(2015-04-25) Watters Messy Factory Schooling History

Audrey Watters thinks most people's (Sal Khan, Ken Robinson, John Taylor Gatto...) history/model of Factory Schooling is over-simplified.

Her history is good to read just for background.

But her real point is to fight certain flavors of School Reform she doesn't like.

Many education reformers today denounce the “factory model of education” with an appeal to new machinery and new practices that will supposedly modernize the system. That argument is now and has been for a century the rationale for education technology... Pressey, much like Sal Khan and other education technologists today, believed that teaching machines could personalize and “revolutionize” education by allowing students to move at their own pace through the curriculum. The automation of the menial tasks of instruction would enable education to scale, Pressey – presaging MOOC proponents – asserted... , with control moved out of the hands of labor (teachers) and into the hands of a new class of engineers, out of the realm of the government and into the realm of the market.

I agree with her on fighting the pseudo-reformists, but I hope she does more to flesh out the design of a Schooling model she's in favor of. Because I fear she's in the More Of The Same Schooling camp...

(See also recognition of phases of model in Disrupting Class.)