I loved reading about the nineteenth-century origins of the US public education system. I knew a little about Horace Mann, but I knew nothing about the Prussian model, or about Mann's research trips to study it! I wrote my dissertation about Victorian poetry, and I have read a little about how nineteenth-century educators believed that memorizing and reciting poetry would civilize and instill nationalism in British schoolchildren: in her 2012 book The Rise and Fall of Meter, for example, Meredith Martin discusses the theory that simply feeling the rhythms of iambic pentameter in their bodies will make students more compliant and patriotic subjects. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for an explanation of why I included these Victorian griffins in this post!)
As I write, I realize that Martin's book was published in 2012, the same year as Khan's The One World Schoolhouse; I also just realized that both books were published about a year before my oldest child was born. I want to learn more about what was happening in education at this particular moment in history: did these two books contribute to a broader skepticism about schools as a mechanism for coercion and compliance? I know that in the 2010s I would have agreed with Khan's assessment that the American education model was "broken." I was reading and thinking a lot about the "school-to-prison pipeline" and the relationship between education and racial justice--an issue that the second Obama administration sought to address in 2014 with an updated school discipline guidance package. Additionally, as the parent of a bright, creative child who had a very hard time following daycare routines--and who would ultimately be diagnosed with ADHD and autism--I worried that public school would break her spirit. My husband also has ADHD and experienced a lot of shame and frustration in school. As my daughter started school--especially before she qualified for an IEP and started receiving individualized support--my husband and I both would have wholeheartedly agreed with Khan that the conventional classroom model was designed to produce "disciplined tractability" (78) rather than "creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas" (80).
Reading Khan in 2026, however, I feel skepticism and even resistance. I still strongly agree that the US education system is not set up to best serve all learners--we urgently need to address racial and socioeconomic inequalities in every aspect of education, from resources to discipline, and we absolutely should be nurturing creativity, neurodiversity, and joy over compliance. And I certainly still agree with both Khan and Johnson that it's crucial to take a "skeptical stance" (Khan 81) toward the "customs and institutions" that "come to seem somehow inevitable and preordained" (61) but that often turn out to have a specific, hidden ideological function! But that means that it's important to apply the same skepticism we bring to our hoary old educational institutions to the claims and arguments made by tech innovators.Over the past decade, arguments that American education is "broken" have increasingly been used to support attacks on the existence of public education; further, Khan's 2012 techno-optimism takes on a different valence in today's technology landscape, especially given the rise of AI and Khan Academy's partnerships with tech giants such as Google. As I read Khan's claim that "today's world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners" (80), I found myself worrying that this was a utopian fantasy, given predictions that AI will replace teachers, doctors, writers, artists, and programmers and Melania Trump's enthusiasm for "humanoid educators." Maybe the best our students can hope for is becoming the IRL facilitators of the robots’ dreams! Of course, this is an exaggeration (I hope): I’m noticing a rising commitment to the importance of critical thinking among education leaders and researchers in the last few months, and Khan himself does take a thoughtful and nuanced approach to technology and AI in the classroom, insisting that Khan Academy's resources, including its AI tools, are not a replacement for teachers or schools. Still, I want to continue to embed my own advocacy for more equitable, joyful, individualized instruction within support for practices that are proven to work very well: publicly funded education, in-person instruction, and small class sizes, for example!
I'll end with one more weird Victorian connection. As I said at the beginning, I loved how both Khan's book and the video from Class Dismissed anchored our current school system in such a specific moment in history, showing how today, just as in the nineteenth century, nationalist governments wanted "children to take their place in society, be cogs, and keep this system going" (Couture, quoted in Class Dismissed). It made me wonder: was there a period in history where the powers that be didn't want the vast majority of children to be cogs? Like, if children weren't being trained to be workers in an industrialized economy, they were still likely to have been trained to take their place in an oppressive hierarchy. But even if that's true, there may have been moments in history where creativity and autonomy were valued more or less by society. And of course these debates are not new!
This got me thinking about John Ruskin's griffins. About a decade after Horace Mann’s research trip to observe Prussian schools, John Ruskin published Modern Painters in England, in which he praised the “freedom of thought” that allowed medieval stoneworkers–ordinary craftsmen without formal education–to create the fantastical, grotesque shapes of gargoyles on Gothic architecture, in comparison to the rigid rules and formulas that classical workmen had to follow. Medieval craftsmen, Ruskin argues, were free to follow their own imaginations as they adorned churches and cathedrals, while Greek and Roman workers were often literally enslaved and constrained to follow strict rules and directions. (Obviously medieval craftsmen did learn the fundamentals of their trade through apprenticeship!) Ruskin believed that even if the work the medieval craftsmen produced was less “perfect” by some metrics, it was more valuable because it showed evidence of human creativity and freedom. I use this example to explain to my high school students why I’m so much more interested in reading their own messy, imperfect writing than I am interested in reading AI, but it also helps me think about structure vs. creativity as a long-standing debate in education and aesthetics.
Here's a fun (?) quiz for you: Ruskin presented his reader with two images of stone carvings of griffins: one from a medieval Gothic building and one from a piece of classical (Greek or Roman) architecture. He claimed that one was “real” and one was “false.” Which do you think is which, and why?
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