Rather than putting children in a box, we need to creatively show them how to think outside it. With robots increasingly blurring the lines between human intelligence and its artificial equivalent, the essential human qualities of ingenuity, agility and curiosity are more important than ever. Despite leaving the industrial age for an era of innovation, our compulsory mass schooling model reflects old-fashioned factories. If we want to distinguish ourselves from robots, we need an education model that cultivates creativity rather than crushes it. In 19th-century America, the rise of compulsory mass schooling dovetailed with the Industrial Revolution. Emerging factories valued large-scale efficiency and standardization, and these principles seeped into the early “common school” movement, shaping education over the next 150 years. Schools, in turn, began to resemble factories. “By creating more tightly coordinated productive hierarchies, such as in factories, industrialization promoted the values of punctuality, subordination and regimentation that came also to characterize schools,” historian Carl Kaestle writes in Pillars of the Republic. | 