Schooling for Silicon Valley

Introduction

The United States is a nation founded within a prevailing storyline that characterizes it as being an exceptional, enlightened, and charitable nation, a “shining city on a hill” (Reagan, 1989, para. 32), and “beacon of light […] in every corner of the globe,” promising freedom, opportunity, equality, and democracy for all (Obama, 2012, para. 56). In actuality, the United States is a nation that was established to be a white Christian empire, whereby settler colonialism and imperialism are endlessly justified and fortified by an underlying cultural narrative that ascribes whiteness to morality and being fully human, and consequently, a nation bestowed with a divine right to lay claim at will to the lands, resources, minds, and bodies of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. It is a nation where private property rights are akin to natural rights, therefore framing capitalism, no matter how brutal, with virtuous intent and thus inviolable. Yet, from the beginning, these structural foundations—rooted within the barbarism of Indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, and gender oppression—constructed an enduring national culture defined by dispossession, white supremacy, racial terrorism, heteropatriarchy, misogyny, class domination, and deep social inequities. Over three centuries later, despite significant efforts by grass-roots social movements to transform it, these underlying structures and ideologies persist, entwined within an era where mass surveillance, mass incarceration, unprecedented wealth inequality, and never-ending militarism are perversely justified as imperatives to preserve freedom, democracy, and a fictitious “American Dream” (Beard, 2012; Omi & Winant, 2014; Zinn; 1980). The contradictions between the nation’s mythologies and factualities are inherent to—and therefore preserve—the cultural, political, and economic foundations of the United States. They are indicative of a nation that was founded by an opulent minority of white men who believed that they alone had a God-given right to freedom and prosperity and thus constructed the structural means to protect their wealth and power from a dispossessed demos and to justify the annihilation, enslavement, and exploitation of entire groups of people (Beard, 2012; Omi & Winant, 2014; Parenti, 1980). Their design for the new nation was based on the “interplay between ideologies and particular interests,” meaning that the white supremacist, settler colonial, and patriarchal Christian doctrine that established the system of governance of the wealthy landowners who founded the United States was fused with free market ideology, and the emergent interests of industrial capitalism (Stiglitz, 2001, p. viii). From the outset, and within these designs, the founders intended for government to serve and preserve these fundamental ideologies and interests. Over time, the nation’s government-run education system was constructed for the social engineering purposes of shaping its entire citizenry to acquiesce to these interests based in manufactured origin stories and beguiling depictions of the nation (Parenti, 1980; Stiglitz, 2001).

More specifically, the founders of the United States and their heirs understood that a cohesive, government funded and operated education system would need to be established as a primary instrument for social and cultural reproduction to fuel and sustain their empire building project. According to the cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1973), educational systems in any society are “the main agencies of the transmission of an effective dominant culture … [of] major economic as well as cultural activity; indeed it is both in the same moment” (p. 136). Critical scholar Jean Anyon (1979) contended that “school curriculum” is intended to contribute to “the formation of attitudes that make it easier for powerful groups … to manage and control society” and “express the dominant groups’ ideologies … [in order] to form attitudes in support of their social position” (p. 382). For these purposes, universal public education was conceived of, and in time firmly institutionalized, to serve as essential infrastructure for U.S. hegemony and to be an apparatus to transmit and “incorporate” citizens into a “selective tradition” (Williams, 1973, p. 9). According to Williams (1973, 1977), a selective tradition is a hegemonic and active sense of tradition that is “a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order” (pp. 9, 116) intended to serve the political, economic, and cultural aims of its ruling elite. Thus, the aims of U.S. public education were established to be—and continue to be systematically shaped by the intersecting cultural and material realities of capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy (Keisch & Scott, 2015). As such, over time and to this day, the story of the United States is the story of its education system.

Primary Education as the Advancement of Civic Nationalism

In the United States and Europe, mass compulsory public education was born out of the marriage between nationalism and industrialization with regard to timing (early nineteenth to early twentieth centuries) and utility (vocational education and the transmission of ideological scripts). The American Revolution was an ideological one, whereby the notion of rights became infused with free-market notions of individual self-sufficiency and individual merit, enacted by patriotic commitments to strive for moral improvement through one’s labor power. This hegemonic script, along with the solidification of modern political parties and the expansion of universal white male suffrage; aided in making universal white education appealing to large numbers of industrialists, legislators, and white citizens throughout the Northeast and Midwest. The nationalistic project of empire building across North America, along with imperialist strivings abroad, propelled the cause for mass public education far into the future.

Compulsory public education is an essential instrument in creating citizen subjects, the “societal members” who are endowed with (or led to believe they have) certain rights of participation in political, social, cultural, and economic institutions as outlined by established laws (Meyer et al., 1992, p. 158). Citizenship is also attached to duties and expectations relating to the maintenance, success, and preservation of the nation-state in both domestic and international affairs. As a principal instrument of nationalism, mass public education instills in children, as future citizens, a homogenous national identity and unequivocal loyalty to the nation-state—as an idealized and hallowed homeland often attached to a transcendental authority. Simultaneously, it equips embryonic citizen subjects with the skills and worldview that enables them to eagerly participate in, or passively acquiesce to, a nation’s sources of cultural, political, and economic power (Meyer et al., 1992; Mann, 2012).

In the United States, a state supported mass educational system was constructed as a means to transform white settlers into citizens (yet restricting suffrage rights of white women) based on the legal and hegemonic expressions of the U.S. Constitution. Foundationally, this project required the construction of a uniform and standardized system of schooling in order to produce a common fidelity to the nationalistic aims of the elite, and to deeply ingrain those aims as cultural scripts—unequivocal beliefs and attitudes that are attached to awe inspiring symbols related to the polity. While the U.S. Constitution left education to be a responsibility of individual states, an intention to imbue public education with nationalism was clearly transmitted in the writings of the founders in their land ordinances and subsequent land grants, and in some cases through efforts in their home states (Carpenter, 2013; Meyer et al., 1992; North & Rutten, 1987).

Essentially, mass public education had to be universal, publicly funded, state mandated, standardized, and staffed by trained and disciplined teachers. Instituting this top-down project presented significant ideological and logistical barriers in the decades following the American Revolution. To begin with, citizen rights in the United States—in practice and as an idea—were attached to one’s individual sovereignty and autonomy; as the imperialist project of nation building was chaotically unfolding. The former was soon tempered by the institutionalization of schooling, wielded over subjugated and disenfranchised groups through Protestant orthodoxy. As for the latter, the establishment of the logistical technique of mass public education could only proceed after other infrastructure projects were firmly established, including law and order through state and municipal governments, systems of transportation and communication, commercial activity, cultural and civil life; and basic schooling customs initiated by federally granted lands. Once these essential logistical techniques of social control by an infrastructurally powerful federal government were radiated outward in common cause with state and municipal governments, influential Protestant social reformers, businessmen, and government officials took steps to impose mass public education on the children of poor white citizen subjects (Kaestle, 1983; Kaestle, 2007; Mann, 2012; Meyer et al., 1992).1

The 1820s through the 1840s was a time of escalating social and labor unrest due to growing wealth disparities and social and economic hardship for the naturalized and immigrant white working-class (Wagoner & Haarlow, 2002; Winslow, 2014). Wealthy and middle-class Protestants—who associated poverty with moral decay, non-English speaking and Catholic immigrants as cultural threats, and labor solidarity as insurrection—began to unite to save souls and foster social cohesion through the advancement of civic nationalism (a concept that would later be referred to as “democratic citizenship”) (Reese, 2011). Intent on creating a common culture within the republic, many members of this elite class advocated for “common schools” as an efficient means to provide a “moral education” for future generations of the labor force in order to instill “character, discipline, virtue, and good habits” (Kaestle, 1983, p. 100). Basic literacy skills also fit into this plan, yet “analytical ability” and “knowledge of the world” did not (Kaestle, 1983, p. 100). This righteous calling required an autocratic apparatus, one that could pacify and instill loyalty in its subjects while disciplining their minds and controlling their bodies. An apparatus that is vested in, and is the most capable of, executing social and cultural reproduction. Common schools were set up to become that instrument: a mass public education system with the nationalistic aim of shaping future workers, whether “native or foreign born, rural or urban” into a God fearing, capable and loyal industrial citizenry (Wagoner & Haarlow, 2002, para.14).

As these efforts were gaining traction in the North and Midwest, the South’s economy was tied to plantation agriculture, chattel slavery, and subsistence farming for poor whites. During the first half of the nineteenth-century, tensions were intensifying between southern states and the federal government and northern states over trade policy, economic determinism, slavery’s expansion into new territories, states’ rights and abolitionism, and diverging cultural worldviews. These mounting conflicts resulted in many southern states establishing public schools separate from public education movements and motivations in the North. Overall, the South resisted the infusion of mass public education until Reconstruction, whereupon Jim Crow laws sculpted intensely segregated public education systems (Kaestle, 1976; Kaestle, 2007; Weingast, 1998).

The Protestants fueling the mass public schooling agenda in the North were sympathetic to the abolition of slavery and were leaders of the Second Great Awakening. They were typically Anglo-American and were a mixture of businessmen, clergy, philanthropists, professionals, and politicians who saw themselves as social reformers (Reese, 2011). Kaestle (1982) explains how their common views “provided the ideological context for the creation of state school systems” that were “centered on republicanism, Protestantism, and capitalism, three sources of social belief that were intertwined and mutually supporting” (p. 75). Kaestle (1982) goes on to describe the cultural scripts this group (comprised of white men) intended to advance through education as,

… the sacredness and fragility of the republican polity (including ideas about individualism, liberty, and virtue); the importance of individual character in fostering social morality; the central role of personal industry in defining rectitude and merit; the delineation of a highly respected but limited domestic role for women; the importance for character building of familial and social environment (within certain racial and ethnic limitations); the sanctity and social virtues of property; the equality and abundance of economic opportunity in the US; the superiority of American Protestant culture; the grandeur of America’s destiny; and the necessity of a determined public effort to unify America’s polyglot population … (pp. 127–128)

These social reformers, while conceptually clear about what the nation needed, began to look beyond their national borders for a model of mass schooling that would be compatible with their vision of the republic. Unfolding events in Prussia were shaping a national system of education that looked promising to many American social reformers. After Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia in 1806, the Prussian monarchy began to systematically restructure and modernize its military, state, and economy along industrial lines. This was all part of a developing nationalist effort to unify long conquered and splintered Germanic states along cultural and economic lines. At the core of this project were major education reforms that synthesized into one of the first compulsory public education systems in the world. In the decades after Prussia helped to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, its highly efficient and standardized industrial education system, staffed by a cadre of disciplined professional teachers, became the model to be replicated by industrializing nations the world over (Barkin, 1983; Franciosi, 2004; Ramirez & Boli, 1987).

The Prussian primary education system introduced a free and compulsory graded system of schooling that involved an eight-year course of primary education for both girls and boys, including kindergarten. It mandated a prescribed national curriculum for each grade, which focused on teaching the technical skills—reading, writing, math, science, technology—needed to modernize the Prussian state and economy. It also required national testing to determine students’ vocational aptitudes. Prussian primary schools also provided music (mostly singing) and religious education that were important in transmitting a common culture and national identity with a strict ethos of duty, discipline, and temperance. For its teachers, the Prussian state required advanced professional training by specialized private seminaries, state certification, and national oversight of instruction through ongoing supervision. The state recognized teaching as a profession, which included a basic salary (Barkin, 1983; DeGarmo, 1887; Franciosi, 2004; McEvoy, 1911; Rothbard, 1979).

Many education reformers in the United States and elsewhere became enamored with Prussia’s primary, secondary, and higher education systems. The 1834 publication titled Report on the State of Public Education in Prussia, further compelled U.S. educators and some state legislatures to replicate the Prussian model. When constructing its state constitution in 1835, Michigan used the Prussian model to design its primary, secondary, and university system (Franciosi, 2004; Gutek, 2012).

Horace Mann, a Protestant moralist, member of the pro-business Whig Party and a phrenologist (a form of scientific racism), served as a Massachusetts State Senator, the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and in the U.S. House of Representatives (Glenn, 1988). As other American education leaders were doing at the time, Mann traveled to Prussia in 1843 to study its primary education system and its teacher education seminaries (normal schools) (Chas, 1887). With the Prussian emphasis on social cohesion, Mann was particularly interested in how they were using their primary public schools to unify the German people. Upon his return to Massachusetts, Mann was even more determined to attach his elite and pious vision of society to a statewide public education system. Understanding that lasting social reforms must begin with children, Mann took up the mantra “Men are cast-iron, but children are wax,” to advance his “Americanized Prussian model” of schooling (Reynolds, 2014, p. 7). Mann’s lobbying efforts for its adoption in Massachusetts persuaded enough of his political allies in the private sector and the state government to support a statewide compulsory system of public primary schools (or common schools), modeled after the Prussian system. Mann’s efforts led to the enactment of a compulsory primary school attendance law in 1852, which was the first in the nation (Gutek, 2012). Mann’s critics, “accused him of wanting to establish a “Prussian-style tyranny” in the schools, arguing that the Prussian model was based on a presumption that government was wiser than the citizenry, while in America the presumption was the reverse” (Reynolds, 2014, p. 7).

In line with this model, Mann worked to advance more “objective” methods of assessing teaching and learning, which led the state of Massachusetts to adopt formal written standardized tests in place of the traditional, and more subjective, oral exams. In his pursuit of greater efficiency in education, Mann’s tests quantitatively assessed students’ rote knowledge to determine the effectiveness of teaching and learning in the burgeoning state’s public schools. The test results allowed district and state authorities to then monitor and compare teachers and schools, to classify students, to streamline pedagogical practices; and to ensure that there was a uniform curriculum that fostered civic nationalism (Gallagher, 2003; Feuer, 1992). According to assessment and evaluation specialist, Ralph Tyler:

At a time when … universal education was developed, the testing movement furnished both an ideological and an instrumental basis for the practice of schools and colleges in sorting students rather than educating them … it promoted the simplistic notion that important outcomes of schooling could be adequately appraised by achievement tests … (Gallagher, 2003, p. 85)

Mann is most often remembered as a principled education and social reformer who was authentically motivated in all of his roles by well meaning, albeit religious, convictions. According to Mann’s Annual Reports during his first four years as the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, he generally presented himself as being such a broker. Yet in his Fifth Annual Report in 1841, Mann made a case for how the value of a common school system would largely be based on the economic interests of the Boston business elite (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). In this report, Mann (1868) was explicit about his views of the hegemonic function of schooling:

Finally, in regard to those who possess the largest shares in the stock of worldly goods, could there, in your opinion, be any police so vigilant and effective, for the protection of all the rights of person, property and character, as such a sound and comprehensive education and training as our system of common schools could be made to impart…Would not the payment of a sufficient tax to make such training universal, be the cheapest means of self-protection and insurance? (p. 100)

In 1845, a prominent group of businessmen praised Mann for his achievements by declaring, “You have demonstrated that the arm of industry is served, and the wealth of the country is augmented, in proportion to the diffusion of knowledge, so that each humble schools-house is to be regarded, not only as a nursery of souls, but a mine of riches” (Vinovskis, 1995, p. 103). In 1863, an eminent educator named John D. Philbirck reminisced about how Mann’s Fifth Annual Report had “probably done more than all other publications written within the past 25 years to convince capitalists of the value of elementary instruction as a means of increasing the value of labor” (Vinovskis, 1995, p. 103).

Mann’s standing in the larger Whig Party influenced many of his fellow reformers to adopt the same model of elementary public education, along with teacher training programs called normal schools, in their states (Groen, 2008). Ultimately, the Prussian model and Mann’s common schools went on to serve as a standard by which rural and urban public education systems were organized throughout the nation. This led to a uniform network of school districts piloted by municipalities, but centrally controlled by state governments, and influenced through federal funds. Public schools became organized within an industrial model of efficiency and standardized in terms of graded classrooms, common curriculum and instruction, methods of assessment (written and multiple choice tests attached to letter grades), and uniform schedules and built environments. Mann’s “Americanized Prussian model” also laid the foundation for formalized teacher education and formal credentialing (Reynolds, 2014, p. 7).

“Kill the Indian … Save the Man”

Taken together, the Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery, and the British and United States’ white supremacist settler colonial penchants, resulted in unrelenting genocidal policies and practices against Indigenous peoples.2 More specifically, the ancestors of today’s Indigenous peoples endured intentional and systematic forms of ethnic cleansing for the purposes of extinction across North America through mass murder, the seizure of, and forced removal from, ancestral homelands, theft of tribal lands by treaty, enslavement, rape, starvation, tainted foods, exposure to disease, mass incarceration/internment on reservations, and forced assimilation via education (Archambeault, 2003; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2023).

In 1813, Thomas Jefferson predicted this outcome when he proclaimed, “this unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination, and now await our decision on their fate” (McDonald, 2013, p. 91). As Adams (1995) states in the book Education for Extinction, “after all this, the schools. After all this, the white man had concluded that the only way to save Indians was to destroy them, that the last great Indian war should be waged against children. They were coming for the children” (p. 23).

As early as 1619 in the colony of Virginia, the Anglican Church authorized the “education” of Indigenous youth for the purposes of assimilation (Juneau, 2001). In 1655, the Harvard Indian College was established to educate “Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness” (History of the Charter of 1650, 2020, para. 11). Thirty years later, the Indian School at William and Mary College in Virginia was established so “that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God” and that students “be thought sufficient to be sent abroad to preach and convert the Indians” (Ganter, 1935, p. 14). As the Virginia Governor, Francis Nicholson, put it at the time, “any great [Indian] nation will send 3 or 4 of their children thither” to be “civilized” they could then be “sent back to teach the same things to their own people” (Literary References to Wren Building, p. 18). In 1754, Moor’s Charity School was established in Connecticut for the purpose of training Indigenous men to become Christian missionaries within Indigenous tribes (Calloway, 2010). In 1769, Moor’s was reopened in New Hampshire as Dartmouth College, chartered:

… for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land in reading, writing & all parts of Learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing & christianizing Children of Pagans as well as in all liberal Arts and Sciences and also of English Youth and any others.” (Calloway, 2010, p. 22)

Following the American Revolution, education increasingly served as an instrument of Indigenous genocide. For these purposes, Protestant ideology was the conduit to “civilize” and thus Americanize Indigenous people according to values attached to private property, material wealth, white supremacy, and patriarchal nuclear Christian families. Learning from previous and failed attempts to “civilize” Indigenous adults through the English missionary and charity schools of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the United States began to target Indigenous children before they were fully acculturated to their particular tribal customs and spiritual beliefs (Calloway, 2010; Juneau, 2001; NARF Legal Review, 2013).