II. The Industrial Factory

The second educational metaphor to be considered is that of the industrial factory. This metaphor, unlike Plato’s cave, did not originate first from a writer’s pen but rather from the multifaceted Industrial Revolution that took place from the late 18th through the 19th century. Two particularly important aspects of the industrial factory that arose during this period were interchangeable parts and the assembly line.

At the beginning of the 19th century, cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney championed the manufacture of interchangeable parts in the production of muskets at his armory. Whereas before an artisan gunsmith had been responsible for crafting each weapon by hand from start to finish, now identical component pieces were manufactured separately en masse and then assembled together to form a complete musket. This had obvious benefits, for both production and repairs were faster, easier, and cheaper. This new system also meant that the necessary qualifications of workers were quite different. No longer was each weapon produced by a sole craftsman who understood the intimate connections between all the parts. Now separate groups of relatively unskilled workers could produce each part, and it was not necessary for them to understand the assembly and proper function of the musket as a whole. It is quite possible, for example, to manufacture a given number of perfectly acceptable firing pins each day without understanding how the firing pin will function as part of the entire musket or knowing how to connect it to the other parts of the firing mechanism.

In addition to interchangeable parts, a second important aspect of the industrial factory was the assembly line. This idea was used and developed throughout the 19th century and was famously “perfected” by the Ford Motor Company in the early 20th century
for the production of Model T automobiles. The basic concept behind an assembly line is that the product being manufactured is assembled in discrete segments by workers who remain stationary along a production line. Each worker is thus responsible for performing a simple task over and over while other necessary tasks are simultaneously performed by other workers along the line. Like the concept of interchangeable parts, the assembly line has obvious benefits in terms of efficiency: fewer tools are needed, and mastery of a simple repetitive task increases production speed and reduces the occurrence of error. Also like the production of interchangeable parts, an assembly line requires relatively unskilled labor. Workers on a tractor assembly line, for example, can perform their job quite satisfactorily without having any idea how to accomplish the other tasks necessary to assemble the entire tractor or understanding how their specific task contributes meaningfully to the assembly of the entire product.

As interchangeable parts and the assembly line became the accepted norm in factory production, the industrial factory gradually became the dominant metaphor by which to organize the process of education as well. Thus, as historian Page Smith notes, by the final decades of the 19th century education had come to be treated primarily as a “knowledge industry.”5 Consider, for example the daily and annual routines of both teachers and students in a post-Industrial school. The teacher, like the factory worker, became a specialist. Whereas before a school teacher (often in a one-room schoolhouse) was responsible for crafting a small group of local students in various curricular subjects over the course of multiple years, teachers soon became responsible for a specific subject area or grade level. The Algebra teacher might now teach period after period of Algebra each day, repeating the same lesson plan over and over much like a factory worker who repeatedly performs the same task. The third grade teacher similarly is a specialist in teaching third grade and repeatedly performs this task year after year. Like the factory worker, the industrial teacher does not have to understand the end product. The Algebra teacher can teach Algebra perfectly well, it is assumed, without understanding how mathematics works alongside of history, literature, science, foreign languages, and fine arts classes to holistically form the student into a certain kind of person. Likewise, the third grade teacher can teach third grade math, it is assumed, without needing to understand how the mathematical concepts being taught will later be developed and built upon to form students able to reason about higher mathematics or solve complicated calculus equations.

While teachers become akin to factory workers in the industrial factory metaphor, students in many ways parallel the products that roll off an assembly line. Each day students move from class to class, subject to subject, just like partially assembled products rolling down a line. Their discreet educational “stations” are divided into even intervals usually governed by bells, and as students are shuttled down the line they encounter at each station a new worker who specializes in the assigned educational task for that period. On an annual scale student learning is divided into distinct grade levels through which students progress. Like products on an assembly line, students do not move on to the next grade level until the education of their current “station” has been successfully completed. Thus the enterprise of learning, on both a daily and annual basis, is conceived of not as a holistic and continuous process but as one that can be divided into a list of distinct standards or “steps” through which students must sequentially move.