The study of education in any of the numerous humanistic and social-scientific disciplines in which it has taken root typically begins from the two intertwined premises: first, that education is mostly schooling, and second, that schooling is good. Schooling both develops individual intellectual and moral capacities, and it solves an array of social problems, from poverty and inequality to crime, prejudice, disease, and social conflict. Scholars of education consequently tend to lionize figures who’ve contributed to expanding schooling opportunities—the Horace Manns and Henry Barnards—and demonize those who’ve resisted them. Bold is the scholar willing to question this entire framework of unstated assumptions and to argue instead that the institution of mass schooling in the West was undertaken not to advance liberty and social progress, but rather to gain control over and indoctrinate unruly masses.

This is the claim of Agustina Paglayan’s ambitious and important Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education. Paglayan is a political scientist and approaches the origins of mass schooling comparatively and empirically. Examining the timing of major compulsory schooling legislation and primary schooling enrollment spikes across the nations of Western Europe and Latin America between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, she tests these dates against contemporaneous political and economic developments in these nations to determine what led countries to invest in mass schooling. Her comparative analysis reveals that the main prevailing explanations for the origins of national compulsory schooling—that schooling was expanded to prepare citizens to discharge their new civic duties after extensions of the suffrage; that it was expanded in response to industrialization to train a more advanced labor force; that it was expanded to advance nationalist ambitions on disparate cultural communities by imposing a common language and national identity; or that it was expanded to serve modern military needs—all fail to line up with the historical timing of actual schooling expansions. Instead, what consistently preceded nationwide expansions of compulsory schooling was “destabilizing internal conflict”—civil wars, revolutions, peasant rebellions, mass protests, and other substantial domestic disorders.

Rather than being a concession to the clamoring of citizens for more educational opportunities and avenues for economic mobility, Paglayan shows that mass schooling was typically an elite strategy intended to instill discipline and morality in the wake of “episodes of mass violence that heightened national elites’ fear of the masses” (p. 108). Adopted only as a last resort after more direct methods of social control like repression and material concessions failed, schooling was an expensive and longer-term pacification strategy, capable of paying off only many years into the future when the first generation of pupils reached maturity. But it also held out the advantage of more continuous effectiveness, whereas political repression and material concessions would have to be re-applied periodically, at no small political and economic cost. “Mass education emerged as a crucial state-building strategy designed to accomplish the state’s main function of promoting social order by indoctrinating future citizens to obey the state and its laws” (p. 87).

Paglayan traces the ideological roots of this indoctrination to the educational philosophies of the Enlightenment, which, she argues, opened up the possibility of universal education for the first time. This is a somewhat muddled undertaking because she appeals seemingly at random to philosophers, including Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, who were broadly famous, but whose works had varying and largely unexplained influence on the educational policy of any actual state. Paglayan particularly focuses on their arguments for state centralization and moral education to demonstrate that they “ascribed to [education] a state-building role” (p. 100). In reality, however, these thinkers were quite ambivalent about the effectiveness and desirability of state involvement in education. Despite a strong desire to centralize political authority, for example, Hobbes did not call for a national school system, but rather for the sovereign to act as a national dictionary, authoritatively defining all words, so that fathers may then privately “institute their children as they themselves think fit” in a society governed by this definitional authority.Footnote ¹ Locke and Rousseau both advocated private tutorial education at home as the best pedagogical option, though in other writings, they admit the usefulness of state intervention for the poor (in Locke’s case) or advocate the wholesale re-organization of states on classical republican principles (in Rousseau’s). Such ideas are not generally reflected in subsequent European education policy.

Paglayan recognizes that these thinkers were primarily interested in individual autonomy, but claims “there is a tension in Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers’ work between their interest in safeguarding the state’s legitimacy and authority, and individual freedom” (p. 99). She contrasts, for example, Rousseau’s Emile, which advocates home education, with his Discourse on Political Economy, which calls for compulsory state schooling, and proposes to reconcile this tension by suggesting that home education was intended for elites, while state schooling was for “the rest” (p. 99). This can’t be right, however, since universal compulsion would not exempt the children of elites. The reality is that these are two different texts that work through the educations suitable to two quite different regimes—a modern commercial monarchy and a classical republic. These treatises, moreover, are philosophical considerations, not legislative blueprints. Rousseau announces at the beginning of Emile that his purpose is not to draw up a national educational policy but to determine what “a man raised uniquely for himself” can possibly “become for others.”Footnote ² Paglayan reduces these speculative philosophies of education to straightforward policymaking.

This reduction leads, moreover, to an ambiguity in her claim that appeals to “moral education” in theory and practice were evidence of an intention to indoctrinate. It is true that the moral virtues at which Locke’s and Rousseau’s education aimed—self-control and rational calculation—are useful for maintaining social order. But they’re also essential for the “critical thinking” that Paglayan opposes to indoctrination, since without self-control, we are not free from external control but rather enslaved to our passions and desires. “Moral education” is not an artifact of Enlightenment-era state-building, but of Greek and Roman philosophies that sought freedom from custom and convention by rendering the will obedient to reason. Virtue, religious faith, and childhood obedience have long been understood to serve such private and even anti-statist ends as easily as statist ones. The observation that Enlightenment philosophers were concerned with “moral training” thus cannot be simply conflated with a desire for social control by central governments. To the contrary, most of them were quite averse to such control.

The argument that mass schooling was implemented by modern nation-states to indoctrinate citizens into political complacency is much more convincing in Paglayan’s account of the intentions of the politicians and reformers who actually designed systems of mass schooling in Europe and the Americas. In these cases, she demonstrates persuasively that the main architects of national schooling in Prussia, France, Chile, and Argentina understood their task as above all one of pacification of restive rural peasants and the urban poor. Argentina even deployed the explicit language of “civilizing” the “barbaric” elements of the nation (the rural ranchers). Paglayan shows that in these initial efforts, other proposed purposes of schooling, such as technical skill development for economic mobility, were demoted or discarded in the focus on cultivating law-abidingness and submission to political authority.

But what about democracies, where the political authority to be obeyed is at least in principle determined by the people themselves? Paglayan insists that her thesis holds for them as well: democracies also turn to mass schooling to indoctrinate restive citizens in the aftermath of internal conflict and to allow the regnant elites to maintain their hold on power. But, however inadvertently, Paglayan’s research reinforces American exceptionalism here. Unlike the other nations in her sample, the US never passed a national school law at all, and still has neither a national curriculum nor centralized control of schools. So, setting aside her method of tracing the timing of national legislation to an earlier domestic conflict, Paglayan focuses instead on the rhetoric of education writers of the 1790s like Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster, contextualizing their ideas as responses to domestic uprisings like Shays’ Rebellion. And it is no exaggeration to describe these writers’ zeal for using schooling to inculcate republican principles as indoctrination. Nonetheless, as intense their desire to turn schoolchildren into “republican machines” (to borrow Rush’s phrase) was, none of it ever came to fruition. No public school system arose from these writings. Instead, a common school movement spread from New England outward beginning in the 1830s, in response to no particular internal conflict. After severe domestic conflict did arise, in the form of the Civil War, the insurrectionist states remained among the last to expand school enrollment, contrary to Paglayan’s theory.

The American case, if understood as an exception, potentially suggests an interesting set of solutions to the problem of indoctrination-by-education that animates Paglayan’s work and to which she offers only a weak solution: more critical, participatory, or at least value-neutral schooling. Initially, she defines indoctrination as education that instills fear of punishment, satisfaction with the status quo, and a morality composed of “unconscious habits of compliance and deference” (pp. 89–90). These efforts are easier to spot in autocracies, which comprise most of Paglayan’s dataset. But when speaking of democracies, she broadens her definition of indoctrination to include teaching the superiority of one’s own regime over others and failing to encourage questioning of the prevailing political values, including democratic values. She criticizes, for example, “inculcat[ing] a specific set of political values and principles among children, such as the notion that voting is the most important duty of citizens, or that protest activities should always be peaceful” (p. 261). If prohibiting children from resolving their grievances with violence is indoctrination, however, it is hard to imagine any alternative.

The degree of political neutrality that Paglayan’s framework demands has never existed anywhere. Even before mass schooling, the laws and customs of every state were prejudiced in their own favor and have always been the original source of civic education, as Montesquieu showed three centuries ago, and Socrates taught even earlier. Paglayan appeals to John Dewey’s ideas as an alternative pedagogical path forward, but Deweyan democracy has no more space for violent protest than Benjamin Rush’s. It has a more progressive conception of democratic norms than Rush’s, but it too inculcates loyalty to and preference for those norms at the expense of alternatives. Paglayan very helpfully draws our attention to the ways that the origins of schooling continue to influence how schooling is practiced across centuries, even as our conceptions of its purpose and goals have radically shifted. Yet she still hopes that a different approach to schooling, undertaken with fuller historical knowledge, may be able to reverse the damage. But what if better schooling isn’t the solution to the pitfalls of schooling?

What the American case in Paglayan’s presentation seems to demonstrate is not that the indoctrinating role of schools can be overcome with a different approach to schooling, but that schooling’s influence on individuals can be diminished by de-emphasizing and de-centralizing schooling itself. By forgoing a uniform curriculum and centralized control and even robust compulsory attendance (homeschooling, unschooling, and nearly any alternative under the sun is permissible in the US), we don’t prevent schools from indoctrinating. What we do instead is ensure that the indoctrination runs in many conflicting directions and, in the aggregate, comes to very little. That is not to say that schooling is useless, only that whatever goods it may produce—literacy, vocational skills, protective supervision of the young—it is not productive of freedom, and if that is what we want from education, we may have to seek it outside of schools.

Origins may not be destiny, but Paglayan’s effort to shed light on these forgotten beginnings is worthy of serious consideration by scholars of contemporary education across disciplines. In a milieu like education scholarship that tends to focus on figuring out how schooling can be used to solve our social and political problems, it is urgent to begin asking whether it is not actually the cause of some of these problems. And surely the fact that schooling is so eminently congenial a mechanism for mass indoctrination and conformism, and that it was indeed instituted for this very reason, should give those concerned with educating for freedom some pause. Perhaps the further centralization and standardization of schooling in the name of democratic education is not the right direction for democracy.