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In a speech last week to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made her latest pitch for a radical transformation in the nature of public schooling—one that would place vocational education front and center. “There are over seven million unfilled jobs in the United States,” she told her audience, because “there is a disconnect between education and the economy.” She declared that civic leaders need to “disrupt” education, or at the very least “rethink” it.

Over the past several years, DeVos has laid the groundwork for this position by telling a very particular story about the history of American education. Schools, she has argued, were modeled after factories, and “students were trained for the assembly line.” But as the economy shifted over time, schools failed to keep pace. As she has repeatedly insisted, schools remain “stuck in a mode” from 100 years ago.

The solution, then, is seemingly quite simple. Schools need to be overhauled so that they focus on preparing young people for the jobs of the future. According to DeVos, “You have to think differently about what the role of education and preparation is.”

If schools are out of date, it seems entirely reasonable to rethink what they do and how they look. But DeVos’s solution is misguided in part because it’s based on a fabricated story. The actual history of workplace training in American schools is far less convenient for her reform agenda.

Nineteenth-century policy leaders supported the creation of public schools for a variety of reasons. Among other aims, schools were intended to foster civic virtue, Americanize immigrants, and inculcate dominant values. But vocational preparation was not a common objective. As historian Ethan Hutt told me, “Early advocates of public education were generally unconcerned with what we would think of as workplace training. Their priorities were social and political in nature.”

State constitutions enshrined public education as a right in the nineteenth century, yet they hardly mention vocational instruction. The most common educational aim described in these documents is the “general diffusion of knowledge” for the “preservation of rights and liberties.” Many of these constitutions go so far as to confirm the value of education for its own sake. Tennessee’s, for instance, “recognizes the inherent value of education and encourages its support.” Montana’s states that public schools should “develop the educational potential of each person.” And the Illinois constitution supports “the educational development of all persons to the limits of their capacities.” Only six states make any mention of training for work.

These were not simply high-minded ideals. In the first decades of public education, after the conclusion of the Civil War, Americans expected their schools to pursue a broad range of objectives. According to a 1880 New York Times editorial, “the reason for the existence of common schools is that they are, or are supposed to be, good for the common wealth. It is asserted, and has hitherto been widely believed, that they make good citizens; that without them the mass of the community would be less virtuous, less happy, less thrifty; and that in a country where suffrage is, to all intents and purposes, universal, public schools are the sweeteners and the salt of morals and the light of legislation and of government.”* Such an ambitious set of aims situated public education as the cornerstone of democratic life.

In its origins, then, public education was hardly the handmaiden of American industry. In fact, nineteenth century schools focused on almost everything except job preparation. According to historian Harvey Kantor, the National Association of Manufacturers viewed public schools of the early twentieth century as “overly bookish and theoretical.” As they saw it, the schools were “ill suited to the intensely practical type of training that industry demanded.” That, it seems, was by design. Public schools were created in a grander spirit—for a broader-ranging set of aims.

In the early twentieth century, a coalition of reformers coalesced around the aim of vocationalizing education. Business leaders, corporate-minded politicians, labor leaders, and school administrators campaigned to reorient public education—at least for some students—toward the world of work.

Though some advocated for across-the-board reform, the dominant approach that emerged was providing vocational training for working-class students. These students dropped out of school at far greater rates than their more privileged peers, often because they needed to support their families financially. Yet the dominant assumption among reformers was that these students lacked the intellectual capacity to complete the standard curriculum. Insofar as that was the case, vocationalism was framed as a solution for keeping the slow-witted in school. Vocational education, wrote David Snedden, a policy leader in the early twentieth century, would be for “those who will do duty in the ranks, who will follow, not lead.”

For the next several decades, vocational education was a key feature of the comprehensive high school, which was organized around a trio of academic tracks. High-ability students would take college-preparatory classes; average-ability students would receive the standard curriculum; and low-ability students would train to work with their hands. According to Harvey Kantor, most educational systems developed “new procedures in guidance and placement to sort and select students for jobs and into educational tracks.”

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, vocational education came under increasing attack as an inherently inequitable approach to schooling. As a 1973 law review article concluded, pulling students out of the academic program was a move “Based on the hopeless conclusion that ‘these kids are dumb’ and cannot be educated.” UCLA professor Mike Rose recalled his own experience with tracking: “If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational track … you’re defined by your school as ‘slow’ [and] you’re placed in a curriculum that isn’t designed to liberate you but to occupy you.”

Vocational education also faced another kind of criticism: that it simply couldn’t be done well in the schools. Skilled instructors were hard to recruit and retain, particularly in light of their qualifications for private-sector work. Equipment was expensive and went quickly out of date. Learning generally occurred in isolation from important real-world contexts. And schools were severely limited in the number of trades they could reasonably promote.

Participation in vocational education has steadily declined over the past several decades. It does live on, re-branded as Career and Technical Education, and some research does find that vocational training can increase student retention and earning power. Other scholarship, however, has continued to raise questions about the over-representation of low-income students in vocational “dumping grounds.”

When critics contend that America’s public schools are preparing students for the jobs of the past, they are engaging in a kind of rhetorical feint. The implication is that today’s students are already being trained for work, and that such a focus has always been an aim of schooling. It suggests that vocational training is something that Americans broadly agree upon, and that is simply in need of an update.

In reality, workforce preparation would represent a significant shift in the mission of schools. President Donald Trump made this shift plain in 2018 when he unveiled a plan to combine the Department of Education with the Department of Labor into a new agency called the Department of Education and the Workforce. (There seems to be little movement on the proposal since it was announced.)

Jobs certainly matter, and the future labor productivity of today’s students will impact the entire economy. Yet even if schools could be reoriented to focus effectively on job training, the result would hardly be an unqualified good. Any shift in the present orientation of schools will come at the expense of school activities organized around the preservation of rights and liberties, as well as the inherent value of education. By and large, Americans of the past were unwilling to make that trade-off. If they’re aware of what’s happening, Americans of the present may be no different.

*A previous version of this article stated that the Times editorial was published in 1890.

Silicon Valley’s liberal branding can seem paradoxical given its political impact. The scandals that accompanied the 2016 election—Cambridge Analytica, Russian interference—revealed that Facebook had contributed to the election of one of the least liberal presidents in history. The company has also been criticized for a host of other sins similarly at odds with Silicon Valley’s liberal technocratic vibe: hijacking attention, compromising privacy, and disseminating content that incited violence.

Faced with mounting pressure over such public relations setbacks, and increasing threats of regulation from the EU, the company hired former British deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, in October as the new Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications. Some saw it as a lobbying attempt: As of this month, the ex-leader of the United Kingdom’s Liberal Democrats has officially moved into Menlo Park, but his time in Brussels as a Member of the European Parliament has endowed him with important contacts in Europe. Others see a “bold” attempt to address Facebook’s critics: Clegg, for one, says he took the job because he enjoys “engaging and grappling with difficult questions.”

Unlike many politicians, Clegg’s political outlook is consciously shaped by the legacy of a political philosopher: John Stuart Mill. Mill was instrumental in formulating the philosophical foundations of nineteenth-century progressive political movements, including liberalism and feminism. His book On Liberty, published in 1859, remains the definitive defense of the liberal notion that the individual’s freedom is the best road to a just and happy political community. On Liberty is also one of Clegg’s favorite books.

So, how would a Mill-inspired liberal approach the criticisms that Facebook is facing? “I think what distinguishes liberalism,” Clegg told Five Books editor Sophie Roell in May 2017 when asked about Mill’s seminal work, “and why it’s very radical and is still radical, is that it believes that there is something beautiful and good and dynamic and positive about the freedom that individuals have to shape their own lives as much as possible—as long as it doesn’t intrude negatively on other people’s lives and other people’s freedoms.” It’s known as Mill’s Liberty principle: the idea that the state should not interfere in the affairs of individuals, as long as they are not harming others or limiting their freedom.

Mill’s concept of harm is notoriously slippery: It’s not necessarily clear how the Liberty principle would apply in cleaning up Facebook. Mill probably wouldn’t have much objection to Facebook’s attention-hijacking maneuvers, for instance. It’s your choice how you procrastinate, and as long as you’re not harming others in the process, the government shouldn’t patronize you by micromanaging. When it comes to privacy, again Mill might have argued that by agreeing to the terms and conditions, one voluntarily consents to giving Facebook access to some private data. But grabbing and holding attention for as long as possible, while mining data users may not fully be aware they’re giving for more effective ad targeting? The voluntary nature of data sharing there is questionable.

Complicating matters further, Mill encouraged states to protect people’s rights—such as the contemporary right to privacy some legal frameworks now recognize. But what counts as a right, according to Mill, is specifically something without which human happiness cannot be maximized. We can’t be sure whether data privacy would have been the kind of thing Mill would have thought necessary for maximizing happiness.

When it comes to the 2016 election-related scandals, there are two separate issues: The dissemination of fake news stories with the aim to spread confusion and short-circuit the democratic process, and the use of data by third parties, such as Cambridge Analytica, with the aim to influence voters in very personalized ways.

Mill wouldn’t have seen the spreading of fake news as problematic. When discussing freedom of speech, Mill argued that not only are false views not damaging, they are actually beneficial. Encountering and combating false views helps prevent the truth from becoming “dead dogma,” Mill wrote: Truth would constantly need defending and reaffirming. Mill seemed to believe that an open, free debate meant the truth would usually prevail, whereas under censorship, truth could end up being accidentally suppressed, along with falsehood. It’s a view that seems a bit archaic in the age of an online marketplace of memes and clickbait, where false stories tend to spread faster and wider than their true counterpoints.

But Mill did also believe that some cases called for the limiting of the freedom of expression. When it is highly likely that one’s remarks will lead to the physical harm of others, then you can be punished for them by the state. The enabling and dissemination of inflammatory content believed to have contributed to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar would very much fall under that category: In a series of posts going back years, The New York Times reported last fall, military personnel in Myanmar “turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing,” taking advantage of the platform’s ubiquity to spread propaganda vilifying the county’s minority Muslim group, who were then repeatedly massacred.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal also illustrates where the utilitarian theorist would have objected to Facebook’s practices. Being careless with the way users’ data is shared with third parties is one thing. But attempting to psychologically profile Facebook users in order to then present each of them with the content most likely to influence their voting goes beyond merely improving advertising, toward a form of manipulation threatening what Mill’s liberalism cared about most: the individual’s freedom. Some technology commentators, like Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, have even seen Facebook’s power to manipulate our behavior as confirmation that free will is an illusion. That’s an extreme conclusion to draw from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but a deep concern with the potential ways in which Facebook might be undermining our autonomy should be close to any liberal’s heart, and something that would justify limiting its power by constraining the amount and kind of data it is legally allowed to collect.

The danger of concentrated power and its capacity to interfere with our freedom was a fundamental concern for Mill—and liberalism more broadly. “Its philosophical roots,” as Clegg himself explained in his 2017 interview, “are about how arbitrary and random power—whether it’s in the hands of monarchs or governments or the nobility or religious leaders—should not trump (excuse the pun) and be given priority over the innate rights and freedoms of individuals.” Liberals, from Mill onwards, typically focused on the state’s power and potential unwanted interference: If the government was collecting our location throughout the day, our sexual orientation, political beliefs, relationship status, psychological state etc. as Facebook is, liberals, like Clegg, would justifiably be calling for action. Arguably, though the topic stands outside the classic liberal tradition, a company doing that is worse, since Facebook’s CEO and chairman Mark Zuckerberg is less accountable to the public than even the most powerful government official.

It’s impossible to know how Nick Clegg will approach his new role as Facebook’s mediator between the technology company’s activities and its political consequences. And Mill’s liberalism might not be the political philosophy that can provide all the tools for combating the harms that Facebook is inflicting on us. But a suspicion of concentrated power and a concern for individual autonomy is a good place to start. If liberals, like Clegg, recognize that it’s not only states, but also private companies—especially those amassing the personal data of over two billion people world-wide—that can pose a threat to freedom, Silicon Valley could wind up helping liberalism as much as liberalism could help Silicon Valley.