values efficiency and conformity.  If we apply democratic values to education we can envision a system where children start at different ages and move through at different speeds, classrooms that are diverse not only in terms of skin color but also age, a system where every child feels challenged but not discouraged.  Contemplating this issue raises a lot of big questions in my mind . . . Who are the decision makers that need to be persuaded to effect such change?  What role can we, as teachers, play in advocating such change?