Henry Ford, Franklin Bobbitt, and Writers on Strike: (Dis)assembling the Assembly Line

Educators Take Notice

Henry Ford was born during the year of the Emancipation Proclamation and grew up in a rural farming community near Dearborn, Michigan. In the space of his lifetime the country evolved from legal labor practices rooted in human slavery to the labor union movement standing up for the right of free people to fair wages and safe working conditions. People in his boyhood community, which was not slave territory, worked hard tending crops, raising livestock, and maintaining their farm buildings and equipment. Young Henry participated in barn raisings, harvest festivals, well diggings—things the community did together for the good of all.

Henry’s hands-on nature and skill with machines and tools likely endeared him to his neighbors. Reports available online differ regarding Henry’s ability to read. Some claim that he was dyslexic, though dyslexia wasn’t a thing until decades later. Some claim his mother taught him to read before he started school. Some claim he hated the one-room school he went to. After he left the farm for city life, self-taught and handy, he apprenticed as a machinist and wasn’t much for education thereafter.

Near the turn of the 20th century Ford opened a business making automobiles pretty much by hand artisanal style. The making was slow, painstaking, and it was clear to him efficiency was standing between him and greater success. So he conjured up the assembly line, an idea that transformed manufacturing in the United Stated. A hundred workers standing in their spot in line had the job of attaching a standardized part on a car body rolling by on an assembly line, which reduced production time exponentially and made it possible to reduce the sticker price and sell automobiles to the average person. The assembly line made transportation over long distances commonplace for the common person.

When Ford left the farm in his teens for Dearborn, roughly 20% of Americans lived in towns and cities. By the time his assembly line reached maturity, 80% of his contemporaries had departed from rural areas and took up residence in urban areas. “Mass production begins…in the conception of a public need of which the public may not as yet be conscious and proceeds on the principle that use-convenience must be matched by price-convenience,” Ford wrote in 1926 in an essay published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. But Ford was clear about an ethical obligation management had in its dealings with labor. In the same piece he wrote:

“Disturbed labour conditions, poor wages, uncertain profits indicate lapses in management. The craftsmanship of management absorbs the energies of many thousands of men who, without mass production methods, would have no creative opportunity. Here the modern method broadens instead of narrows individual opportunity.”

In the 1920s Ford needed rubber to make tires for his automobiles; so he decided to make a town in Brazil where most of the world’s rubber came from and grow his own rubber trees. He would become his own source and build a model utopian mini society to give the world an example of the kind of life the assembly line could afford. Fordlandia needed laborers, laborers needed houses to live in, so Ford built houses for his workers. He paid them well, instituted practices like punching in and out on a time clock and an eight hour work day, built a swimming pool and a golf course, and opened a school, a hospital, and a cemetery. Healthcare was free.

Before long dark clouds appeared. Ford wanted his workers to live their private lives according to his standards. They were willing to follow his strict rules during their shifts, but they didn’t appreciate his social engineering. He banned alcohol. Like Kellogg who made a fortune from corn flakes, Ford preferred a meatless diet and served his workers brown rice, oatmeal, and whole-wheat bread. He enforced rules requiring them to attend poetry readings and English-language-only songfests. The workers rebelled. They took to an island they called the “Island of Innocence,” and they established a bar and a brothel. Ultimately, they rebelled in the 1930s, destroying much of Fordlandia, including the time clocks, costing thousands of dollars to rebuild.

Fordlandia failed when Ford’s rubber trees started dying. He had ignored the expertise of botanists and planted his rubber trees in the wrong season under the wrong conditions. In 1945 Fordlandia as it had been designed shut down, though people still live there today. The nail in the coffin was the invention of synthetic rubber. He sold the land back to Brazil and suffered a loss of $20,000,000. It’s worth noting that Ford never once visited his city. He passed away in 1947, a disillusioned man wondering why his vision of the world failed to materialize.

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Frederick Winslow Taylor, dubbed the father of scientific management, was a mechanical engineer born in West Virginia a few years before Henry Ford who articulated a method helpful to Ford’s project with his time-and-motion studies. Taylor analyzed tasks, subdividing them into motions, studying ways to reduce time on task through analysis of sub tasks and eliminating wasteful activities, with a resultant increase in efficiency, a method that would be combined with Fordism and applied to schools in the 20th century, spawning structures like grade level cohorts moving from teacher to teacher in assembly line fashion, curriculum organized by subject matter, division of labor, and standardized tests.

Franklin Bobbitt, a professor of educational administration at the University of Chicago, published extensively about ways to apply Taylorism to city school systems. In 1913 Bobbitt published an article in the Teachers College Record arguing that schools ought to be organized scientifically beginning with curriculum objectives. There were other theories of schooling at the time, for example Maria Montessori who championed the individual child as curriculum creator, and John Dewey who thought it might be a good idea to build teaching around children’s experiences. Individuals are widgets treated to monolithic production protocols. Bobbitt’s perspective won and still dominates public schools. Here is Franklin Bobbitt:

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The Writer’s Guild of America striking against wealthy studio producers are entangled in a web woven by Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor. Teachers working in public schools do their jobs in a fundamentally different context than that of Hollywood writers—regulated by state and federal codes located in state governments—but pressures to standardize and maximize the work of teachers and to accept less and less pay relative to their contributions to the end goal are very much analogous.

Until the recent past, writers in Hollywood participated in the making of films not just by writing scripts, but by working on sets as films were being made. Michael Schur, a writer on “The Office,” according to the New York Times, spoke of his writing gig as an “apprenticeship” where he learned to understand costuming, makeup, props, the whole business of transforming a script into a movie. From the experience he mastered not only the craft of writing a show, but of running his own shows, one of which is the whimsical and intelligent deontological comedy “The Good Place.” Today, the norm is for the script writer to create a script and then leave the set. Writers write, actors act, and directors direct in compartmentalization.

Enter the natural language bot. If the Taylor’s scientific management and Ford’s assembly line carry the day in the movies, writers will be not only unable to make a living, but unable to apprentice on film sets to gain the nuanced understanding that serves their growth in expertise. Once the producers, who have making money as the chief goal, learn to use the bot to write and/or revise scripts, the need for human writers will evaporate. Efficiency could mean more movies of mediocre quality produced by fewer and fewer human beings.

Hollywood has a long tradition of a production culture that produces not just films, but fine-tuned human consciousness that truly reaches for the stars. Not to be punny, but the bot stands a good chance of lo-bot-omizing the movies. Like the proverbial frog in a pot of water on a burner gradually getter hotter, instead of protesting, people in the audience will get more and more drowsy and pay more and more for subpar movies with less and less to say.

Take a lesson, fellow educators. Schools operate according to Bobbitt’s scientific management principles. Students move from teacher to teacher on a conveyor belt; teachers are required to use standardized methods, materials, and tests that privilege the right answer; and individual learners get homogenized and categorized in a system that skims the cream of the crop and treats them to advanced coursework in conformity while the masses occupy jobs that are going the way of script writers.

Education has three choices. 1) Ignore AI and punish students who use it. 2) Ignore AI and turn a blind eye to its misuse. Or 3) Learn to understand its affordances as a teaching and learning assistant, a digital tool in the service of learning and use it to serve self-directed and self-regulated learning. Your thoughts?¹

1. Leonhardt, David, The Morning: Tiered work forces, The New York Times, July 20, 2023