\n\n(TW: my catholic school trauma)
\nReading\u00a0\u201cThe Boy Who Could Change the World\u201d
\n\n\nIt\u2019s difficult to even imagine what America was like before the industrial revolution. Their notion of freedom was far stronger than the one we have today. For many Americans, life wasn\u2019t about showing up at a job at a specified hour, following orders all day, and returning home for a couple hours of \u201cfree time\u201d\u2014that would be considered slavery. A free American was one who worked on their own or with their family, worked from home, worked whatever hours they liked, and got paid based on what they accomplished.\n
\n\nUnder the putting-out system, for example, merchants would deliver raw materials like cotton to your house. When you felt like it, you\u2019d card, spin, and weave the raw cotton into cloth. And then the next week the merchant would come by to buy from you whatever cloth you had produced.
\n\nHe goes on to discuss mill workers in New England, who were mostly young girls, some around the age of 10. This was before our modern day labor laws, so the girls were working fourteen hour days. They still found time to read & discuss books/ideas, though.\u00a0
\n\n\nAnd through all that thinking and learning and discussing, they began to question the less pleasant aspects of their situation. When, in 1836, the Lowell mill owners decided to cut their employees\u2019 pay, the girls walked out.
\nWhat these young girls accomplished is truly amazing. They organized their own newspaper, the Voice of Industry, which they wrote, edited, printed, and sold themselves. Through it they organized more protests and strikes, as well as organized their own slate of candidates in the state elections to fight for better working conditions and a ten-hour day. Amazingly, their slate won. The owners, outraged, got their legislators to declare the election results invalid and hold a revote. Before the revote, large signs were posted threatening that anyone who voted for the ten-hour slate would be fired. And yet the slate won again.
\n\n[..]\n
\n\nBut their writing in the Voice shows that they wanted much more than simply better working conditions. They saw themselves as slaves\u2014wage slaves\u2014and concluded that the solution was not simply to demand that the bosses be nicer to them or pay them more, but to abolish the bosses entirely.\n
\n\nTheir bosses didn\u2019t like this, at all. The mill owners fired the girls, blacklisted their names, and then did something strange: they sent girls to school.\n
\nThe schools they built\u2014the common schools\u2014would be easily recognizable by any modern student. \u201cThe door [of each school] shall be closed precisely at the time fixed for the opening of the school, and in the morning religious exercises will be performed, for which purpose 10 minutes are allowed.\u201d (Today we just say the pledge of allegiance.) \u201cEach teacher shall call the roll call of his or her classes \u2026 in the morning and afternoon, and shall keep an accurate record of all absences.\u201d The day was then divided into separate lessons, allowing \u201c30 minutes for the study of each lesson and 10 minutes for each recitation.\u201d
\n\nInstead of corporal punishment, teachers were encouraged to secure order \u201cby the mildest possible means\u201d to instill \u201ca regard for right, and thus a standard of self-government in the minds of the children themselves.\u201d* Students were tested on how much they learned and, just like today, working coordinating other students was considered \u201ccheating\u201d and punished. (Perhaps they were worried that if students learned to coordinate they might be more likely to foment strikes once in the mills.)\u201c\n
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\n\n\nCareful records kept by the mill owners allow us to compare mill workers who did and did not go to school. Just as with modern students, there is no evidence of any impact of increased education on worker productivity.*\n
\n\nSo why did the mill owners spend so much money building and running these schools? They were quite clear about their intent. The classes were justified not for their usefulness but because memorizing them was a form of \u201cmoral education\u201d leading to \u201cindustrious habits \u2026 and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large.\u201d
\nAs one Lowell manager explained it, \u201cI have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good common-school education. I have uniformly found the better educated, as a class, possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.\u201d\u201d\n
\nAs the Lowell School Committee summarized their findings: \u201cThe proprietors find the training of the schools admirably adapted to prepare the children for the labors of the mills.\u201d Why? \u201cWhen [their laborers] are well educated \u2026 controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factitious considerations.\u201d*
\nIndeed, school was so important that the mill owners quickly decided to make it mandatory. \u201cNo language of ours can convey too strongly our sense of the dangers which wait us from [those who] are not and have never been members of our public schools,\u201d warned the Lowell School Committee. Universal schooling is \u201cour surest safety against internal commotions.\u201d\u2021
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\nThe children who didn\u2019t attend school \u201cconstitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine,\u201d warned the committee. \u201cUnsuccessful attempts, during the past year, to burn two of our school-houses \u2026 are an index to the evils which threaten from such sources.\u201d\n\nMore accurately, such burnings were an index of public resistance to such coercion. In 1837, 300 teachers were forced to flee their classrooms by riotous and violent students.\u2551 In 1844, the Irish population went on strike from the schools, reducing attendance by 80%. The School Committee stepped up their anti-truancy efforts to force them and others back to school.\u201c\n
\n\nAnd so the spread of schools and factories destroys the American model of freedom. Instead of being independent farmers or self-employed manufacturers, Americans are herded into factories enmasse, forced to work for someone else because they cannot earn a living any other way. But thanks to schools, this seems normal, even natural. After all, isn\u2019t that just the way the world works?\n
\n\nThe effect on the students is almost heartbreaking. Taught that reading is simply about searching contrived stories for particular \u201ctext features,\u201d they learn to hate reading. Taught that answering questions is simply about cycling through the multiple-choice answers to find the most plausible ones, they begin to stop thinking altogether and just spout random combinations of test buzzwords whenever they\u2019re asked a question.\u00a0\n\u201cThe joy of finding things out\u201d is banished from the classroom. Testing is in session.\u201d
\nSchool hasn\u2019t seemed to have changed much since the early 1800s, at least the not sort of schooling geared for the masses. As a child, I was strongly discouraged from risk taking, ridiculed by teachers when I gave the wrong answer, punished for asking questions, had to ask permission to use the bathroom (and was often refused), refused permission to get a drink of water (the school had no air conditioning & it was June in Pennsylvania. Yes, multiple children got heat exhaustion, daily. Our parents commiserated, but thought this was normal. Teachers treated this as normal. We were told to \u201ctoughen up\u201d and respect our elders when we complained.) We were taught to need someone\u2019s permission\u00a0to get medical attention.\u00a0
\nI was once refused when I needed to see the nurse (I was going to vomit.) The teacher accused me of lying & told me to sit down. I sat down, and about two minutes later threw up. I half expected to get a demerit for dirtying the floor. I burst into tears, blubbering out humiliated apologies to my classmates and to the teacher.\u00a0Above my concern for my dignity and health had been placed my teacher. That was my mentality as a kid.
\n(Normal is whatever you\u2019re used to, but people shouldn\u2019t be used to this.)
\nThe thing that stands out in all of this, now, was how the other students remained frozen. I don\u2019t know how to interpret their freeze \u2013 they didn\u2019t move to get me a tissue, or towels, or anything. The teacher had forbade me from moving to clean up myself, so I had to wait for the nurse to arrive in a puddle of my own vomit. I obeyed. My classmates were staring at their desks, at the wall, anywhere but the teacher or myself. Maybe they were suffering second-hand embarrassment, or pity, or even fear that the teacher would lash out at them, next.\u00a0
\nThat was the sort of environment we grew up in, for 14 years of our lives.\u00a0
\nIn all of this, I notice this kind of moral fragmentation that society today seems to encourage. There\u2019s a sense that people have abrogated all responsibility:\u00a0\u201coh, that\u2019s not my\u00a0department, I\u2019m not the one who makes the rules.\u201d So we ignore people in pain, and accept on an instinctive level that there\u2019s nothing we can do.\u00a0
\nExcept that isn\u2019t true, even that asshole Lowell said,\u00a0\u201cThe children who didn\u2019t attend school \u201cconstitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine.\u201d\u201d
\nThis submissive attitude people have comes from fear, from an underestimation of our own strength and compassion.\u00a0
\n\u2014
\nLike, do people get what this does to a person\u2019s self-esteem? Maybe not, because they\u2019re all suffering from the same blindness.
\nLast week during the heat wave, I started experiencing heat exhaustion and\u00a0\nmy instinctive thoughts were to move as little as possible, and wait for it to be over.\n
\nI mean, what does that sound like to you?
\nLike, maybe my experiences at school were unusually bad, but it looks to me a lot like our society is systematically abusing kids into submissively accepting poor treatment by their superiors.\u00a0
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I studied under Stuart Blumin, the wool-carders are a familiar example in labor history due to their centrality to E.P. Thompson\u2019s foundational Making of the English Working Class, the Lowell mills are probably the most familiar case study of American labor history.
(In part cause there\u2019s a lot about the owners using culture to discipline the workers that kinda parallels what Thompson said about the use of Presbyterianism, and especially if there\u2019s a parallel to the later Paterson mills)
But to go with those so-familiar examples and breezily reach a conclusion like \u201cunlike factories, earlier small-workshop and farmed-out capitalism meant freedom\u201d is suuuuuuch a WHOA moment contrary to any assumptions of the field like, what, that I\u2019m suddenly suspicious of all of it