Schools as Factories: The Limits of a Metaphor

This essay examines a longstanding and recurrent metaphor in the representation of schools in modern society: the school as factory. Tracing this figure to the rise of philanthropic schools provided by factory owners from the early stages of the British industrial revolution, the essay surveys its uses both in the historical sources and in later critical-theoretical analyses commonly informed by the work of Michel Foucault. While acknowledging the frequent validity of the metaphor in specific historical conjunctures, the essay also questions its overapplication past and present, to the exclusion of other symbolic constructions of the school with deeper origins and wider salience for the practice of education. The essay concludes with a reminder that the reproduction of governing metaphors in the historical and cultural study of educational institutions should always be treated with philosophical caution.