TL;DRWhy This Matters
Every civilization has faced the same foundational problem: how do you transmit what you know to people who don't know it yet, and how do you decide what counts as worth knowing in the first place? That question sounds bureaucratic. It isn't. It is, in fact, one of the most consequential political questions a society can answer — because the answer shapes not just what people learn, but what they're capable of imagining. Curricula are not neutral documents. They are arguments, written in the language of requirements and contact hours, about what a human being is for.
The history of organized education is inseparable from the history of power. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is practically a truism among historians of education. The Prussian schooling system of the early nineteenth century — which became the template for mass public education across Europe and North America — was explicitly designed to produce disciplined, punctual, obedient citizens who would make reliable soldiers and factory workers. Its architects were not embarrassed about this. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose Addresses to the German Nation (1808) helped inspire the system, was quite clear that the goal was to produce a new kind of person whose will was aligned with the state. The bells, the rows of desks, the age-graded cohorts, the standardized examinations — these were not pedagogical discoveries. They were industrial design choices.
And yet education has also been, repeatedly, one of the most powerful tools of human liberation. Frederick Douglass learned to read in secret, against the explicit prohibition of his enslaver, and later wrote that the moment he understood the relationship between literacy and freedom — that keeping people ignorant was the mechanism of their oppression — he felt something irreversible shift inside him. The suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the liberation theology of Latin America, the underground samizdat networks of Soviet dissidents: all of them understood that access to knowledge was not merely useful but constitutive of personhood itself. To control what a person can know is, in a very real sense, to control who they can become.
What makes this moment unusual is that we are living through the third great disruption in the technology of knowledge transmission. The first was writing itself — which broke the monopoly of oral tradition and priestly memory. The second was the Gutenberg press, which shattered the Church's near-exclusive control over textual reproduction and arguably made the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and eventually liberal democracy possible. The third is the internet — and we are still, honestly, in the middle of it, still trying to understand whether it is primarily liberating or primarily a new, more sophisticated mechanism of control. Perhaps, as with every previous disruption, it is both.
The Gutenberg Disruption and Its Lessons
The printing press arrived in Europe around 1440, and within fifty years it had produced more books than had been created in the entire previous thousand years of Western civilization. This is worth sitting with. The speed of the transformation was staggering, and so was the terror it inspired in those whose authority rested on controlling the written word.
The Catholic Church's response was instructive. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum — the Index of Forbidden Books — was established in 1559 and remained in effect, in various forms, until 1966. It was not merely symbolic. It was a serious bureaucratic apparatus, regularly updated, designed to enumerate precisely which ideas were too dangerous for ordinary people to encounter. Copernicus was on it. Galileo was on it. Descartes was on it. So were Locke, Hume, Kant, and Mill. Reading the Index as a catalogue is, from a certain angle, rather like reading a syllabus of modernity.
What the Church understood — and what every subsequent controller of information has understood — is that the accessibility of an idea changes its social power. A heretical manuscript copied by hand and circulating among a tiny learned elite is a manageable threat. A printed pamphlet available for a penny in every market town is a revolution waiting to happen. Martin Luther grasped this intuitively: he wrote in German rather than Latin, at a reading level accessible to the newly literate merchant class, and his Ninety-Five Theses spread across Germany in two weeks. Two weeks. In 1517. The establishment had no framework for that velocity.
The lesson that Gutenberg's century teaches us is not simply that more information equals more freedom. It is more complicated than that. The press also enabled the rapid spread of anti-Semitic libels, witch-hunting manuals (the Malleus Maleficarum was a bestseller), and political propaganda of a virulence that hand-copying had made impractical. Information abundance does not automatically produce wisdom or justice. It produces a contested field in which different kinds of knowledge — and different kinds of manipulation — compete. The question of who wins that competition turns out to depend enormously on what people have already been taught to value, to trust, and to doubt.
The Prussian Blueprint
It is genuinely difficult to overstate how much of contemporary mass education derives from decisions made in Prussia between roughly 1800 and 1870. The Prussian education model — compulsory attendance, age-graded classes, standardized curriculum, trained professional teachers, examinations as sorting mechanisms — was adopted with remarkable speed and remarkably little critical scrutiny by industrializing nations that needed to manage large populations of newly urbanized workers.
Horace Mann, the American education reformer who traveled to Prussia in 1843 and returned to Massachusetts with evangelical enthusiasm for what he had seen, is perhaps the most important figure in this transmission. Mann was not a villain; he genuinely believed he was bringing the gift of literacy and civic formation to a democratic republic. But he was also, somewhat unconsciously, importing a set of assumptions about the relationship between education, obedience, and social order that were quite at odds with the democratic ideals he thought he was serving.
The philosopher Ivan Illich, in his 1971 book Deschooling Society, made the most radical version of this argument. Illich contended that compulsory schooling does not primarily teach children academic subjects — it teaches them to be consumers of institutional authority. The hidden curriculum of school, he argued, is the lesson that knowledge comes from certified experts, that your own curiosity and self-direction are insufficient, and that your value as a person is determined by your performance on externally administered assessments. Whether or not you accept Illich's prescription (which was essentially to abolish schools), his diagnosis remains intellectually bracing. The hidden curriculum — the lessons taught not through content but through structure — is arguably more powerful than any explicit syllabus.
This is debated among educationalists. Many researchers argue that Illich overstated the case and that public schooling, whatever its origins, has genuinely expanded opportunity and social mobility for millions of people. Both things can be true simultaneously: an institution can be simultaneously emancipatory in some dimensions and constraining in others. The historical record suggests it usually is.
Who Decides What Gets Taught
The question of curriculum control is, in democratic societies, surprisingly unresolved. In the United States, it is constitutionally a state matter, which produces a patchwork of fifty different answers — and, within states, significant control exercised at the local school board level. This means that the content of what American children are taught is determined by thousands of overlapping political processes, most of them not very visible, all of them contestable.
The textbook industry adds another layer. Because Texas and California are by far the largest textbook markets, publishers have historically designed materials to satisfy those states' adoption committees — which means, in practice, that the ideological and factual preferences of a relatively small number of people in Austin and Sacramento have shaped what is taught to children across the entire country. This is not speculation; it has been extensively documented by journalists and historians, perhaps most thoroughly in Diane Ravitch's The Language of Composition and in the reporting of organizations like the Texas Freedom Network.
The culture war over American history curricula — over how slavery is taught, over whether the 1619 Project framework or a more traditional narrative should organize instruction — is often reported as a novelty, a product of our uniquely polarized moment. It isn't. Battles over history education are as old as public education itself. After the Civil War, the Lost Cause mythology was systematically inserted into Southern curricula, presenting the Confederacy as a noble defense of state sovereignty rather than a slave empire. This rewriting was effective: surveys of Southern adults throughout the twentieth century consistently showed higher rates of Lost Cause belief among those who had attended public school in the South. Curricula are not merely reflections of values; they actively produce them.
Outside the United States, the mechanisms differ but the fundamental dynamic is similar. In China, the gaokao examination system creates a powerful feedback loop: whatever appears on the exam gets taught, and what gets taught shapes what a society's educated class knows and thinks. The Party's control over examination content is therefore control over the intellectual formation of the Chinese professional class. In Turkey, after 2016, textbooks were extensively revised to remove discussion of evolutionary theory and to emphasize Ottoman history in ways aligned with current nationalist ideology. In Hungary, the Orbán government has progressively centralized curriculum control and required universities to teach approved civic values. These are not aberrations. They are the ordinary behavior of governments when they decide that education is primarily a mechanism for social reproduction rather than for critical inquiry.
The Internet and the Illusion of Total Access
For a brief, intoxicating moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed as though the internet had solved the problem of information control permanently. Knowledge that had previously been gatekept by universities, publishers, and governments was suddenly, notionally, available to anyone with a connection. Wikipedia, launched in 2001, became — astonishingly — one of the most consulted reference sources in human history, collaboratively written and freely accessible. The implicit promise was that information freedom was now structurally guaranteed; no Index Librorum Prohibitorum could survive in a world of distributed servers.
This was not wrong, exactly. It was incomplete. What the early internet optimists underestimated was the distinction between information being technically available and information being effectively discoverable, comprehensible, and trusted. When everything is available, the bottleneck shifts from access to attention — and whoever controls attention controls, in a meaningful sense, what people actually know.
Google's search algorithm determines, for the overwhelming majority of people, what information is effectively real — because information that does not appear in the first page of results does not, for most practical purposes, exist. This is not conspiracy; it is the inevitable consequence of abundance. But it means that algorithmic curation has replaced editorial gatekeeping, and the values embedded in the algorithm (which are partly commercial, partly technical, partly ideological in ways that are genuinely difficult to audit) now function as a kind of distributed curriculum. We did not abolish the Index; we privatized it and made it invisible.
Social media platforms have added a further dimension. The recommendation engine — the algorithmic system that decides which content to show you next — is arguably the most powerful educational technology ever built, in the sense that it shapes what people believe, fear, and value more continuously and more effectively than any classroom. YouTube's algorithm, by its own internal logic, tends to recommend progressively more extreme or emotionally engaging versions of whatever you just watched. Facebook's news feed was, for years, optimized for engagement, which turned out to mean optimized for outrage, because outrage is the emotion that drives clicks. These are not accidents. They are business model choices. But their educational consequences — their effects on what people believe and how they reason — dwarf the effects of any curriculum reform.
The Radical Pedagogy Tradition
It would be misleading to present education's relationship with power as purely a story of control. There is a long, vital counter-tradition: a history of educators who understood their work as fundamentally political, who were trying to use education not to reproduce existing society but to question and transform it.
Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator whose 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed became one of the most cited works in educational theory, argued that what he called the banking model of education — in which teachers deposit information into passive students — was not merely pedagogically ineffective but politically oppressive. It trained people to be receivers rather than creators of knowledge, to accept the world as it was rather than as it might be. His alternative — critical pedagogy — involved teaching literacy through engagement with students' own lived experience and political situation, inviting them to name their world as a step toward changing it. Freire's literacy programs in northeastern Brazil were so politically threatening that he was imprisoned and exiled after the 1964 military coup.
This tradition runs from Freire back through John Dewey, who argued in the early twentieth century that education for democracy required a fundamentally different kind of school — one organized around inquiry, participation, and genuine problem-solving rather than rote acquisition of predetermined answers. It runs forward through the critical race theory debates in American education (where the term "critical pedagogy" has become, in public discourse, a kind of political Rorschach test, bearing little resemblance to its theoretical origins). It runs through the unschooling movement, through democratic free schools like Summerhill, through the philosophy of Waldorf education, each of which represents a different answer to the question: what if we organized learning around the learner's own development rather than the institution's requirements?
These alternatives have remained peripheral, which is itself informative. The mainstream has generally found them threatening — not because they failed, but because their success would require a fundamental renegotiation of the relationship between educational institutions and the people they purport to serve.
Knowing What You Don't Know You Don't Know
There is a dimension of educational control that is subtler than banned books or mandatory curricula: the structure of ignorance that education produces. Every curriculum teaches not only content but a set of implicit assumptions about what kinds of questions are worth asking, what kinds of evidence count, and what kinds of people's experiences are treated as data.
The history of Western education is substantially a history of what was left out. Indigenous knowledge systems — which in many cases contained sophisticated ecological science, astronomical observation, and philosophical thought — were categorized as myth and excluded from what counted as knowledge. The intellectual contributions of Islamic scholars, who preserved and extended Greek philosophy and made fundamental advances in mathematics, optics, and medicine during Europe's medieval period, are systematically underrepresented in Western educational narratives. Women's intellectual history was largely invisible in curricula until feminist scholars began recovering it in the latter half of the twentieth century. Epistemic injustice — the philosopher Miranda Fricker's term for the harm done to someone in their capacity as a knower — is not only an interpersonal phenomenon; it can be systematically embedded in educational structures.
This is not merely a matter of historical fairness, though it is that. It shapes contemporary reasoning in material ways. A person educated entirely within one paradigm of knowledge — who has never been invited to question the assumptions that organize their thinking — has a particular kind of blind spot. They know many facts within the paradigm. They may not know that the paradigm has edges, that there are questions it cannot ask, that its categories are constructions rather than necessities. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn called these assumptions paradigms, and argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that most scientists work entirely within them, solving puzzles defined by the paradigm rather than questioning the paradigm itself. Education, for the most part, teaches paradigm maintenance rather than paradigm questioning.
The deepest form of educational control may therefore be the one that is least visible: not preventing you from reading certain books, but ensuring that certain questions never become thinkable, because the concepts required to form them were never installed.
Digital Education and the New Enclosures
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a transformation that was already underway: the massive migration of education onto digital platforms. Zoom classrooms, MOOCs, Khan Academy, Coursera, Google Classroom — a new infrastructure for learning emerged at speed, and it brought with it a set of questions about ownership, surveillance, and the commodification of learning that are still being worked through.
When education moves onto proprietary platforms, something changes about the nature of the knowledge being transmitted. The data generated by students' interactions — what they struggled with, how long they spent on each problem, which concepts they avoided, which explanations they needed repeated — becomes enormously valuable. Learning analytics is an expanding industry whose pitch to educational institutions is, essentially: let us harvest your students' cognitive data and we'll tell you how to teach them more efficiently. The efficiency framing is real; there are genuine pedagogical benefits to adaptive learning technologies. But the model also produces a student body whose intellectual development is being measured, profiled, and sold in ways that Fichte, Mann, or even Illich never imagined.
There is also the question of platform capture in higher education. The increasing reliance of universities on learning management systems, plagiarism detection software, and proctoring technologies (many of which use AI surveillance to monitor students during remote examinations) represents a significant shift in the locus of control over educational experience. These are not public institutions accountable to democratic processes; they are private companies with commercial interests that may or may not align with educational ones.
At the same time, digital education has genuinely democratized access in ways that matter. A student in rural Nigeria can now, in principle, take a course from MIT. A person curious about quantum mechanics or the history of the Ottoman Empire can find, at essentially no cost, material that would previously have required either a university library or significant wealth. The question is not whether digital education is good or bad — it is clearly both — but who controls the infrastructure, on what terms, and toward what ends.
Homeschooling, Unschooling, and the Question of Exit
One response to the perceived failures of institutional education is simply to leave it. Homeschooling has grown dramatically across the Western world over the past three decades — in the United States, the percentage of school-age children being homeschooled has roughly doubled since 2012, a trend that accelerated sharply during the pandemic. The homeschooling population is ideologically heterogeneous: it includes religious conservatives who want to teach creationism, progressive families pursuing child-led unschooling, and a large middle who are simply dissatisfied with their local schools.
This heterogeneity makes homeschooling politically odd. It is simultaneously a conservative exit from secular liberal education and a progressive exit from authoritarian institutional schooling. Both are, in their different ways, a refusal of the Prussian model's assumption that the state has the right and duty to define what children must learn.
The counter-argument — made seriously by scholars like Rob Reich and others — is that compulsory public education is not primarily about producing useful workers or obedient citizens; it is about creating the conditions for democratic participation and civic life, including the exposure of children to perspectives and people different from those of their own family. A child raised entirely within a homeschooling bubble may be extremely well-educated in some respects and severely limited in others. The question of whether the state has a legitimate interest in preventing epistemic enclaving — the formation of populations with entirely incompatible factual bases for political reasoning — is not easily answered from either a libertarian or a communitarian perspective. It is genuinely unresolved.
Unschooling, associated most closely with the educator John Holt, goes further than homeschooling in rejecting any imposed curriculum. The theory is that children are natural learners whose curiosity, if left unmanaged by institutional demands, will lead them to acquire the knowledge and skills they genuinely need. There is interesting evidence for this in specific contexts — the self-directed learning research of Sugata Mitra, whose Hole in the Wall experiments showed Indian children in urban slums teaching themselves to use computers with minimal adult instruction, is cited frequently. There is also evidence that unschooling produces vastly unequal outcomes depending heavily on the cultural and economic resources of the family. Like many educational innovations, it may work beautifully for some children and catastrophically for others.
The Questions That Remain
Who gets to decide what a child must know — and what democratic accountability, if any, should exist for that decision? As curricula become increasingly contested terrain in culture wars, as algorithmic platforms increasingly shape what young people actually learn, and as homeschooling fragments the shared informational commons that public education was meant to create, the question of legitimate educational authority has no agreed answer.
If the deepest form of control is the control of what questions can be thought, how would you know if you were subject to it? The structure of ignorance is invisible from the inside almost by definition — the concepts you lack are precisely the ones you don't know you lack. What would an education explicitly designed to produce its own questioning look like, and would any state or institution that depends on educated cooperation ever willingly build one?
The internet promised to make information free, but what it actually made free was access to information — while attention, comprehension, and trust became the new scarce resources, controlled by private algorithms optimized for engagement rather than understanding. Have we merely traded one Index Librorum Prohibitorum for millions of personalized ones, each invisibly tailored to confirm what we already believe? And if so, what would it mean to reform that, when the architecture itself is the curriculum?
Education has always served, simultaneously, as a mechanism of social reproduction and a potential engine of social transformation. Frederick Douglass and the Prussian schoolmaster were both right about what literacy does — they simply wanted it to do different things. What does it tell us that the most transformative educators in history — Freire imprisoned in Brazil, Socrates executed in Athens, Wollstonecraft mocked in London — so often found themselves in conflict with the societies whose children they were trying to teach?
And finally: in a world where artificial intelligence can now generate plausible, fluent, confident text on almost any topic, what does it mean to be educated? If the skill of retrieving and synthesizing information can be delegated to a machine, what remains that is irreducibly human about knowing something — and is that irreducible remainder precisely what no institution has ever been very good at teaching?