Ricardo Semler's summary is the bluntest one available: school in rows is a factory from the 1800s, operating in a world that no longer has many factories. As he has told it, that observation carried him through two decades of schools built on the opposite grammar, children choosing what to learn, adults acting as tutors rather than bosses, work organized around a project, a tutor, and a deadline, which he notes is the shape of adult work as well.
The factory-school story deserves one honest complication before it earns its force. Historians of education point out that the tidy tale, in which industrialists sat down and designed schooling to produce docile workers, is largely a retrospective simplification. Mass schooling grew from many roots: religious instruction, nation-building, civic idealism, urbanization, and yes, the era's available organizational technology. The rows did not come from a conspiracy, and the honest version of the argument does not need one. They came from the same place as everything else in the nineteenth century: standardization was the best tool anyone had for handling large numbers of people with small numbers of supervisors.
The grammar, not the origin, is the problem
But the origin story matters less than the operating system that persists. Strip away the debate about intent and look at the design itself. Students are batched by manufacture date, moved in unison at the sound of a bell, evaluated by uniform inspection at fixed intervals, and graded significantly on compliance: sitting still, following instructions, completing identical tasks in identical time. Every one of those features is an answer to an industrial-era constraint, scarce teachers, scarce books, no way to track individuals, and every one of them survives in buildings full of technology that dissolved the constraint decades ago.
This is the useful sense in which school is a factory: not that it was built by factory owners, but that it still solves a logistics problem that no longer exists, and imposes the costs of that solution on children. The costs are not mysterious. Decades of motivation research in the self-determination tradition converge on the finding that environments supporting autonomy produce better-quality motivation and engagement than environments running on control, across school levels and cultures (Ryan and Deci, 2020). A synthesis of 153 studies found autonomy support associated with gains across motivation, engagement, self-regulated learning, and achievement (Mammadov and Schroeder, 2023). The row-and-bell grammar is, almost point for point, a machine for denying autonomy: what to learn, when, how fast, and next to whom are all decided elsewhere.
Why it persists without defenders
Ask a superintendent, a teacher, a parent, or an employer to defend age-batching and bells and almost none will. The inheritance persists through a subtler mechanism: it is nobody's decision. Teachers inherit the timetable, principals inherit the building, districts inherit the credit-hour, universities inherit the transcript, employers inherit the diploma. Each layer optimizes within the grammar because changing the grammar requires every other layer to move at once. Institutions do not need advocates to survive; they need only the absence of a coordinated alternative.
That is why the interesting challenges to the model come from outside the coordination problem, from schools small enough or independent enough to rewrite the grammar wholesale rather than reform it clause by clause. The Lumiar model that grew from Semler's wager makes the substitution explicit: multi-age groups instead of batches, demonstrated competence instead of seat time, tutors who accompany individual trajectories instead of supervisors who keep the line moving (Revista Educação, 2020).
The re-examination that matters
The industrial inheritance re-examined, then, yields a sharper indictment than the myth. The myth says school was designed for a bad purpose. The record says something worse: school was designed for a real purpose that expired, and no one is responsible for noticing. A factory that has outlived its product does not need to be denounced. It needs to be decommissioned, and its parts, the teachers, the buildings, the childhoods, redeployed around the constraint that actually binds now: not the scarcity of information, but the scarcity of adults who know a particular child well.
The rows were never evil. They were efficient. The question a century later is only whether anyone still remembers what they were efficient at.
Sources
- Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective. Contemporary Educational Psychology 61. Autonomy-supportive environments predict better-quality motivation across school levels and cultures. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101860
- Mammadov, S. & Schroeder, K. (2023). A meta-analytic review of the relationships between autonomy support and positive learning outcomes. Contemporary Educational Psychology 75. 378 effect sizes, 153 studies; mean effect 0.32 across motivation, engagement, and achievement. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2023.102235
- Revista Educação (2020). Criador da escola Lumiar explica seu projeto (interview with Ricardo Semler). Multi-age groups, competence-based advancement, tutors instead of supervisors. https://revistaeducacao.com.br/2020/01/09/lumiar-entrevista/