The Greatest Factory We Ever Built: How Mass Education Rewired the World
- didiermoretti
- Jan 19
- 10 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
For most of human history, literacy was a luxury good. Like silk or spices, it belonged to the gentry and priests who could afford the time, tutors, and texts. For everyone else, literacy was unnecessary - and dangerous.
A literate peasant was a questioning peasant—prone to challenge his station, his lord, or, worst of all, his taxes. Ignorance suited the social order. The masses toiled with their muscles while a small elite safeguarded humanity's accumulated knowledge in monasteries, madrasas, and private libraries. This arrangement worked well for building pyramids and conquering continents.
Then, in the late nineteenth century, the logic reversed. Elites who had long feared educated masses began building schools for everyone. The cause was not a sudden outbreak of moral zeal or piety. It was the cold arithmetic of the Industrial Revolution.
This is the story of how mass education became the most powerful economic multiplier in history—and, in the process, quietly taught people how to question the hierarchy that created it.
Education for the Few
Education, when it existed at all, was designed to reproduce social order, not to expand opportunity. Jewish communities insisted on male literacy to study the Torah; Rome educated citizens for administration and war; Greece aimed to produce citizens, not workers. No one in 1300 was running schools to produce more productive serfs.
China came closest to a meritocratic ideal. The Imperial Examination System (keju) lasted an astonishing 1,300 years, filtering the population to produce a highly educated bureaucracy. But this was a system for selecting the few, not elevating the many.
Ultimately, literacy remained a rounding error. As recently as 1820, the global adult literacy rate stood at just 12 percent.
From Muscles to Minds
Why did the elites of Victorian England, Prussia, and the United States suddenly decide to educate the children of the poor? The answer lies in the shift from brawn to brains.
The First Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1830) was built on muscle. It de-skilled labor, replacing master craftsmen with machines that could be operated by children pulling levers. But the Second Industrial Revolution (c. 1870–1914) was built on precision engineering, electrification, chemistry, and logistics. It was no longer enough for a worker to be strong; they needed to be literate, numerate, and adaptable.
Railroads required literate brakemen who could read schedules and avoid collisions. As machinery became more expensive, the cost of human error skyrocketed. An illiterate peasant breaking a wooden plow is a nuisance; an illiterate worker mishandling a high-pressure steam boiler is a catastrophe. Capitalists who once wanted docile bodies now needed adaptable brains.
Not everyone welcomed this shift. Landed elites correctly recognized—sometimes explicitly—that educated workers were a threat to cheap labor. Where land ownership was concentrated, public education stalled. Guatemala's coffee oligarchs blocked public schools until the 1940s, fearing that educated indigenous workers would leave plantation work. They may have been right—but their great-grandchildren are still paying the price.
From here on out in this article we will primarily focus on the experience of the first countries to industrialize: Europe and the US. Similar dynamics played out in many other countries as they embarked on their own industrialization.
Prussia's Assembly Line for Citizens
While industry provided the why, Prussia provided the how. After being humiliated by Napoleon in 1806, Prussia realized that the modern army—like the modern factory—required competence at scale.
Prussia built the prototype: standardized curriculum, teacher certification, and distinct "grades" based on age. It was the equivalent of the Model T of education, a century before Ford: efficient, standardized, and designed to create obedient citizens. It wasn't designed for flourishing—it was designed for scale.
Other nations, facing the challenge of manufacturing "Americans," "Britons," or "Frenchmen" at scale out of chaotic populations, eagerly imported the model. Public schools became the factories where immigrants and farmers were processed into citizens with a common language and shared history. Critics mocked it as "education-as-factory," training compliant workers rather than thinkers. They weren't wrong. But they missed something crucial: even this regimented form of literacy was about to unleash a massive economic multiplier.
The Great Rewiring
Public schooling was not a cultural project. It was the most ambitious infrastructure program of the nineteenth century.
The transformation was stunning. In England, literacy jumped from 53% in 1820 to more than 95% by 1900. In the United States, high school enrollment doubled between 1900 and 1910, then doubled again by 1920. This expansion was driven not by federal mandate but by local communities voting to tax themselves to build schools—a grassroots revolution in education.
Figure 1 illustrates the broader pattern. Northwest European nations and their settler colonies led the transformation, moving from roughly 50% literacy to over 80% in a single century. By 1940, US illiteracy had fallen to just 2.9%
The pattern would replicate globally over the next century—more slowly, but with similar force: worldwide, the number of literate people grew more than tenfold between 1870 and 1970 - from less than 300,000 to over 3 Billion.
Unlocking Human Potential
Historians have long called this the rise of "human capital," treating education like a software upgrade for biological machinery. But a better lens is the expansion of Human Capabilities.
While the initial goal was functional—producing workers who could read a manual or calculate a ledger—the result was transformative. By endowing the workforce with the tools of thought, society didn't just increase productivity; it expanded the scope of what human beings could do and be.
This shift unlocked a profound positive feedback loop. A population that can read is not only more employable but also more innovative, politically active, and health-conscious. Literate populations could read sanitation instructions and demand clean water—child mortality in London dropped from 64% in the 1700s to about 30% in 1840. The true wealth of the industrial age wasn't the machinery in the factories, but the sudden, massive expansion of human potential that mass schooling unleashed.
We didn't just get smarter; we got connected. Public education was the wiring.
The Multiplication Effect: Why Education Wasn't Just Addition
The conventional story treats mass literacy as simple addition: more literate people means more smart people. But that misses the real power. Mass literacy created Network Effects.
The value wasn't linear—it was exponential. Each new literate person didn't just add to the system; they multiplied its possibilities.
Releasing Trapped Genius
Expanding the talent pool unlocked genius previously trapped by circumstance. Consider the evidence: Marie Curie went from working as a governess and studying in secret to winning two Nobel Prizes. Michael Faraday, the son of a blacksmith with minimal schooling, gave the world the electric motor. Madam C.J. Walker, born to former slaves and working as a washerwoman, built a logistics empire. Andrew Carnegie, a poor Scottish immigrant and bobbin boy, became a steel titan. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, deaf and barred from school, educated himself in newly opened public libraries and became the father of rocket science.
These were not isolated miracles. They were the predictable result of expanding the talent pool from thousands to millions. But adding nodes was only half the equation. The real power came from connecting them.
The Rise of Distributed Intelligence
When public schools created millions of compatible nodes—citizens who shared the same alphabet, math, and technical language—and the telegraph connected them, the innovation network exploded. The world shifted from isolated genius to distributed intelligence.
The Victorian Internet.The telegraph became the nineteenth-century equivalent of the internet. By 1866, the transatlantic cable allowed engineers in Pittsburgh to learn about breakthroughs in Berlin in days rather than months. Railroads coordinated trains in real time—literate workers operating complex systems at scale.
The Rise of “Open Source” Science. Scientific journals grew from roughly 100 worldwide in 1800 to over 10,000 by 1900. Publications like Nature (est. 1869) and The American Machinist became innovation forums accessible to a broad audience. Unlike Britain’s more restrictive patent regime, U.S. patents were deliberately published and indexed, functioning like open-source hardware: protected, but public.
The Invention Factory. Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory (1876) was revolutionary not for any single invention, but because it was the first Industrial Research Lab which institutionalized innovation. Teams of literate machinists, chemists, and electricians rapidly prototyped, tested, and iterated. Edison didn’t just invent products; he invented the method of inventing.
The Power of Connection. The Wright Brothers are often romanticized as lonely geniuses tinkering in isolation. The reality was more collaborative. They were master researchers who "downloaded" the open-source data of the era—pamphlets from the Smithsonian and data from German and French aviators. They corrected errors in the global dataset and built their machine. Similarly, the sewing machine was born from forced cooperation; the industry was paralyzed by patent lawsuits until a "Patent Pool" combined Elias Howe’s needle with Isaac Singer’s mechanics. Innovation ceased to be a solitary pursuit and became a rapid, iterative process, where inventors built upon each other's work to create revolutionary technologies at scale.
The Innovation Chain Reaction. Innovation is rarely a lightning strike; it is a combustion engine. It relies less on "eureka" moments and more on the high-velocity exchange of data. Mass literacy provided fuel for this reaction, and accelerated the diffusion of new technologies. Because breakthroughs could be rapidly documented, shared, and cross-pollinated by an ever-widening circle of educated minds, the era saw a vertical spike in progress. Ideas didn't just accumulate; they collided and compounded. This explains why the period from 1859 to the early 1900s was one of the most fruitful in history, unleashing a torrent of breakthroughs in steel, electricity, and organic chemistry. (1)
The Great Enrichment
The economic results were stunning. This is one of the key factors in explaining why the graph of human economic progress, which was flat for 10,000 years, suddenly shot upward in a vertical line around 1870.
Consider the numbers. In the 1880s alone, the US laid 75,000 miles of railroad track—the largest amount anywhere in world history—suddenly connecting isolated farms to national markets. This was made possible by a steel revolution: Bessemer steel rail prices collapsed from $167 per ton in 1867 to $17.62 by 1898, a 90% drop that made previously impossible infrastructure projects routine.
The benefits cascaded. Between 1870 and 1913, in the US real GDP per capita more than doubled—one of the fastest sustained growth periods in American history. Homes with complete plumbing surged from roughly 1% in 1900 to 55% by 1940. Electrification, modern sanitation, and consumer goods that would have been impossible with an illiterate workforce became standard.
Crucially, this wasn't just about invention; it was about deployment. A literate workforce could learn to operate new technologies faster. They could read installation manuals, follow safety procedures, and maintain complex systems. The interaction between human capabilities and technological progress created a virtuous cycle: better education enabled more sophisticated technology, which increased returns to education, which justified further investment in schooling.
We didn't just get smarter; we got connected. Public education was the wiring.
What Nobody Planned For
But here is where it gets interesting. Mass education unleashed consequences that had little to do with its original purpose —and some that actively undermined the social order that built it.
The Demographic Paradox
Mass education triggered a demographic shift—with a paradoxical twist.
First came the “quality over quantity” transition. As Oded Galor argues, when children were farm labor, families had many of them. (2) When children became students who cost money to raise, families had fewer—and invested more in each. Birth rates began a long decline that has led to shrinking populations across the developed world today
Yet paradoxically, populations exploded in the near term. Why? Educated societies drove scientific breakthroughs that collapsed child mortality and extended lifespans faster than birth rates could fall. Britain's population nearly tripled between 1831 and 1901—not because families had more children, but because far more of those children survived to adulthood. This 'demographic dividend' provided surplus manpower to staff factories, the Royal Navy, and colonies simultaneously. It powered the British Empire and seeded the anglophone settlements that would dominate the next century. (3)
Women Entered the Workforce
Education opened one respectable door first: teaching. By 1900, 70 percent of American teachers were women. That crack widened. Though progress was slow, education-once granted-proved impossible to contain. Literate women organized suffrage movements, wrote pamphlets, and demanded rights. The schoolhouse didn’t just create teachers; it created suffragettes.
Mass Warfare
Mass education made mass conscription possible—and lethal. Literate soldiers could read maps, follow complex orders, operate sophisticated weaponry, and coordinate logistics at unprecedented scale. Railroads that moved goods now moved armies; telegraphs that transmitted prices now transmitted battle plans.
World War I was the dark side of the Prussian model: millions of educated young men, trained for obedience and steeped in nationalism, marching efficiently into industrial slaughter. The schoolhouse built the nation—but it also built the nationalism that nearly destroyed it.
Bottom-Up Power
Education created bottom-up power to counter top-down authority. Literate workers read revolutionary pamphlets as easily as factory manuals. They organized unions, demanded rights, and made democracy viable at scale.
The timing was not coincidental. Britain's Second Reform Act (1867) expanded suffrage, followed shortly by the Elementary Education Act (1870), which established universal elementary schooling. America's Progressive Era reforms tracked high school expansion. Literate citizens could digest Ida Tarbell's exposé of Standard Oil or follow complex economic debates in the press.
You cannot have mass democracy without mass literacy—the elite had accidentally created the informed citizenry required to challenge them
The System We Built, The World We Have
Here's the uncomfortable truth: we are running a 21st-century world on 19th-century software.
The education system we inherited was optimized for the industrial age, and it performed its function brilliantly. It took chaotic, localized populations and processed them into standardized citizens capable of reading, calculating, and following instructions. It prioritized consistency over creativity because the industrial economy rewarded replication. That system turbo-charged growth, enabled mass democracy, and lifted billions out of poverty.
But the logic of value is shifting. We are entering an age where standardization—once a virtue—is becoming a commodity. The routine cognitive tasks we spent a century training humans to perform are now a digital baseline. The economic premium has migrated from calculation and compliance to the qualities that remain stubbornly difficult to code: creativity, tacit knowledge, and human connection. We no longer need to train humans to be better cognitive machines; we need to unleash their full capabilities.
Meanwhile, the nationalism we baked into the curriculum is a legacy that requires a careful audit. In the 19th century, the schoolhouse was the forge of the Nation State, turning peasants into "Frenchmen" or "Americans." This forged the social trust required for democracy, but it also fueled the tribal absolutism that burned Europe to the ground—twice. We taught students that their nation was the protagonist of history, and often, that their neighbors were the villains.
Today, this fortress mentality is a liability of a different sort. The central plotlines of our time—climate change, pandemics, AI alignment—are indifferent to borders. A curriculum designed to fortify nations against foreign threats is ill-equipped for managing a planetary commons. We may need to teach students that their nation is not just a fortress to be defended, but a valuable node in a fragile network that must be maintained.
For most of human history, literacy was a luxury good. Then we made it universal and turbocharged civilization. The question now is whether we can transform education as radically as we did in the 1870s—before the system optimized for the last revolution becomes a major brake on the next one.
Previous Article: The Acid and the Glue: Science and the Paradox of Progress
Next Article: Coming Soon
(1) As it relates to steel and transport, see the previous article When Distance Died: The Transport Revolution and its Discontents
(2) See Galor, Oded. The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality (2022).
(3) An interesting book on the impact of demographic changes, most notably in helping to create the British Empire, is Morland, Pual. The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World (2019).
