This is excerpted from “The Second Wave,” which is Chapter 2 in Toffler’s third best-seller, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 29.

AS WORK SHIFTED out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was “nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.” If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education.

Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the “overt curriculum.” But beneath it lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” that was far more basic. It consisted—and still does in most industrialized nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.

Thus from the mid-nineteenth century in, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer, and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased.

Mass public education was clearly a humanizing step forward. As a group of workingmen in New York City declared in 1829, “Next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.” Nevertheless, Second Wave schools machined generation after generation of young people into a pliable, regimented work force of the type required by electro-mechanical technology and the assembly line.

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