Our education system was designed to fight and win political and economic wars. We needed people to build bombs, radar and airplanes. We now have different problems, such as climate change, hunger, toxic waste, terrorism and looming shortages of clean water. These issues require new types of solutions.

Unfortunately, our public education system is not geared to solve these modern problems. Although today’s young people are living in a sophisticated, fast-paced, highly technological world, the schools we make them attend are still operating much like they did a century ago. The dilemma is that as long as we educate people in traditional ways, they will perpetuate the current way of doing things. In order to make change, we must fundamentally transform how we think about learning and the position of individuals in society.

By our very use of words like “teaching” and “schooling,” we seem to accept the idea that some people at the top are doing things to other people farther down the totem pole. Public education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth’s resources for granted. That is no way help children grow up into problem-solving, assumption-challenging, compassionate citizens who think independently and participate in the life of their communities and countries.

Sociologists, futurists, politicians, entrepreneurs and even some educators talk about the need for a revolution in education. But what they envision really amounts to nothing more than tinkering with the old, crumbling structure. Although there have been many cosmetic alterations to public education over the past century, the traditional blueprint for education persists...and it looks like a factory. From time to time alternative schools and programs emerge that are teaching a so-called “child-centered curriculum”, or that are using team-teaching or a program of integrated studies or some other new pedagogy.

But the context of these well-meaning and sometimes less oppressive alternatives is still hierarchy and coercion. Most people still believe that children and young people must be made to go to school or else they won’t become educated. And even the most radical critics of the school system seem not to want to abandon the belief that children must be processed for a life as producers and consumers..

This is not surprising, since education is an industry. Our present system was designed to prepare workers for an Industrial Age culture, teaching authoritarianism, self-repression, and strict obedience to the clock. True to the industrial model, control over what is to be learned rests somewhere inside a huge bureaucracy that oversees both teachers and students.

Getting rid of the factory model of public education challenges not just our assumptions about how children learn, but a variety of agendas related to who manages the affairs of our communities and how corporations make profits. It is those vested interests which allow otherwise insightful and community-minded people to ignore the scandalous malfunctioning of our billion dollar education industry.

But change will not happen until we give up on the hierarchical, coercive, industrial model of education – whether it looks like a public school, a charter school, a private school, or a home school. We must deschool society, as author Ivan Illich put it back in 1970, rather than merely reform the institution. We must demolish the institution of schooling because it impedes learning and enslaves children. Then we need to put both money and creativity into creating opportunities and infrastructures that respect children and help them learn.

To do that, we must challenge our dearly held assumptions about the purpose and process of education. These are assumptions that have created a society that chooses consumption over action, that favors developing new weapons to relating to each other, that encourages production over conservation. Overturning these assumptions will take time, but unschoolers and democratic school advocates are making that change, one child at a time.