this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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Hmm, depending on whose opinion you listen to, education systems have always been built around workforce productivity:
RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms
You can argue that primary and secondary school was about workforce productivity, but college was designed for leadership training.
Well... the first colleges were established to train clergy, because reading and writing were rare skills at the time, and there was a demand for trained clergy who worked as clerks, accountants and record keepers for nobles who could not themselves read or write, which I think just circles back to the workforce productivity thing.
This is also true for Confucian schools in China. The students were not clergy in the religious sense, but they learned reading, writing and tradition in order to become useful administrators for local rulers.
Colleges haven't been training people how to read for centuries; it has been assumed that people entering college could read and write with a pen for a long time and college shifted with it.
And the collegiate system wasn't based on Confucian teaching styles.