RYCHARD Newark

FINK

State

College,

EDUCATION TIlE CULT by

RAYMOND

The

University

on

AND OF EFFICIENCY E. of

CALLAHAN

Chicago

Press,

Chicago,

1962.

In Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Raymond E. Callaban has described the influence exerted upon public education by the business community and offered evidence that this influence has more often than not weakened the effectiveness of our schools. Callahan's general thesis, that many of the fundamental values of business leadership are present in education and are irrelevant to the ideal goals of instruction, is hardly new. Every historian of American education has documented a portion of the obstructionist role played by many businessmen from the period of the common school revival up to the present. For instance, in a well-done chapter in The Social Ideals o[ American Educators, "The School and Business Enterprise," Merle Curti sketched the issues quite ably. He moved from Jane Addams' description of the educational purposes of businessmen (to teach children to become people who obey promptly and do not question why) to evidence of the influence on school administration of American business and factory methods (including the method of decreasing the per pupil cost of instruction by increasing class size). Curti claimed that, in general, educators "consciously and unconsciously" moIded the school system "to accord with the canons of a profit-making economic system." But he stopped there. Education and the Cult of Efficiency enlarges upon this beginning. It is the first study to offer a comprehensive explanation of some of the reasons why we have moved from the kind of educational statesmanship offered by men like Horace Mann to the faceless, conforming, and vulnerable superintendent of the present. Callahan begins his study with the events of the turn of the century. By this time it had become quite clear that the corporation and the businessman, and the managerial devices developed by them in the drive for profits and social control,

Rychard

F;nk

were dominant influences in America. They were already being responded to by many educators. The administrators who controlled the National Education Association announced tnat the real challenges in education had to do with business problems and t h e proper emphases in curricula were utilitarian and vocational. As one such gentleman put it, intense and absorbing earning that reduces the desire and power to earn money "is 53 positively harmful." When William C. Bagley published the first edition of his famous work, Classroom Management in 1907, he summarized the educational facts of life by asserting that his topic was a business problem; and he defined the basic rule of efficient service (for teachers, of course) as "unquestioned obedience." The stage was thus set for the arrival of the efficiency expert. When the prophet arrived, his name was Frederick W. Taylor and his was the gospel of scientific management. The idea of scientific management became headline copy beginning in 1910 when Louis Brandeis, in hearings before the Interstate Commerence Commission, introduced witnesses who testified that efficiency engineering would allow railroads to increase wages even as they lowered costs. The brainchild of Taylor, scientific management was the systematic application of time and motion studies to problems of production and material handling. Ever since 1895, Taylor had been demonstrating what he insisted was "the application of the conservation principle to production." He was concerned with finding the cheapest and best material for any job and, most particularly, the single, most efficient way of applying labor to the manufacturing process. Following the railroad hearings, the idea of scientific management popped up everywhere; and the principles of efficiency were applied to many segments of life, including the army and navy, the home, family and household, the legal profession and the church, and education. The theme of the day, proclaimed in the title of a Saturday Evening Post editorial, was "Scientific Management for All." While Taylor's ideas were used to whack many institutions, public education in particular was assaulted. Behind the criticism lay the rapid and considerable expansion of secondary education, and the jolt this growth was giving the tax structure of many communities. The challenge of scientifically-minded critics, most of whom were participants in the measurement movement sparked by Thorndike and his disciples, was for teachers to show results

Studies

54

in

Philosophy

and

Ed uca

tlo

n

that could be "readily seen and measured." In late 1911, man 3, popular jom'nals began qnestioning the financial and administrative aspects of education in "What Is the Matter?" editorials. In February, 1912, at a meeting of the Department of Superintendence of the N.E.A., a visiting speaker described the "new processes, new labor-saving devices, new methods of planning, more detailed instruction, more exacting records" which were helping industry and business to double and triple production and profit. The educator had to learn to justify himself, this speaker said, "when the businessmen complains of his product." Whatever apprehensions many schoohnen had about this were well-founded; for later that year, in such mass circulation magazines as the Ladies" Home Journal and the Saturday Eoening Post, a flood of articles lashed out at education. The titles of some of these articles speak for themselves: "Our Medieval High Schools," "The Case of Seventeen Million Children - Is Our Public School System Proving an Utter Failure?," and "Is the Public School a Failure? It is: The Most Momentous Failure in Our American Life Today." The seal of sanctity was placed npon the reasons for America's social ills (the schools, naturally, were responsible for them) by H. Martyn Hart, dean of St. Johns Cathedral in Denver: "The crime which stalks almost unblushingly through the land; the want of responsibility which defames our social honor; the appalling frequency of divorce; the utter lack of self-control; the abundant ttse of i/licit means to gain political positions; all are traceable to [education's] one great and crying defect - inefficiency." Many educators, for reasons ranging from cheap expediency to conviction from a quest for power over people to the better salaries paid administrators, became carriers of the dominant values of the business community. Callahan discusses many of these men, but four in particular deserve discussion. Frank Spaulding served as superintendent of schools in such cities as Passaic, New Jersey, and Cleveland, Ohio, and became head of Yale's Department of Education in 1920. He first developed his version of the ideal of business efficiency at an N.E.A. meeting in 1918. While Spaulding agreed that there was no single measure that could express one school's superiority over another, he insisted that there were certain educational products or results that could be measured. As he put it, l refer to such results as the percentage of c h i l d r e n of each year of age in the school district that the school enrolls; the average n u m b e r of day's

Rychard

Fink

attendance sectued annually from each child; tl~e average length of time required for each child to do a definite unit of work; the percentage of children of each age who are allowed to complete their schooling, with the avergae educational e q u i p m e n t of each; the percentage of children who arc inspired to continue their education in higher school; and the quality of llle education that the school affords.

As Callahan points out, Spaulding related efficiency to budget analysis and tied educational value to dollar value. His position as a superintendent in major systems and his later university affiliation lent great respectability to his statistical interpretations of effieiency. Franklin Bobbitt taught educational administration at the University of Chicago for many years and exerted considerable influence from that position. His initial contribution to the possibilities of the ideal of efficiency appeared in the Twelfth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, The Supervision of City Schools (1918). Bobbitt argued that the basic tasks of management, direction, and supervision were the same in manufacturing, government, philanthropy, and education. To prove his point, he defined a number of principles that made scientific management relevant to education. His sixth principle is as good an illustration of his thinking as any of the point s he made: "The worker must be kept up to standard qualifications for his kind of work for his entire service." What was involved here was an in-service training program, created, managed and enforced by administrators ( " . . . finding the best methods is too complicated to be laid on the shoulders of the teacher.") If the educational program developed and maintained efficient standards, Bobbitt said, 9 . . it appears possible so to speed u p tile work that one teacher may be able to handle two shifts of pupils in acadendc subjecls assuring a six-hmlr day with not more than two hours required for daily p r e p a r a | i o n . T h e Icacher may then he told that the remaining four hours of tile day not ~meded for sleep and meals lnav lie used for tile variety of ilccessarv h/llll',l!l izing activities for keeping one's self up to standard.

Beyond the stern conviction that "the teacher's freedom is necessarily narrowly limited," Bobbitt argued with considerable effectiveness that the proper way to design a curriculum was through an analysis of the field's needs for the school's products. The school was to ask business and industry for their specifications and then build these needs into curriculum, thus making certain that graduates were the sorts of people who had the

55

Studies

56

in

Philosophy

and

Education

kinds of skills and attitudes desired by businessmen. To Bobbitt, education theory was mere opinion and deserved no serious attention. What ought to be was irrelevant to educational planning; only what is merited attention. Ellwood P. Cubberley, for many years dean of the School of Education at Stanford, and perhaps the most prolific editor and publicist of his generation, exerted his influence through his famous text, Public School Administration. Between 1915 and 1984, it is likely that more students of administration studied this book than any other. His treatment of efficiency and scientific management are worth quoting: Every manufacturing establishment that turns nut a slandard product or ~cries of products of any kind maintains a [orce of elticicncy experts to slt,dy mcth()ds of procedure and to measttre and test the outpttt of its works. Such men ultimately hring the mamffacmring establishment large returns, by introducing improvements in processes and procedure, and in Iraining lhe workman to produce a larger aud a beltcr output. Our schools arc. in a sense, factories in which the raw prodt,cts (children) are to bc shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. T h e specifications for manufacturing come from 1he demands of twentielhcentury civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the speciticatious laid down. This demands good tools, specialized machinery, continuous measurement of production to sce if it is according to specifications, the elimination of waste in mamffacture, and a large variety in the output.

Last, was George D. Strayer, for many years professor of educational administration at Teachers College, Columbia. During his career, Callahan observes, he "taught more courses in administration, directed more school surveys, and directed more dissertations than any other man." He wrote and edited many volumes on educational management and economics, but his greatest contribution was an attitude toward the professional training of school administrators. As he said, "Indeed, it may be proposed that there is no detail of the work of the administrator that may not properly become the subject of intensive investigation by those who are candidates for the doctor's degree in the professional school." What followed (and they still appear) were doctoral theses on janitorial service, cafeteria problems, fire insurance cost estimation, and plumbing standards. Callahan concludes his study by noting that the cult of efficiency remains a dominant force in the management of public education. Today, team teaching is recommended as a way of

Rychard

Fink

improving teacher efficiency; and teaching machines are introduced because they can increase teacher-pupil ratios and reduce the per pupil cost of instruction. Callahan concludes with an interesting understatement: "The continuous pressure for economy has produced a situation in which many men with inappropriate and inadequate training are leaders in our public schools." What this study underscores is the value conflict between 57 the ideals of the American business community and the personcentered democratic aspirations of the progressive movement. The image of man supported by the latter, in which education aspires to develop critics, problem-solvers, creative thinkers, and people who can, when necessary, cooperate, is little more than a ceremonious dedication to those who espouse the cult of efficiency. What education costs is quite important, as are all kinds of equipment and organizational devices that contribute to the science of education. But education is, in its most serel~e dunension, an art, and account books and gimmicks have little to offer this aspect of it. It is the cheap, unimaginative version of efficiency that has made writing instruction impossible because of large English classes, kept good books out of classes, supported routine and mechanical scheduling, made in-service education a waste of time, encouraged the automatic promotion of students, preached the tyranny of the norm through testing programs, and built into administration and supervision the need for etude manipulation. This idea of efficiency is meaningful to education only when property is worth more than people. What is important in teaching is economy of learning, but that has nothing to do with costs as such. Philosophically, there is not much worth saying in opposition to the mechanistic bias, the storage theory of mind, and the authoritarian value structure of the efficiency lovers in education. What does deserve consideration is a strategy for democracy that could identify and present an effective opposition to education's existing power structure. Probably, all that can be done is what this book does - make the issue public so the Cannon of criticism can be fired. As for the idea of efficiency, there is little that is humane and generous in the administrative theories of modern business. Studies in the sociology and social psychology of business and industry offer considerable evidence that the factors that can unleash human productivity are not particularly congenial to the thinking of typical business executives. For decades now,

Studies

58

in

Philosophy

and

Edvcation

both before and after Elton Mayo, business has toyed with thc human relations approach and ended up perverting the insights of that movement. The generally unorganized state of teachers places them at the beginning of the development of a systematic opposition to the cult of efficiency. The role of teachers' associations has yet to be hammered out. It could be that books such as this will help form the judgments that will create more compassionate theories of management than those used in education today. The cult of efficiency is wrong. The school is not like a factory, children are not raw material (even the analogy betrays an ugly spirit), personality is not to be produced by schedule, and what business needs and wants is hardly an adequate measure for a civilization that dreams of democracy. If Education and the Cult Efficiency communicates these notions to a few more people than already believe them, then their reasons for anger might tilt the condition of man a bit more toward the person-centered ideals which some people still cherish. Toward that end, this book deserves to be required reading in eve~T graduate program of education starting tomorrow.

RUBIN

GOTESKY

Norlhern

lJlinois

ON

KNOWING

FOI{ by

University,

THE

JEROME

Harvard

;

en

ESSAYS

LEFT S.

University

ttAN

D

BRUNER Press,

Cambridge,

1962.

Whoever writes with his left hand has a way of circummtvigating comment which is closed to those who use their right hand. It is as if he were an Ezekiel who sees in the heavens a vision of living creatures with four faces and wings that make a noise like an earthquake. His insights are not his own but those of the Lord. This is my feeling about Professor Bruner's