Democracy and the Industrial Imagination in American Education

Educational politics in the United States is entangled in the notion that the foremost mission of education is, in the infamous words of Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed revision of the University of Wisconsin’s mission, “to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs.” This general outlook is not an outlier. It is typical of those who approach education primarily as a way to fuel industry with skilled labor. This outlook is premised on an increasingly dominant educational model that is miseducative, antidemocratic, and incompatible with values of mutual respect and individual dignity. It is helpful to analyze the industrial model of education more precisely, getting clearer about the way it informs both educational discourse and delivery, so that our critiques of ill-considered aims and priorities can be clearly and forcefully targeted.