History confirms that our conventional instructional public schools were developed on an industrial model invented in the 19th Century, which seems pretty obvious to me when you think about all the structure in those schools of periods, bells, uniform classrooms, desks in rank and file, standardized curriculum, etc. At the end of the 19th Century, universal public K-12 education with no tuition, paid for by the taxpayer, had become such an expensive proposition that school district executives and school boards went to great lengths to attempt to employ the latest best practices from the business world to justify that all that money was being “efficiently” spent. It may in fact be worth considering if some of the business methodologies developed toward the end of the 20th Century might appropriately be applied to today’s conventional schools.

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