Literacy Education for the 21st Century: It's Time to Close the Factory

Much of what is done in literacy education today reects the philosophy of the industrial (or factory) model of education, which evolved during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article examines the historical and theoretical foundations of the factory model and contrasts it to the more recently developed inquiry model. Vignettes provide glimpses of how each model plays out in a contemporary classroom. We argue that the factory model of education is no longer useful since democracy in the twenty-rst century requires citizens who are able to think critically and use learning and language exibly to construct knowledge in a number of ways and contexts. While it sometimes seems that the raging national debate over education is a phenomenon exclusively endemic to our time and culture, we should remember that this is not the case. A similar national debate that took place in Japan in the 1880s determined that country’s educational thought and political action for the next fty years (Bethel, 1973). In that case, debate centered on the goal of education—specically, whether education in Japan should seek to build subjects or citizens. One group argued that a strong Japan could be built only by citizens, ‘‘only by people educated to be in-dependent and self-assured’ ’ ( p. 28). Another group, however, believed that it was more important to have obedient and loyal subjects in Japan, and that this should be the main goal of education. The latter group won the debate, and, at the risk of sounding trite, the rest was history.