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Whether over creationism or gender identity, bitter political fights have sprung up around what sorts of ideas should be taught in public schools. Education is often touted as a tool of social mobility meant to help students access well-paying jobs, but these curricula battles indicate that many adults view it as a tool for inculcating future citizens with a particular viewpoint.

How can an institution that carries so much of our collective expectation to equalize mankind also bear some of the marks of an indoctrination factory? On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Agustina Paglayan, a professor of political science at UC San Diego whose new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, conducts a rigorous historical analysis of why public education spread.

“The expansion of primary education in the West was driven not by democratic ideals, but by the state’s desire to control citizens,” Paglayan argues. “And to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: You’ve probably heard the name Horace Mann. He was a 19th-century reformer who championed the abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and, most famously, the American public-school system.

As Adam Harris wrote for The Atlantic, Mann “sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive.”

Agustina Paglayan would probably add another word: obedient. Agustina is a political scientist at UC San Diego. Her new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, argues that the roots of the world’s modern education systems were based not on progressive ideals but on a desire to suppress unruly populations.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Public education is largely seen as a progressive enterprise meant to provide opportunities to those who could not afford an education on their own, but its roots may have been anything but. Beginning with Prussia in the mid-1700s, Agustina looks at the curious timing of when countries invest in their education systems and finds that investment comes in response to political elites witnessing threats to their political power.

I still believe that public education, as Horace Mann put it, can be the great equalizer of the conditions of man. But after reading Agustina’s book, I’m not sure policy makers were seeking to make it so. And troublingly, modern reformers may be more interested in indoctrination than education.

Agustina, welcome to the show.

Agustina Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I’m very happy to be here.

Demsas: Happy to have you. So every single time I have a conversation with someone about education policy, whether on this show or in real life, I’m sort of struck by the selection-effect issues of having education conversations with policy makers and policy wonks, because, almost universally, they’re people who liked school and liked learning, and they’re people who probably, in some ways, thrived or at least managed to overcome difficulties that they had in school.

And then they’re the people who then go on to have these conversations about, What’s wrong with schools these days? and, What’s going on here? I was one of those weird kids who would get FOMO about sick days. (Laughs.) I assume that you’re also in this class of people. You have a Ph.D. and, I guess, never quit school. Do you think about how your relationship to education affects your research?

Paglayan: Absolutely. I always think not just about how my personal experience but everyone’s personal experience shapes their research. I will say your intuition is correct.

I was a straight-A student all along. But I also had, for better or worse, the benefit of having many siblings, some of whom dropped out of high school. And so within the confines of my family, I had exposure to those inequalities that we see in society more broadly. And that inequality that I observed, even within my family, was something that was always a source of curiosity for me, particularly, as you were saying, you and I—we were straight-A students.

Demsas: Not straight-A, but I won’t co-opt that. I liked school. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Okay. And I didn’t need much support to do that. But what I saw was that some of my siblings who needed more support from school in order to do well—they weren’t getting that support. And so that was always something that was a little troubling for me to try to understand: Why is it that those who get more easily distracted, those who maybe have more behavioral problems or more difficulty concentrating, they’re not getting the support they need? That’s what schools are supposed to do and who they are supposed to be helping the most. At least, that’s what I grew up thinking.

And so that always was at the heart of my interest in education. I mean, the other really relevant piece of what drove me to study education, in terms of my personal experience, is just that I grew up in a family where education was the most important thing. And my mom, in particular—she sacrificed a lot to be able to afford one of the best schools in Argentina, which is the country where I grew up. We didn’t have health insurance for a while. There were a lot of different things that she sacrificed along the way. And so I grew up with this sense that education is the most important investment you can make in order to live a life that is not just a prosperous life but a life with individual autonomy, where you can pursue your dreams, if you want.

And then what I started seeing as I started working on education—I worked both at the World Bank, helping with education reform in different countries, and also at Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis—as I started getting to know more about education systems, I started noticing, well, we have these ideas about how education is supposed to be about improving living standards, promoting individual autonomy, etcetera. But education systems worldwide are not living up to that promise.

And so that was also something that led me to be further interested in education systems and figuring out this puzzle, which began as a family-specific puzzle, but then I started observing these broader patterns cross-nationally.

Demsas: Do you still believe that education holds all those values that you did growing up?

Paglayan: I think education certainly has the promise to accomplish that. I don’t think education systems were designed to accomplish that, and I think that’s a big part of the explanation why they don’t live up to that promise.

Demsas: I want to situate us in the history of the rise of state-led primary education. Before reading your book, I think I hadn’t really taken in the short timeline that we’re talking about here, just over the course of, like, 200 years. I’m hoping you can talk to us—like, when did this start? Where did it start? Give us sort of a historical grounding.

Paglayan: Yes. So you’re right. This is a 200-year history—very short in human history. Historically, what we had was that the education of children was left entirely to families and churches. And it’s in 1763 that Prussia became the first country in the world to create a compulsory primary-education system.

And that sort of is the first instance of a state-regulated primary-education system. And Prussia, in that time period, also happens to transition from being a backward economy to being one of the most developed and, particularly, a military and world power. And so there are many countries around the world who are trying to figure out: What did Prussia do? How did Prussia accomplish this major transformation?

And what they observed as they traveled to Prussia—and you have people from all over, from Horace Mann traveling to Prussia, to the education reformers in Latin American and in France and other parts of Europe—and what they observe when they go to Prussia is, well, the one thing Prussia has that no one else has is this primary-compulsory-education system. And so that sets off a set of reforms in other countries or, at least, debates about how, if you have a primary-education system, you can consolidate political authority if it is the government that’s in charge of regulating what’s being taught in schools and then using that regulation to ensure that children are being taught to obey the state and obey its laws.

But as I pointed out, it began in 1763. I would mark that as a really important date with Prussia. And then what you see progressively is the U.S. and Canada and continental Europe following Prussia successively at different points in time, followed by Latin America toward the end of the 19th century. And then much later, you see Asian and African countries sort of following suit. So the timing of the different countries varies in terms of when they push for primary education. And that’s one of the things that I examine in the book, is, Well, why are they doing it when they are doing it?

Demsas: How did parents react to this? It seems pretty rapid, over the course of maybe a generation, where you’re not expected to have any kind of regular interaction with state institutions, to, all of a sudden, You need to send your 5-year-old to a state-run public school. How do they react to that?

Paglayan: We don’t have a lot of evidence on how parents directly reacted. What we do have evidence on is what politicians perceived was the parents’ reaction. And the perception that politicians had was primarily that parents really did not like this, because the schools weren’t teaching their kids anything that was particularly useful. And those children were used to contributing to the household income. They worked in farms. They worked in factories. And so, suddenly, you were withdrawing a form of labor that contributed to the family’s economy.

And so the parents resisted that at first. Or at least, again, that was the perception that governments had, that there was this resistance. And that’s why, then, governments passed compulsory-schooling laws, to say, Okay, even if you don’t like it, you need to send your children to school, because we have this project that we want to carry out.

Demsas: I know we’re talking in generalities now, and I know from reading your book, you’ve collected a lot of data to be able to speak in these averages, and there’s a ton of heterogeneity that’s underlying a lot of this that I’m just going to pin for our listeners here.

But in general, when we’re talking about compulsory public education, are you saying that these states would send police officers to require that? Would they levy fines? How much state capacity did they really have to require this? Or was it just that people kind of just follow the law for other reasons?

Paglayan: So as you pointed out, one of the things that I document in the book is the different sets of penalties and provisions that were put in the law to encourage parents to comply with compulsory-schooling provisions. And so in some countries, what you had was the threat of fines, and sometimes it’s just the threat itself that was sufficient to encourage low-income parents to send their kids to school. You didn’t have to really have everyone fined. It was just the existence of those fines.

It was the creation of school inspectorate systems that was very heavily in charge of monitoring school attendance. So states also created this monitoring tool through hiring and deploying school inspectors to monitor whether children were attending school and identify parents who were not complying. So this system in and of itself was something that encouraged parents.

And then the other thing that was also used was not just fines but, for example, in the context of Prussia, if you wanted to get religious confirmation, you had to send your kid to school. Otherwise, they couldn’t get their religious confirmation. And so that was another way to induce parents.

Demsas: So you mentioned this before, but the question under investigation is: Why did the west lead in expanding mass primary education? What were the reasons for that expansion and the motivations underlying that shift? Before we get into your explanation, I want to run through the traditional theories and talk them through, and talk through how you were able to discard those with your research.

You mentioned a few of them in your book: democratization, industrialization, interstate wars, assimilation of immigrants. Can you walk us through these theories and why you don’t see them holding water?

Paglayan: Yes, so all of the theories that you just mentioned, I examine in the book, and I rule out only after looking at the evidence. And so let me start with democratization.

So there was a big literature that argued that the expansion of primary education in the west, and around the world, was driven by the spread of democracy—that once lower-income people became enfranchised, they wanted primary education, and governments, who now needed to win elections with votes from lower-income individuals, responded by expanding primary education.

And so to test this theory, one of the things that I did was to compile information about when governments began to regulate primary education. And also, how much access to primary education was there prior to a country becoming democratic for the first time?

And so the two things that I found there was, first, that the creation of state-regulated primary-education systems (as defined by the passage of the first primary-education law that regulates the curriculum, regulates when you need to attend school, regulates who can become a teacher, all of these things that are regulated by these primary-education laws), these laws are passed well before a country transitions to democracy for the first time—on average, a hundred years before. So that’s the first piece of evidence to rule out the democracy argument.

Demsas: And what’s your data sample? What countries are you looking at, and are you just independently doing all this research, or are there data sets that already exist?

Paglayan: No.

Demsas: Oh, wow.

Paglayan: Yeah. I did all of the information gathering. So I started with Europe and the Americas, and I used a collection of roughly 80 different books, dissertations, and secondary sources, primarily to locate the year when these laws were passed and then to locate the actual laws, because the book also analyzes the content of the laws, the curriculum, the teacher training-and-recruitment policies, and so on. But I started with the secondary sources first, and sometimes there’s discrepancies, so you have to sort of figure out who’s correct here.

Demsas: A big theme of the show is just how laborious all data collection actually is and how it’s the main part of most research. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Yeah, it takes a little bit of an obsessive personality to enjoy the task, actually.

Demsas: So essentially, you’re plotting this first year as, like, Year Zero and then also plotting at what year democratization happens and seeing whether those things are actually happening one after the other. And you just don’t see any relationship at all?

Paglayan: Well, the relationship you see is that it happens way before democracy. And then the other thing that I also look at is, Okay, maybe they just passed laws, but they didn’t do much in the form of providing primary education to people. This was just paper but not much in the form of implementation.

And so to get at whether that was the case, the other thing that I did was to construct a data set with primary-school enrollment rates for European and Latin American countries going very far back in time, farther back than any other previously existing data set. And what I looked at is, Okay, when you get to a country’s first transition to democracy, what was the prior level of enrollment in primary education? Are we talking 20 percent? Are we talking 30 percent? And no, we’re talking an average 70 percent enrollment. So enrollment in primary education was already very high prior to democratization.

And the other thing that I also find—and this isn’t in the book; it’s in a separate article that I published—is that democratization itself didn’t lead to further increases in primary education. And this is totally consistent with theories that argue that democracy responds to a majority of people. Well, a majority of people already had access to primary education, so they didn’t want a further expansion. And you don’t see, therefore, democracy expanding primary education further, even if you still have 30 percent or 40 percent of people in some countries left out of primary education.

Democratization doesn’t do much. And the origins of primary education are nondemocratic origins. They preceded the arrival of democracy. So that’s one piece of evidence that the book provides.

The other argument is on industrialization. So here, the argument was that the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy created a need for skilled and docile workers. And industrialists themselves were demanding that the state create this docile and skilled workforce by setting up primary school systems. And this isn’t something that I have studied on my own. There are other people who’ve studied this, and I build on their work, and some of the primary sources that I collect are consistent with these arguments. The first thing you notice is that industrialists often opposed, at first, the expansion of primary education by the state.

Demsas: You’re taking away their workers.

Paglayan: Exactly. [It’s] for the same reason that the parents opposed it. Children were working, and industrialists thought, Yeah, you’re taking away our workers. That’s going to reduce the size of the workforce, and that’s going to increase salaries, so we don’t want that.

The other thing is the timing of industrialization versus the timing, again, of these laws that are passed. And you don’t see a consistent pattern of industrialization or the beginning of industrialization preceding the creation of these systems. I think a nice example is the contrasting experiences of Prussia and England. So Prussia created, as we were talking about earlier, the first compulsory primary-education system regulated by the state while it was an agrarian country. And on the flip side to that is that England, which was the leader of the Industrial Revolution, was one of the last countries in all of Europe to create a primary-education system. By 1850, England was the country in Europe with the lowest level of access to primary schooling, even though you had already had almost an entire century of industrialization.

Demsas: Okay, so we’ve run through democratization and industrialization, and then there’s also interstate wars.

Paglayan: Yes, so interstate wars is, again, an argument people have made that countries developed their primary-education systems in response to military competition and, in the context of that military competition, a desire to form a large, trained, and loyal army—and also to inoculate citizens from external invasion or attempts to capture the country’s territory. So the idea is, Well, if I teach you to be patriotic, and a foreign power comes and tries to seduce you, well, I’ve taught you to be patriotic, and you’re not gonna be seduced by those attempts.

And again, the evidence, if you look at what happens with access to primary education after interstate wars, you are seeing that the occurrence of interstate wars leads to an expansion of access to primary education, which is what you would expect if interstate-war arguments were correct. You don’t see that.

What you see in the western world is that during interstate wars, there is a big drop in enrollment, and after the end of the interstate war, there is a recovery but not new expansion of enrollment. It’s just a partial recovery of the drop that took place during the period of the interstate war.

Demsas: Largely, what you have done in falsifying the democratization, the industrialization, the interstate wars—and also, you talk about the idea that assimilating immigrants also does not fit with the timing. Like, you don’t see large waves of immigration coincide with the creation of expanding primary education to the masses. Largely, your objections are with ones of timing, and those are ones I think are really easy to grasp.

But with democratization, I have a harder time buying that you can pinpoint exactly when that begins. Of course, as you know, democratization is not a simple, binary yes or no. It’s a process that happens and exists even within very autocratic regimes. Amartya Sen had a very famous and provocative argument that democracy is a universal value. And he points to various historical examples of democratic deliberation and norms around public reason outside of the normal Greek, western tradition throughout history.

Obviously, that doesn’t prove anything about whether democratization causes education, but it makes me less certain about our ability to say, Democratization does not play a significant role in pushing for more education, because it’s possible that there were just natural reactions to the fact that people were demanding more things, or there were riots happening all the time, and that creates a response within the state to provide educational resources.

Paglayan: Right. So I think you’re absolutely right that you could have, even within the context of a regime that is still a nondemocratic regime, a response to the masses that is driven by what we would consider relatively democratic ideals. And in order to get at whether that’s what’s going on, one of the key things that we need to do—one that I do as part of the book—is to look at: What are the political arguments that are being used by politicians when they are choosing and defending the creation of primary-education systems?

And so if there was an effort to address societal demands, what you would see is that kind of language. And you don’t see that. You see language along the lines of, The masses don’t want to send their children to school, but this is something that’s going to be beneficial for the state for its own sake, for its stability and the consolidation of political authority. And so we’re going to create these systems. We’re going to force parents to send their kids to school, even if they don’t like it.

So you don’t see this demand. And likewise, one of the things that I look at is: Are civil wars, then, leading to an expansion of primary education? Because civil wars or, as you said, riots, rebellions—there are different types of internal conflicts that I discuss in the book. Are these episodes of internal conflict leading to an expansion of education because people are asking for it? And that’s maybe part of the reason why they’re rebelling, is they want an improvement in their living standards.

Well, when you look at what politicians are saying after these episodes, and they’re talking about, Okay, what’s the goal of education? it’s not to improve living standards. It’s to teach obedience, to teach submissiveness to the state’s authority. And so it’s in the arguments that are being made by political elites who are setting up these systems, and it’s in the content of the laws themselves, also—What is the curriculum that’s being taught? How are the teachers being trained? and so on and so forth—that you see that the intention is not driven by democratic ideals. I think that’s the collection of evidence, in my view, that helps realize that there’s an authoritarian route in education systems.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the real roots of western education, according to Augustina.

[Break]

Demsas: So I think it’s a good time for you to give us your thesis, because I do think there’s a pretty-convincing refutation of many of these traditional explanations, and people are probably left wanting more now.

Paglayan: Sure. So what the book argues, essentially, is that the expansion of primary education in the west was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority—with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo, from which these political elites who are using primary education benefit from.

So that it’s essentially a social-control argument about the origins of primary education and an indoctrination argument about the origins of these western primary-education systems. And by indoctrination, I do want to clarify that I’m following the definition from the dictionary, because the term indoctrination has all kinds of connotations, especially in the United States. But the dictionary defines indoctrination as the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

And so from that standpoint, you can teach someone to accept, uncritically, that an absolutist regime is the best thing that could happen to you. Or you could also teach someone to accept, uncritically, that democracy or republican institutions are the best form of government.

And what makes it indoctrination is not the content of what’s being taught. It’s that the process of teaching these beliefs occurs without allowing, or much less encouraging, critical thinking. There’s no room for students to question, Oh, but why are you saying that republican institutions or absolutist regimes are the best way to structure political life? So there’s this emphasis on using education to instill a set of beliefs about: These are the existing political rules. This is how society is led by the state, and you should accept that as the right thing.

The other core argument of the book is about when exactly governments are likely to turn to education for this indoctrination and social-control and instilling obedience purposes. And that’s another key part of the book, which is to show what we were talking about earlier, that these efforts to use education as a form of indoctrination are particularly likely to intensify when political elites experience social unrest and mass protest against the status quo that these elites benefit from.

So these episodes of mass violence against the status quo generate a lot of fear among political elites who benefit from that status quo. And that fear is what leads political elites to then forge a coalition that supports, Okay, let’s invest in primary education, because clearly what we’ve been doing so far, whether it’s repression or trying to appease people with material concessions—that’s not sufficient. We just had this mass revolt or rebellion or insurrection or protest, etcetera. That tells us that what we’ve been doing is not sufficient. We need to do something new. And that’s when they either choose to invest for the first time in primary education or reform the existing education system that they have to better tailor it to the goal of obedience.

Demsas: Your book is called Raised to Obey. It’s a great title, and it’s also, I think, a very apt, succinct way of describing your thesis here. But I think that the natural question that rises is, you know: There is a desire to repress the peasantry and the citizenry of countries that have largely been authoritarian for hundreds of years. What changed about the capacity or the tools that they were using in advance that made compulsory education necessary to repress the masses? Because I can imagine someone listening to this and going, Okay, so it’s another tool in order to maintain social order, but isn’t there something interesting about the fact that it all kind of just develops in a short, 200-year time span?

Paglayan: Yes, and what happens is the Enlightenment. We have sort of this myth that the Enlightenment promoted ideas of individual autonomy and using reason to make decisions, as opposed to superstition or religion. And there’s a lot of truth in that, but during the Enlightenment, conversation and ideas that circulated around mass education, specifically, which is distinct from education for elites—the idea that took form during the Enlightenment on mass education was that mass education could be used by states to instill obedience and to consolidate the authority of the state.

And so what you see is this moment of change in ideas. It’s sort of a new idea that emerges that We didn’t have, before, any notion that the state could or should be involved in the education of children. And its people like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and Voltaire and Kant who are saying, Well, the state has an interest of its own to educate children so that they will learn to obey the sovereign and its laws. And you get kind of these ideas in the 18th century or so becoming very pervasive in terms of circulating among elites.

Now, the ideas on their own are not sufficient for then political rulers to implement those ideas. And that’s where the role of internal conflict and social protest against the status quo becomes a catalyst for elites to say, Oh, okay. We’ve heard that maybe we could use mass education to instill obedience, but we know that’s a costly endeavor. We have to hire a lot of teachers.

So they only agree to turn to education after they experience a situation that tells them, Okay, the tools you’ve been using—repression, material concessions—those are no longer sufficient. And so that diagnosis is what then leads them to education. But you’re right that this is based on a necessary condition, which is the existence of these ideas, which occur primarily around the Enlightenment.

Demsas: Talk to me a little bit about your evidence for this here. I know you’ve talked a little bit about the research you’ve done into how elites were talking about creating public-education systems. But I assume that there were many instances of upheaval that were happening throughout hundreds of years of human history, and even over the course of this time period that we’re talking about here, when the Enlightenment ideas were in place. There were many instances of upheaval happening and concerns from elites that they were maybe losing power.

But not all of these countries choose to engage in expansion of primary-education systems after every single one of these things. So is there something particular about the upheavals or the rebellions that cause elites to change their minds here? Are you able to kind of code all of the specific types of rebellions that occur? How do we know that these things are causal?

Paglayan: So there are three different things that I want to say in response to this question, which was at the heart of my concern in studying how these instances of upheaval affect or not affect education efforts by the state.

So one of the core concerns is, as a social scientist, you don’t want to start cherry-picking the upheavals that do lead to the expansion of primary education, because that’s just like, Yeah, you’re cherry-picking the cases that meet your theory or support your theory, but there could be all these other upheavals that also take place that don’t lead to education reform.

And so what I did to get around that issue of cherry-picking is just use civil wars as a way of testing systematically whether one type of internal conflict that has been coded by other social scientists, its timing, and has been coded across countries over time for centuries—whether that type of internal conflict is associated with an expansion of primary education.

And that’s what I find, is that when you look at civil wars and expansion of primary education, both before and after a civil war, what you see is that in countries that experienced a civil war, there is a rapid acceleration of primary education following the civil war that you don’t observe in countries that in the same time period did not experience a civil war. So the civil war is leading to further expansion of primary education above and beyond what you would expect in the absence of civil war. And so that’s one of the pieces of evidence that the book provides.

There’s also specific cases that I look at that are not using nationally aggregated data but subnational data to further look at this argument. So in the context, for instance, of thinking about the case of France or the case of Chile or the case of Argentina, what I also examine is: When you have a form of internal conflict that is followed by an education reform, is the implementation of that education reform and the construction of schools being targeted specially to those areas that are perceived by the government to constitute a threat to its social order and stability?

And so, again, that’s another piece of evidence that I find, that yes, indeed, what you’re seeing in the aftermath of these episodes of social conflict involving mass violence against the status quo is that the state not only decides to create a national primary-education system and expand access to primary education, but it’s particularly targeting or specially targeting the expansion of primary education to those areas where the rebels had rebelled against the status quo.

And then this brings us back to your question: Well, but maybe it’s doing that because the rebels were asking for education or asking for an improvement in their living conditions. And they’re responding by providing education for that reason, not for social control. Which is then why I have to look at, Okay, is that what the education system is designed to accomplish? And it’s not.

And then the other thing that I discuss in the book considerably is: Not all kinds of internal conflict are likely to lead to the expansion of education for indoctrination purposes. So if you think, for example, of the context of England, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that England did have episodes of political instability. You had civil wars in the 17th century. You had mass strikes in the 19th century.

But what you have in the context of England is that—while these ideas of the Enlightenment that circulated in Prussia and continental Europe, around, States should use education for consolidating authority by instilling obedience in future citizens—in England, the ideas that exist about mass education are different. And people in England have more of a concern that if you educate people, that’s going to lead them to be more empowered and to become more rebellious, if anything.

And so one of the things that the book says is that for episodes of social unrest to lead to mass-education efforts for indoctrination purposes, well, elites have to believe that education can indeed indoctrinate people. If elites believe that education is going to empower them, as they did in England, they’re not going to respond to strikes or civil wars by expanding education. And so that helps explain in the case of England, for example, why it lagged behind.

And then there’s other conditions that also need to be in place. You need a minimum level, for instance, of fiscal capacity and administrative capacity to be able to roll out these plans. In the context of Mexico, for example, throughout the 19th century, there were all kinds of civil wars. And those civil wars led to a lot of laws that tried to create an education system that was focused on instilling obedience. But that could never be implemented, because there were no resources to do it.

Similarly, in the case of France after the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, there is an effort to pass laws to use education for indoctrination, but the state’s treasury is completely decimated, so they can’t implement that. So there are some conditions that need to be in place.

The other thing that also needs to be in place is that you need elites to come to the conclusion that the existing tools failed to contain the disorder, that a new type of approach is needed. So if you have a situation where you have a mass upheaval, but repression succeeds in quashing those rebels relatively quickly, then I would not expect that to be a situation where you turn to invest in education, because the existing tools worked. So it’s really in those contexts, where the masses are perceived as predisposed to violence and also elites believe that the existing tools are insufficient to address that violent predisposition—that’s when you turn to education.

Demsas: I’m very persuaded by your argument. But I think there’s another theory I want to run past you.

I’m a Protestant, and so I’m forced to ask, like, in my bones: What about Protestantism? There’s a great paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann in QJE. They use county-level data from late-19th-century Prussia to figure out whether Protestantism led to better education and higher economic prosperity.

They essentially look at how close a given county was to Wittenberg. Wittenberg is where that story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church happened. Apparently, whether these were nailed or pasted or even posted on the church doors is up for debate by historians, but I choose to imagine him nailing the theses to the door for dramatic Protestant effect.

The economists find a strong effect of distance from Wittenberg on literacy, which they say largely explains the Protestant lead in economic outcomes. Luther himself also called for boys’ and girls’ schools so they could read the Bible, have that kind of personal relationship with God that defines Protestantism against Catholicism.

So I can imagine a story that Protestantism, the development of Martin Luther’s ideas, and the push to develop these schools as a tool of religious education—that this sort of literacy leads to the development of schooling. And then you see the diffusion from Prussia to other countries, because, as you mentioned earlier in our episode, people were going to Prussia and going, like, Why are you so much more prosperous than us, better than us? And they are seeking to just copy things that feel distinctive. What’s wrong with that theory?

Paglayan: I know the paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann that you’re mentioning. I know it very well. I teach it in one of my courses on historical political economy, and I think they are definitely on to something.

It is the case, as you are articulating, that in Prussia, the Protestant elites played an important role, as well, in pushing for mass education. Now, what you have in Prussia is a situation where Protestants had been pushing for mass education for their own religious goals. And then what you then have is, in the 1740s and 1750s, a situation in which you have peasant revolts in the countryside.

And at that point, the king says, Well, we need to do something to contain these peasant revolts and prevent them from recurring in the future. And the king’s advisers tell him, Well, we should use mass education to teach obedience to the state and its laws. And the king turns to Protestants, who have been providing mass education, to get their support on how to repurpose this Protestant education into an education that’s going to help the king’s goal of consolidating his political authority.

And the Protestants, in this process, they give up some of their power to shape education. And in exchange for giving up that power, they get more resources. So for example, they get resources to fund a normal school, which is in charge of training teachers in Berlin. And the state says, Well, we’re going to give you a monopoly right over the training of these teachers, but the schools are going to be supervised by a state authority and no longer by the priests themselves. And the curriculum of the schools and the normal schools, as well, is going to be set by the state itself, not by the church.

So there’s ways in which the Protestant church gives up power in order to get more resources to do some of its projects and reach more people than it had in the past. Now, of course, that’s the story in Prussia. There’s other countries where you also have a legacy of Protestantism, and Protestantism doesn’t really do much there to expand primary education. But in the context of Prussia, I think you are absolutely right that it played a role, but it’s just not sufficient to explain why, then, the state took over this function.

Demsas: This show is about questioning popular narratives, and I think that the idea that mass primary education was expanded by the west as a tool of social control—I think that’s a pretty controversial claim to a lot of people. But I’ll often gut-check my sense of what a popular narrative is with various sources. I’ll look at polling, or I’ll ask various experts in the field or, you know, read books and papers.

One thing I did when preparing for this interview was to just ask my fiancé, who’s not in education at all—he’s a software engineer—why he thought the spread of mass education happened first in the west. And I’m not joking—he immediately walked over to our bookshelf and pulled out a copy of Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish.

You mentioned this in your book, but some sociologists, like Foucault, have argued that schools are a tool of social control. The argument goes, you know, many modern institutions—like schools but also, hospitals, factories, and the military—they use confinement, and they normalize meticulous examinations of the body and routines in order to subjugate citizens to the state. Do you view your argument as essentially in line with that school of sociological thought?

Paglayan: I do. I think that one of the contributions of the book is to reinstate that way of thinking about education. So Foucault wrote a lot, as you pointed out, on different ways of disciplining individuals, one of which, according to him, was schools. But Foucault also lost a lot of traction in sociology. There were sociologists who criticized him as providing a very cynical interpretation of history. There were also sociologists who said there was essentially no evidence, systematic evidence, whatsoever for his arguments.

And so I think one of the contributions of the book is to provide a wealth of evidence that Foucault’s work didn’t have, that’s cross-national, that’s across two centuries, showing that indeed social-control goals were at the heart of governments’ efforts to regulate and expand primary education.

And I think the other place where I think I depart from Foucault is in putting an emphasis, in the case of my work, in the role that the state played in creating schools for this disciplining purpose. He talks a lot about how schools discipline students, monitor their behavior, create norms of what constitutes good behavior and what constitutes deviant behavior. There’s a lot of that in Foucault, but what he doesn’t really talk much about is how this function of the school was something that the state itself created and used for its own sake of consolidating political authority.

Demsas: I want to bring us to modern day, because I think a lot of people may find it easier to buy that this expansion of mass education happened in the 1700s, 1800s, even early 1900s as a tool of social control but may find it harder to stomach that that’s what’s happening now.

So much of expanding education is seen as a liberal, even progressive value. It’s seen as a way of empowering people, and even if it was the case that it was the intention hundreds of years ago, at this point, obviously, schools are a democratizing force. They’re a liberalizing force. They’re an empowering force.

So you cite research that talks to, you know, people in developing countries about why they want to expand education and find something that surprised me a lot. So could you tell us about that?

Paglayan: Yes. So these days, it is absolutely true that if you ask a politician why they want to provide education, they’re going to tell you, Well, to promote economic development, to reduce poverty and inequality. In public, that’s what they’re going to say, because to say, We want to provide education to create docile and obedient citizens, would be political suicide, right? So usually that’s not what they’re gonna say.

So what this group of researchers at the Center for Global Development did was to try to get policy makers—they surveyed 900 policy makers across developing countries—to try to get them to reveal their true motive for providing education, without these policy makers knowing that’s what they were revealing.

And so what they used was these forced-choice experiments, where they essentially gave policy makers the option to choose between two different sets of education systems. And what they had was, for example, in Scenario A, an education system that promotes 90 percent docile citizens or dutiful citizens, 10 percent skilled workforce, and 30 percent literate individuals—I don’t remember the specific details, but that’s one scenario. And then another scenario is, instead of 90 percent dutiful citizens, it’s 30 percent dutiful citizens, 90 percent literate workforce.

And essentially, what you’re doing is for people to see, Okay, what do you prefer? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens or 90 percent skilled workforce? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens, or do you prefer 90 percent literate population? without them realizing that’s what they’re doing. And what they saw, by having many different pairs of comparisons and having these policy makers choose between these pairs, was that, by far, forming dutiful citizens was the goal that they prioritized over these other options.

Demsas: I hear you talking about this, and you can’t help but think about the current education-reform movements in the United States. I think that they’re pretty cross-pressured, though, because I tried to think about how I would apply your theories to this kind of modern instantiation of it, and you see cross-pressures within the movement.

On the one hand, Republicans in many states have successfully pushed for decentralization efforts, like allowing the use of public dollars to send your kids to private, religious institutions, homeschooling, places where it’s actually quite difficult to, like, instill control about how people are teaching their children or what they’re learning. But then you also see this desire to eradicate certain books or reaffirm certain ideas about American history, about how racism functioned, about what it means about American identity really in reaction to, you know, the 1619 Project. You see that both in primary [education] but also throughout education, including higher education, like in Florida. How do you think about this? Do you still see this kind of education as a tool of social control?

Because, basically, there are two ways I can read this. One is that there’s a wing of the Republican Party that sees education as a tool of social control that they can continue to use to reaffirm certain ideas about America and what ideas people should believe, whether it’s about gender or race or other things. And on the other hand, there’s a wing in the Republican Party that believes that education is clearly a liberalizing force, and so, We need to decentralize and undermine this sort of public institution.

Paglayan: That’s a very good point. So let me take a few steps back.

So the first thing I’ll say is that when I think of all of the efforts that the Republican Party has made since September 2020 with the creation of the patriotic education commission, or 1776 Commission, at that time, and then all of the subsequent state laws in Republican-controlled states to prohibit the teaching of so-called divisive concepts, such as the idea that there’s institutionalized racism, and all of the book bans that you were just describing—all of these I see as just another example of this pattern that the book identifies, which is a cross-national and a centuries-old pattern of politicians responding to mass protest against the status quo by turning to education to teach children that the status quo is actually okay. To the extent that Republicans are using public education, they want to ensure that public education is repurposed for the sake of teaching kids that the status quo is okay.

And they’re doing this precisely after the Black Lives Matter protests, because that was a set of protests that were nationwide. And that sort of ignited a fear of what the country would look like if we were to reform the institutions that these elites benefit from. Now, I think you’re also right that there are some, and a not small portion within the Republican Party, who say, Well, better yet, let’s get rid of public education, and let’s try to have more education in the hands of parents and religious institutions providing education.

But I think there’s also a realistic sense that you can’t just get rid of public schools. So they’re doing both things at the same time to try to, in some ways, shift enrollment away from public schools but, also, reform public schools so that they serve this specific agenda. The one thing I’ll say, though, Jerusalem, is that we talk right now about how they want to use education to instill a specific set of political and moral values, and that the Republican Party wants to do this.

But in my view, the issue is: Liberals are also doing this. I haven’t really seen much effort on the part of liberals in rethinking education systems and saying, Hey. Yeah, we’re still teaching the Pledge of Allegiance in many states to 5-year-olds. They’re repeating, I swear allegiance to the U.S. flag and to the republic for which it stands. And these are 5-year-olds who don’t know how to write their name yet, much less know what the republic is that they’re swearing allegiance to. What does that even mean?

So there is a lot of continued, persistent use of education to teach a lot of norms, to teach the norm, for instance, that in the U.S., if you want to express discontent, you do it by voting. You don’t do it by protesting. And if you want to protest, it has to be a peaceful protest. That’s a norm. The idea that republican institutions are the best form of government—again, that’s an idea, but it’s not taught in a way that encourages critical thinking.

And I hear a lot of liberals right now saying, Yes, and we shouldn’t teach critical thinking. We should indoctrinate for democracy. And so they’re kind of complicit in some ways. They want to teach a different set of ideas than conservatives, but they still want the education system to serve their own political agenda and teach a specific set of norms, instead of thinking, How can we use education to actually encourage critical thinking? And so that’s something that I also wanted to bring up as part of this conversation.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess we’re coming a little bit full circle from this episode here, where, because maybe I had a unique experience of school or a less-common experience of school—I don’t know—I feel like I learned critical thinking in school. I feel like I was able to get pushback or things like that, but I think there’s a lot of people who have been doing a lot of writing in the tradition of Foucault and others about how that is not the common experience at educational institutions.

Paglayan: Yes. Exactly. And the reality is that the lower the level of income of the student, the more the school tends to be focused on disciplining than on promoting critical thinking. So that’s the other thing, because I talked to some friends or colleagues who tell me, Yeah, but the school that my kid goes to—yeah, the school your kid goes to serves affluent people. And that’s not the group of people that politicians are concerned about disciplining: It’s the people who are at the bottom who need to be taught to stay in their place, to be happy with what they have, and so on. So that’s also relevant here.

Demsas: Well, I think that’s a great place to ask our final question, which is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Paglayan: So I’ll say that, historically, I’ve been someone who was very focused on my intellectual development and thinking that my brain and my mind are crucial for my well-being. And investing in that is crucial for my well-being. And over the course of time, I’ve come to see that my body is also really important and that, oftentimes, it’s really taking care of acknowledging how I feel in my body that’s more important to figuring out what I really think for my well-being.

And so that’s been sort of a bit of an evolution in trying to not to separate the body from the mind experience, and certainly trying not to prize the mind over the body, which is what I used to do.

Demsas: I have had a very similar experience. Maybe it’s just, like, you’re getting older or whatever, but you have to get eight hours of sleep. And if you’re thinking about yourself in terms of, like, Well, I could have just continued reading. I could have continued doing more work. I could do more prep for this interview, or I could have written more.

I also just think the research is getting pretty definitive here about things like stress and not taking care of yourself in that way having serious impacts down the line, in a way that’s really kind of conflicting with advice you get as a kid, which is just, like, Put everything you can. Sleep four hours a night. Neglect all these things about self-care in order to advance your intellectual pursuits. So I feel very similar.

Paglayan: Exactly.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Agustina. I really enjoyed having you on the show.

Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I loved talking with you.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.