My understanding is actually that they tried to apply the principles of factories to school. It's not so much that they want to prepare people to work in factor

My understanding is actually that they tried to apply the principles of factories to school. It's not so much that they want to prepare people to work in factories, as they wanted to create a process where you could take someone through the whole school system in a repeatable fashion and get an expected result, just like factories do for cars. So instead of everyone of every age in the same class or a mentor system, you have everyone of the same age going though the same material every year. Unfortunately what it tends not to work as well with are students behind their age curve or ahead of their age curve.