Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

school system is for.
    And when you understand that you can start to realize why it looks like it does and, importantly, what can be done to change things for the twenty-first century.
    As we heard earlier, business guru Tom Peters feels that, ‘education is economics and economics is education’ (Peters 1994), and while we have seen there is more to it than simply churning out qualified people, Peters is making clear that being stupid is certainly not the way forward to economic success. Despite his business focus, Peters is passionate about education. ‘I get very emotional about this topic,’ he admits in his 2003 book,
Re-imagine!
, describing how he wrote a chapter on the topic in a ‘rage against the knowing malevolence of the designers of our schools system’. He describes how legendary industrialist J.D. Rockefeller established the General Education Board in the US in 1906, an organization whose goal was that:
    In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands.
    (Peters 2003)
    As Peters says, ‘How could so many people be so collectively stupid?’ Yet, at the time, that was what we wanted – an education system to do just that. What we in the UK had started with the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, Rockefeller was taking to its logical conclusion, followed shortly after by a man called Frederick W. Taylor 1 who would change the face of the world of work forever. A mechanical engineer from Pennsylvania, Taylor was driven by the need to make the working practices in the factories and elsewhere more efficient, to address what President Theodore Roosevelt had described as the ‘larger question of increasing our national efficiency’. The answer, Taylor felt, lay not in individual achievement but in the system. ‘No great man,’ he states in his seminal 1911 publication
The Principles of Scientific Management
, ‘can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate.’
    Taylor promised greater efficiencies leading to higher productivity leading to shorter working hours and more money for all (although the latter two were often abused by certain less than scrupulous factory owners who saw it as a way of getting people to work more for less money while they made bigger profits). The trade-off for all this greater productivity and wealth was quite straightforward. It was vital that people didn’t think for themselves. If they did, then they would mess up the system. As Taylor says:
    In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.
    (Taylor 1911)
    So, out went the artisans, the artists and the thinkers. ‘Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines’ as Bertrand Russell wrote in 1952 in
The Impact of Science on Society
. Instead, in came Man’s role as cogs in the apparatus, human and machine working together to produce. This was something parodied by Charlie Chaplin in his 1936 masterpiece
Modern Times
, a comment on the desperate times suffered by people during the Great Depression, something which he felt was created ‘by the efficiencies of modern industrialization’.
    In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, children 2 were very much part of the industrial process but with the various Factory Acts 3 of the nineteenth century in the UK, children were not allowed to work inthe factories until they reached the age of nine. For example, the Factory Act of 1802, also known as the
Health and Morals of Apprentices Act
, not only outlawed the use of children under nine in the textile mills but also legislated that:
    every such apprentice shall be instructed, in some part of every working day, for the first 4 years at least of his or her apprenticeship … in the usual hours of work, in reading, writing, and arithmetic, or either of them, according to the age and abilities of such apprentice, by some discreet and proper person, to be provided and paid by the master or mistress of such apprentice, in some room or place in such mill or factory to be set apart for that purpose.
    ( www.umassd.edu/ir/resources/workingconditions/w1.doc )
    Schools became a way, then, of keeping off the streets the children that the new Act meant were no longer in the factories with their parents whilst, at the same time, serving to equip young people with enough of the three Rs to be able to work in the factories when they were old