We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.

David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International’s excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: “It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.”

The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.

SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS

What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says “All my means are sane, my motive and object mad.” In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.

Historically, Francis Bacon’s proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes’ epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask “what does this substance do to what?” until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. “Managing the planet” has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.

What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.

A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.

It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we’re losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:

“[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities…. In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling.”

In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and “In itself it will never make us ethical [people].” Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.

A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that “if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.” His advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:

“Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul.”

WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR

Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.

First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.

A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student’s mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.

Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.

Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to “disinvest” in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the “bottom line.” But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.

My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of “minute particulars” and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.

Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the “real world.” Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.

AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS

If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry’s words, “itinerant professional vandals”? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?

My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.

Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?

Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:

• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics

Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold’s words, know that “they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust.” Leopold asked: “If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?”

JEAN ANYON This essay first appeared in Journal of Education, Vol. 162, no. 1, Fall 1980.)

It’s no surprise that schools in wealthy communities are better than those in poor communities, or that they better prepare their students for desirable jobs. It may be shocking, however, to learn how vast the differences in schools are – not so much in resources as in teaching methods and philosophies of education. Jean Anyon observed five elementary schools over the course of a full school year and concluded that fifth-graders of different economic backgrounds are already being prepared to occupy particular rungs on the social ladder. In a sense, some whole schools are on the vocational education track, while others are geared to produce future doctors, lawyers, and business leaders. Anyon’s main audience is professional educators, so you may find her style and vocabulary challenging, but, once you’ve read her descriptions of specific classroom activities, the more analytic parts of the essay should prove easier to understand. Anyon is chairperson of the Department of Education at Rutgers University, Newark;
  

Scholars in political economy and the sociology of knowledge have recently argued that public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. Bowles and Gintis¹ for example, have argued that students in different social-class backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different occupational strata–the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and personal assertiveness. Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michael W. Apple focusing on school knowledge, have argued that knowledge and skills leading to social power and regard (medical, legal, managerial) are made available to the advantaged social groups but are withheld from the working classes to whom a more “practical” curriculum is offered (manual skills, clerical knowledge). While there has been considerable argumentation of these points regarding education in England, France, and North America, there has been little or no attempt to investigate these ideas empirically in elementary or secondary schools and classrooms in this country.³

This article offers tentative empirical support (and qualification) of the above arguments by providing illustrative examples of differences in student work in classrooms in contrasting social class communities. The examples were gathered as part of an ethnographical⁴ study of curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices in five elementary schools. The article attempts a theoretical contribution as well and assesses student work in the light of a theoretical approach to social-class analysis.. . It will be suggested that there is a “hidden curriculum” in schoolwork that has profound implications for the theory – and consequence – of everyday activity in education….
The Sample of Schools

… The social-class designation of each of the five schools will be identified, and the income, occupation, and other relevant available social characteristics of the students and their parents will be described. The first three schools are in a medium-sized city district in northern New Jersey, and the other two are in a nearby New Jersey suburb.

The first two schools I will call working class schools. Most of the parents have blue-collar jobs. Less than a third of the fathers are skilled, while the majority are in unskilled or semiskilled jobs. During the period of the study (1978-1979), approximately 15 percent of the fathers were unemployed. The large majority (85 percent) of the families are white. The following occupations are typical: platform, storeroom, and stockroom workers; foundry-men, pipe welders, and boilermakers; semiskilled and unskilled assembly-line operatives; gas station attendants, auto mechanics, maintenance workers, and security guards. Less than 30 percent of the women work, some part-time and some full-time, on assembly lines, in storerooms and stockrooms, as waitresses, barmaids, or sales clerks. Of the fifth-grade parents, none of the wives of the skilled workers had jobs. Approximately 15 percent of the families in each school are at or below the federal “poverty” level;⁵ most of the rest of the family incomes are at or below $12,000, except some of the skilled workers whose incomes are higher. The incomes of the majority of the families in these two schools (at or below $12,000) are typical of 38.6 percent of the families in the United States.⁶

The third school is called the middle-class school, although because of 5 neighborhood residence patterns, the population is a mixture of several social classes. The parents’ occupations can he divided into three groups: a small group of blue-collar “rich,” who are skilled, well-paid workers such as printers, carpenters, plumbers, and construction workers. The second group is composed of parents in working-class and middle-class white-collar jobs: women in office jobs, technicians, supervisors in industry, and parents employed by the city (such as firemen, policemen, and several of the school’s teachers). The third group is composed of occupations such as personnel directors in local firms, accountants, “middle management,” and a few small capitalists (owners of shops in the area). The children of several local doctors attend this school. Most family incomes are between $13,000 and $25,000, with a few higher. This income range is typical of 38.9 percent of the families in the United States.⁷

The fourth school has a parent population that is at the upper income level of the upper middle class and is predominantly professional. This school will be called the affluent professional school. Typical jobs are: cardiologist, interior designer, corporate lawyer or engineer, executive in advertising or television. There are some families who are not as affluent as the majority (the family of the superintendent of the district’s schools, and the one or two families in which the fathers are skilled workers). In addition, a few of the families are more affluent than the majority and can be classified in the capitalist class (a partner in a prestigious Wall Street stock brokerage firm). Approximately 90 percent of the children in this school are white. Most family incomes are between $40,000 and $80,000. This income span represents approximately 7 percent of the families in the United States.⁸

In the fifth school the majority of the families belong to the capitalist class. This school will be called the executive elite school because most of the fathers are top executives (for example, presidents and vice-presidents) in major United States-based multinational corporations – for example, AT&T, RCA, Citibank, American Express, U.S. Steel. A sizable group of fathers are top executives in financial firms in Wall Street. There are also a number of fathers who list their occupations as “general counsel” to a particular corporation, and these corporations are also among the large multi-nationals. Many of the mothers do volunteer work in the Junior League, Junior Fortnightly, or other service groups; some are intricately involved in town politics; and some are themselves in well-paid occupations. There are no minority children in the school. Almost all the family incomes are over $100,000 with some in the $500,000 range. The incomes in this school represent less than 1 percent of the families in the United States.⁹

Since each of the five schools is only one instance of elementary education in a particular social class context, I will not generalize beyond the sample. However, the examples of schoolwork which follow will suggest characteristics of education in each social setting that appear to have theoretical and social significance and to be worth investigation in a larger number of schools.
The Working Class Schools

In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance. Available textbooks are not always used, and the teachers often prepare their own dittos or put work examples on the board. Most of the rules regarding work are designations of what the children are to do; the rules are steps to follow. These steps are told to the children by the teachers and are often written on the board. The children are usually told to copy the steps as notes. These notes are to be studied. Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the right steps.

The following examples illustrate these points. In math, when two-digit division was introduced, the teacher in one school gave a four-minute lecture on what the terms are called (which number is the divisor, dividend, quotient, and remainder). The children were told to copy these names in their notebooks. Then the teacher told them the steps to follow to do the problems, saying, “This is how you do them.” The teacher listed the steps on the board, and they appeared several days later as a chart hung in the middle of the front wall: “Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down.” The children often did examples of two-digit division. When the teacher went over the examples with them, he told them what the procedure was for each problem, rarely asking them to conceptualize or explain it themselves: “Three into twenty-two is seven; do your subtraction and one is left over.” During the week that two-digit division was introduced (or at any other time), the investigator did not observe any discussion of the idea of grouping involved in division, any use of manipulables, or any attempt to relate two-digit division to any other mathematical process. Nor was there any attempt to relate the steps to an actual or possible thought process of the children. The observer did not hear the terms dividend, quotient, and so on, used again. The math teacher in the other working-class school followed similar procedures regarding two-digit division and at one point her class seemed confused. She said, “You’re confusing yourselves. You’re tensing up. Remember, when you do this, it’s the same steps over and over again–and that’s the way division always is.” Several weeks later, after a test, a group of her children “still didn’t get it,” and she made no attempt to explain the concept of dividing things into groups or to give them manipulables for their own investigation. Rather, she went over the steps with them again and told them that they “needed more practice.”

In other areas of math, work is also carrying out often unexplained fragmented procedures. For example, one of the teachers led the children through a series of steps to make a 1-inch grid on their paper without telling them that they were making a 1-inch grid or that it would be used to study scale. She said, “Take your ruler. Put it across the top. Make a mark at every number. Then move your ruler down to the bottom. No, put it across the bottom. Now make a mark on top of every number. Now draw a line from…” At this point a girl said that she had a faster way to do it and the teacher said, “No, you don’t; you don’t even know what I’m making yet. Do it this way or it’s wrong.” After they had made the lines up and down and across, the teacher told them she wanted them to make a figure by connecting some dots and to measure that, using the scale of 1 inch equals 1 mile. Then they were to cut it out. She said, “Don’t cut it until I check it.”

In both working-class schools, work in language arts is mechanics of punctuation (commas, periods, question marks, exclamation points), capitalization, and the four kinds of sentences. One teacher explained to me, “Simple punctuation is all they’ll ever use.” Regarding punctuation, either a teacher or a ditto stated the rules for where, for example, to put commas. The investigator heard no classroom discussion of the aural context of punctuation (which, of course, is what gives each mark its meaning). Nor did the investigator hear any statement or inference that placing a punctuation mark could be a decision-making process, depending, for example, on one’s intended meaning. Rather, the children were told to follow the rules. Language arts did not involve creative writing. There were several writing assignments throughout the year but in each instance the children were given a ditto, and they wrote answers to questions on the sheet. For example, they wrote their “autobiography” by answering such questions as “Where were you born?” “What is your favorite animal?” on a sheet entitled “All About Me.”

In one of the working-class schools, the class had a science period several times a week. On the three occasions observed, the children were not called upon to set up experiments or to give explanations for facts or concepts. Rather, on each occasion the teacher told them in his own words what the book said. The children copied the teacher’s sentences from the board. Each day that preceded the day they were to do a science experiment, the teacher told them to copy the directions from the book for the procedure they would carry out the next day and to study the list at home that night. The day after each experiment, the teacher went over what they had “found” (they did the experiments as a class, and each was actually a class demonstration led by the teacher). Then the teacher wrote what they “found” on the board, and the children copied that in their notebooks. Once or twice a year there are science projects. The project is chosen and assigned by the teacher from a box of 3-by-5-inch cards. On the card the teacher has written the question to he answered, the books to use, and how much to write. Explaining the cards to the observer, the teacher said, “It tells them exactly what to do, or they couldn’t do it.”

Social studies in the working-class schools is also largely mechanical, rote work that was given little explanation or connection to larger contexts. In one school, for example, although there was a book available, social studies work was to copy the teacher’s notes from the board. Several times a week for a period of several months the children copied these notes. The fifth grades in the district were to study United States history. The teacher used a booklet she had purchased called “The Fabulous Fifty States.” Each day she put information from the booklet in outline form on the board and the children copied it. The type of information did not vary: the name of the state, its abbreviation, state capital, nickname of the state, its main products, main business, and a “Fabulous Fact” (“Idaho grew twenty-seven billion potatoes in one year. That’s enough potatoes for each man, woman, and…”) As the children finished copying the sentences, the teacher erased them and wrote more. Children would occasionally go to the front to pull down the wall map in order to locate the states they were copying, and the teacher did not dissuade them. But the observer never saw her refer to the map; nor did the observer ever hear her make other than perfunctory remarks concerning the information the children were copying. Occasionally the children colored in a ditto and cut it out to make a stand-up figure (representing, for example, a man roping a cow in the Southwest). These were referred to by the teacher as their social studies “projects.”

Rote behavior was often called for in classroom work. When going over 15 math and language art skills sheets, for example, as the teacher asked for the answer to each problem, he fired the questions rapidly, staccato, and the scene reminded the observer of a sergeant drilling recruits: above all, the questions demanded that you stay at attention: “The next one? What do I put here?. . . Here? Give us the next.” Or “How many commas in this sentence? Where do I put them . . . The next one?”

The four fifth grade teachers observed in the working-class schools attempted to control classroom time and space by making decisions without consulting the children and without explaining the basis for their decisions. The teacher’s control thus often seemed capricious. Teachers, for instance, very often ignored the bells to switch classes – deciding among themselves to keep the children after the period was officially over to continue with the work or for disciplinary reasons or so they (the teachers) could stand in the hall and talk. There were no clocks in the rooms in either school, and the children often asked, “What period is this?” “When do we go to gym?” The children had no access to materials. These were handed out by teachers and closely guarded. Things in the room “belonged” to the teacher: “Bob, bring me my garbage can.” The teachers continually gave the children orders. Only three times did the investigator hear a teacher in either working-class school preface a directive with an unsarcastic “please,” or “let’s” or “would you.” Instead, the teachers said, “Shut up,” “Shut your mouth,” “Open your books,” “Throw your gum away-if you want to rot your teeth, do it on your own time.” Teachers made every effort to control the movement of the children, and often shouted, “‘Why are you out of your seat??!!” If the children got permission to leave the room, they had to take a written pass with the date and time….
Middle-Class School

In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer. If one accumulates enough right answers, one gets a good grade. One must follow the directions in order to get the right answers, but the directions often call for some figuring, some choice, some decision making. For example, the children must often figure out by themselves what the directions ask them to do and how to get the answer: what do you do first, second, and perhaps third? Answers are usually found in books or by listening to the teacher. Answers are usually words, sentences, numbers, or facts and dates; one writes them on paper, and one should be neat. Answers must be given in the right order, and one cannot make them up.

The following activities are illustrative. Math involves some choice: one may do two-digit division the long way or the short way, and there are some math problems that can be done “in your head.” When the teacher explains how to do two-digit division, there is recognition that a cognitive process is involved; she gives you several ways and says, “I want to make sure you understand what you’re doing-so you get it right”; and, when they go over the homework, she asks the children to tell how they did the problem and what answer they got.

In social studies the daily work is to read the assigned pages in the textbook and to answer the teacher’s questions. The questions are almost always designed to check on whether the students have read the assignment and understood it: who did so-and-so; what happened after that; when did it happen, where, and sometimes, why did it happen? The answers are in the book and in one’s understanding of the book; the teacher’s hints when one doesn’t know the answers are to “read it again” or to look at the picture or at the rest of the paragraph. One is to search for the answer in the “context,” in what is given.

Language arts is “simple grammar, what they need for everyday life.” The language arts teacher says, “They should learn to speak properly, to write business letters and thank-you letters, and to understand what nouns and verbs and simple subjects are.” Here, as well, actual work is to choose the right answers, to understand what is given. The teacher often says, “Please read the next sentence and then I’ll question you about it.” One teacher said in some exasperation to a boy who was fooling around in class, “If you don’t know the answers to the questions I ask, then you can’t stay in this class! [pause] You never know the answers to the questions I ask, and it’s not fair to me-and certainly not to you!”

Most lessons are based on the textbook. This does not involve a critical perspective on what is given there. For example, a critical perspective in social studies is perceived as dangerous by these teachers because it may lead to controversial topics; the parents might complain. The children, however, are often curious especially in social studies. Their questions are tolerated and usually answered perfunctorily. But after a few minutes the teacher will say, “All right, we’re not going any farther. Please open your social studies workbook.” While the teachers spend a lot of time explaining and expanding on what the textbooks say, there is little attempt to analyze how or why things happen, or to give thought to how pieces of a culture, or, say, a system of numbers or elements of a language fit together or can be analyzed. What has happened in the past and what exists now may not be equitable or fair, but (shrug) that is the way things are and one does not confront such matters in school. For example, in social studies after a child is called on to read a passage about the pilgrims, the teacher summarizes the paragraph and then says, “So you can see how strict they were about everything.” A child asks, “Why?” “Well, because they felt that if you weren’t busy you’d get into trouble.” Another child asks, “Is it true that they burned women at the stake?” The teacher says, “Yes, if a woman did anything strange, they hanged them. [sic] What would a woman do, do you think, to make them burn them? [sic] See if you can come up with better answers than my other [social studies] class.” Several children offer suggestions, to which the teacher nods but does not comment. Then she says, “Okay, good,” and calls on the next child to read.

Work tasks do not usually request creativity. Serious attention is rarely given in school work on how the children develop or express their own feelings and ideas, either linguistically or in graphic form. On the occasions when creativity or self-expression is requested, it is peripheral to the main activity or it is “enriched” or “for fun.” During a lesson on what similes are, for example, the teacher explains what they are, puts several on the board, gives some other examples herself, and then asks the children if they can “make some up.” She calls on three children who give similes, two of which are actually in the book they have open before them. The teacher does not comment on this and then asks several others to choose similes from the list of phrases in the book. Several do so correctly, and she says, “Oh good! You’re picking them out! See how good we are?” Their homework is to pick out the rest of the similes from the list.

Creativity is not often requested in social studies and science projects, either. Social studies projects, for example, are given with directions to “find information on your topic” and write it up. The children are not supposed to copy but to “put it in your own words.” Although a number of the projects subsequently went beyond the teacher’s direction to find information and had quite expressive covers and inside illustrations, the teacher’s evaluative comments had to do with the amount of information, whether they had “copied,” and if their work was neat.

The style of control of the three fifth-grade teachers observed in this school varied from somewhat easygoing to strict, but in contrast to the working-class schools, the teachers’ decisions were usually based on external rules and regulations–for example, on criteria that were known or available to the children. Thus, the teachers always honor the bells for changing classes, and they usually evaluate children’s work by what is in the textbooks and answer booklets.

There is little excitement in schoolwork for the children, and the assignments are perceived as having little to do with their interests and feelings. As one child said, what you do is “store facts up in your head like cold storage – until you need it later for a test or your job.” Thus, doing well is important because there are thought to be other likely rewards: a good job or college.¹⁰
Affluent Professional School

In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently. The students are continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. Work involves individual thought and expressiveness, expansion and illustration of ideas, and choice of appropriate method and material. (The class is not considered an open classroom, and the principal explained that because of the large number of discipline problems in the fifth grade this year they did not departmentalize. The teacher who agreed to take part in the study said she is “more structured this year than she usually is.) The products of work in this class are often written stories, editorials and essays, or representations of ideas in mural, graph, or craft form. The products of work should not be like anybody else’s and should show individuality. They should exhibit good design, and (this is important) they must also fit empirical reality. The relatively few rules to be followed regarding work are usually criteria for, or limits on, individual activity. One’s product is usually evaluated for the quality of its expression and for the appropriateness of its conception to the task. In many cases, one’s own satisfaction with the product is an important criterion for its evaluation. When right answers are called for, as in commercial materials like SRA (Science Research Associates) and math, it is important that the children decide on an answer as a result of thinking about the idea involved in what they’re being asked to do. Teacher’s hints are to “think about it some more.”

The following activities are illustrative. The class takes home a sheet requesting each child’s parents to fill in the number of cars they have, the number of television sets, refrigerators, games, or rooms in the house, and so on. Each child is to figure the average number of a type of possession owned by the fifth grade. Each child must compile the “data” from all the sheets. A calculator is available in the classroom to do the mechanics of finding the average. Some children decide to send sheets to the fourth-grade families for comparison. Their work should be “verified” by a classmate before it is handed in.

Each child and his or her family has made a geoboard. The teacher asks the class to get their geoboards from the side cabinet, to take a handful of rubber bands, and then to listen to what she would like them to do. She says, “I would like you to design a figure and then find the perimeter and area. When you have it, check with your neighbor. After you’ve done that, please transfer it to graph paper and tomorrow I’ll ask you to make up a question about it for someone. When you hand it in, please let me know whose it is and who verified it. Then I have something else for you to do that’s really fun. [pause] Find the average number of chocolate chips in three cookies. I’ll give you three cookies, and you’ll have to eat your way through, I’m afraid!” Then she goes around the room and gives help, suggestions, praise, and admonitions that they are getting noisy. They work sitting, or standing up at their desks, at benches in the back, or on the floor. A child hands the teacher his paper and she comments, “I’m not accepting this paper. Do a better design.” To another child she says, “That’s fantastic! But you’ll never find the area. Why don’t you draw a figure inside [the big one] and subtract to get the area?”

The school district requires the fifth grade to study ancient civilization (in particular, Egypt, Athens, and Sumer). In this classroom, the emphasis is on illustrating and re-creating the culture of the people of ancient times. The following are typical activities: the children made an 8mm film on Egypt, which one of the parents edited. A girl in the class wrote the script, and the class acted it out. They put the sound on themselves. They read stories of those days. They wrote essays and stories depicting the lives of the people and the societal and occupational divisions. They chose from a list of projects, all of which involved graphical presentations of ideas: for example. “Make a mural depicting the division of labor in Egyptian society.”

Each wrote and exchanged a letter in hieroglyphics with a fifth grader in another class, and they also exchanged stories they wrote in cuneiform. They made a scroll and singed the edges so it looked authentic. They each chose an occupation and made an Egyptian plaque representing that occupation, simulating the appropriate Egyptian design. They carved their design on a cylinder of wax, pressed the wax into clay, and then baked the clay. Although one girl did not choose an occupation but carved instead a series of gods and slaves, the teacher said, “That’s all right, Amber, it’s beautiful.” As they were working the teacher said, “Don’t cut into your clay until you’re satisfied with your design.”

Social studies also involves almost daily presentation by the children of some event from the news. The teacher’s questions ask the children to expand what they say, to give more details, and to be more specific. Occasionally she adds some remarks to help them see connections between events.

The emphasis on expressing and illustrating ideas in social studies is accompanied in language arts by an emphasis on creative writing. Each child wrote a rebus story for a first grader whom they had interviewed to see what kind of story the child liked best. They wrote editorials on pending decisions by the school board and radio plays, some of which were read over the school intercom from the office and one of which was performed in the auditorium. There is no language arts textbook because, the teacher said, “The principal wants us to be creative.” There is not much grammar, but there is punctuation. One morning when the observer arrived, the class was doing a punctuation ditto. The teacher later apologized for using the ditto. “It’s just for review,” she said. “I don’t teach punctuation that way. We use their language.” The ditto had three unambiguous rules for where to put commas in a sentence. As the teacher was going around to help the children with the ditto, she repeated several times, “where you put commas depends on how you say the sentence; it depends on the situation and what you want to say. Several weeks later the observer saw another punctuation activity. The teacher had printed a five-paragraph story on an oak tag and then cut it into phrases. She read the whole story to the class from the book, then passed out the phrases. The group had to decide how the phrases could best be put together again. (They arranged the phrases on the floor.) The point was not to replicate the story, although that was not irrelevant, but to “decide what you think the best way is.” Punctuation marks on cardboard pieces were then handed out, and the children discussed and then decided what mark was best at each place they thought one was needed. At the end of each paragraph the teacher asked, “Are you satisfied with the way the paragraphs are now? Read it to yourself and see how it sounds.” Then she read the original story again, and they compared the two.

Describing her goals in science to the investigator, the teacher said, “We use ESS (Elementary Science Study). It’s very good because it gives a hands-on experience–so they can make sense out of it. It doesn’t matter whether it [what they find] is right or wrong. I bring them together and there’s value in discussing their ideas.”

The products of work in this class are often highly valued by the children and the teacher. In fact, this was the only school in which the investigator was not allowed to take original pieces of the children’s work for her files. If the work was small enough, however, and was on paper, the investigator could duplicate it on the copying machine in the office.

The teacher’s attempt to control the class involves constant negotiation. She does not give direct orders unless she is angry because the children have been too noisy. Normally, she tries to get them to foresee the consequences of their actions and to decide accordingly. For example, lining them up to go see a play written by the sixth graders, she says, “I presume you’re lined up by someone with whom you want to sit. I hope you’re lined up by someone you won’t get in trouble with.”…

One of the few rules governing the children’s movement is that no more than three children may be out of the room at once. There is a school rule that anyone can go to the library at any time to get a book. In the fifth grade I observed, they sign their name on the chalkboard and leave. There are no passes. Finally, the children have a fair amount of officially sanctioned say over what happens in the class. For example, they often negotiate what work is to be done. If the teacher wants to move on to the next subject, but the children say they are not ready, they want to work on their present projects some more, she very often lets them do it.
Executive Elite School

In the executive elite school, work is developing one’s analytical intellectual powers. Children are continually asked to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving a problem. Schoolwork helps one to achieve, to excel, to prepare for life.

The following are illustrative. The math teacher teaches area and perimeter by having the children derive formulas for each. First she helps them, through discussion at the board, to arrive at A = W X L as a formula (not the formula) for area. After discussing several, she says, “Can anyone make up a formula for perimeter? Can you figure that out yourselves? [pause] Knowing what we know, can we think of a formula?” She works out three children’s suggestions at the board, saying to two, “Yes, that’s a good one,” and then asks the class if they can think of any more. No one volunteers. To prod them, she says, “If you use rules and good reasoning, you get many ways. Chris, can you think up a formula?”

She discusses two-digit division with the children as a decision-making process. Presenting a new type of problem to them, she asks, “What’s the first decision you’d make if presented with this kind of example? What is the first thing you’d think? Craig?” Craig says, “To find my first partial quotient.” She responds, “Yes, that would be your first decision. How would you do that?” Craig explains, and then the teacher says, “OK, we’ll see how that works for you.” The class tries his way. Subsequently, she comments on the merits and shortcomings of several other children’s decisions. Later, she tells the investigator that her goals in math are to develop their reasoning and mathematical thinking and that, unfortunately, “there’s no time for manipulables.”

While right answers are important in math, they are not “given” by the book or by the teacher but may be challenged by the children. Going over some problems in late September the teacher says, “Raise your hand if you do not agree.” A child says, “I don’t agree with sixty-four.” The teacher responds, “OK, there’s a question about sixty-four. [to class] Please check it. Owen, they’re disagreeing with you. Kristen, they’re checking yours.” The teacher emphasized this repeatedly during September and October with statements like “Don’t be afraid to say you disagree. In the last [math] class, somebody disagreed, and they were right. Before you disagree, check yours, and if you still think we’re wrong, then we’ll check it out.” By Thanksgiving, the children did not often speak in terms of right and wrong math problems but of whether they agreed with the answer that had been given.

There are complicated math mimeos with many word problems. Whenever they go over the examples, they discuss how each child has set up the problem. The children must explain it precisely. On one occasion the teacher said, “I’m more–just as interested in how you set up the problem as in what answer you find. If you set up a problem in a good way, the answer is easy to find.

Social studies work is most often reading and discussion of concepts and independent research. There are only occasional artistic, expressive, or illustrative projects. Ancient Athens and Sumer are, rather, societies to analyze. The following questions are typical of those that guide the children’s independent research. “What mistakes did Pericles make after the war?” “What mistakes did the citizens of Athens make?” “What are the elements of a civilization?” “How did Greece build an economic empire?” “Compare the way Athens chose its leaders with the way we choose ours.” Occasionally the children are asked to make up sample questions for their social studies tests. On an occasion when the investigator was present, the social studies teacher rejected a child’s question by saying, “That’s just fact. If I asked you that question on a test, you’d complain it was just memory! Good questions ask for concepts.”

In social studies–but also in reading, science, and health–the teachers initiate classroom discussions of current social issues and problems. These discussions occurred on every one of the investigator’s visits, and a teacher told me, “These children’s opinions are important – it’s important that they learn to reason things through.” The classroom discussions always struck the observer as quite realistic and analytical, dealing with concrete social issues like the following: “Why do workers strike?” “Is that right or wrong?” “Why do we have inflation, and what can be done to stop it?” “Why do companies put chemicals in food when the natural ingredients are available?” and so on. Usually the children did not have to be prodded to give their opinions. In fact, their statements and the interchanges between them struck the observer as quite sophisticated conceptually and verbally, and well-informed. Occasionally the teachers would prod with statements such as, “Even if you don’t know [the answers], if you think logically about it, you can figure it out.” And “I’m asking you [these] questions to help you think this through.”

Language arts emphasizes language as a complex system, one that should be mastered. The children are asked to diagram sentences of complex grammatical construction, to memorize irregular verb conjugations (he lay, he has lain, and so on …), and to use the proper participles, conjunctions, and interjections in their speech. The teacher (the same one who teaches social studies) told them, “It is not enough to get these right on tests; you must use what you learn [in grammar classes] in your written and oral work. I will grade you on that.”

Most writing assignments are either research reports and essays for social studies or experiment analyses and write-ups for science. There is only an occasional story or other “creative writing” assignment. On the occasion observed by the investigator (the writing of a Halloween story), the points the teacher stressed in preparing the children to write involved the structural aspects of a story rather than the expression of feelings or other ideas. The teacher showed them a filmstrip, “The Seven Parts of a Story,” and lectured them on plot development, mood setting, character development, consistency, and the use of a logical or appropriate ending. The stories they subsequently wrote were, in fact, well-structured, but many were also personal and expressive. The teacher’s evaluative comments, however, did not refer to the expressiveness or artistry but were all directed toward whether they had “developed” the story well.

Language arts work also involved a large amount of practice in presentation of the self and in managing situations where the child was expected to be in charge. For example, there was a series of assignments in which each child had to be a “student teacher.” The child had to plan a lesson in grammar, outlining, punctuation, or other language arts topic and explain the concept to the class. Each child was to prepare a worksheet or game and a homework assignment as well. After each presentation, the teacher and other children gave a critical appraisal of the “student teacher’s” performance. Their criteria were: whether the student spoke clearly, whether the lesson was interesting, whether the student made any mistakes, and whether he or she kept control of the class. On an occasion when a child did not maintain control, the teacher said, “When you’re up there, you have authority and you have to use it. I’ll back you up.”

The executive elite school is the only school where bells do not demarcate the periods of time. The two fifth-grade teachers were very strict about changing classes on schedule, however, as specific plans for each session had been made. The teachers attempted to keep tight control over the children during lessons, and the children were sometimes flippant, boisterous, and occasionally rude. However, the children may be brought into line by reminding them that “It is up to you.” “You must control yourself,” “you are responsible for your work,” you must “set your own priorities.” One teacher told a child, “You are the only driver of your car-and only you can regulate your speed.” A new teacher complained to the observer that she had thought “these children” would have more control.

While strict attention to the lesson at hand is required, the teachers make relatively little attempt to regulate the movement of the children at other times. For example, except for the kindergartners the children in this school do not have to wait for the bell to ring in the morning; they may go to their classroom when they arrive at school. Fifth graders often came early to read, to finish work, or to catch up. After the first two months of school, the fifth-grade teachers did not line the children up to change classes or to go to gym, and so on, but, when the children were ready and quiet, they were told they could go–sometimes without the teachers.

In the classroom, the children could get materials when they needed them and took what they needed from closets and from the teacher’s desk. They were in charge of the office at lunchtime. During class they did not have to sign out or ask permission to leave the room; they just got up and left. Because of the pressure to get work done, however, they did not leave the room very often. The teachers were very polite to the children, and the investigator heard no sarcasm, no nasty remarks, and few direct orders. The teachers never called the children “honey” or “dear” but always called them by name. The teachers were expected to be available before school, after school, and for part of their lunchtime to provide extra help if needed.
The foregoing analysis of differences in schoolwork in contrasting social class contexts suggests the following conclusion: the “hidden curriculum” of schoolwork is tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way. Differing curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices emphasize different cognitive and behavioral skills in each social setting and thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical and symbolic capital,¹¹ to authority, and to the process of work. School experience, in the sample of schools discussed here, differed qualitatively by social class. These differences may not only contribute to the development in the children in each social class of certain types of economically significant relationships and not others but would thereby help to reproduce this system of relations in society. In the contribution to the reproduction of unequal social relations lies a theoretical meaning and social consequence of classroom practice.

The identification of different emphases in classrooms in a sample of contrasting social class contexts implies that further research should be conducted in a large number of schools to investigate the types of work tasks and interactions in each to see if they differ in the ways discussed here and to see if similar potential relationships are uncovered. Such research could have as a product the further elucidation of complex but not readily apparent connections between everyday activity in schools and classrooms and the unequal structure of economic relationships in which we work and live.

NOTES

1. S. Bowles and H. Gintes, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). [Author's note]
2. B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3. Towards a Theory of Educational Transmission, 2d ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); P. Bourdieu and J. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1977); M.W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (Boston: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979). [Author's note]
3. But see, in a related vein, M.W. Apple and N. King, “What Do Schools Teach?”Curriculum Inquiry 6 (1977); 341-58; R.C. Rist, The Urban School: A Factory for Failure (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973). [Author's note]
4. ethnographical: Based on an anthropological study of cultures or subcultures-the “cultures” in this case being the five schools being observed.
5. The U.S. Bureau of the Census defines poverty for a nonfarm family of four as a yearly income of $6,191 a year or less. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1978 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 465 ,table 754. [Author's note]
6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Money Income in 1977 of Families and Persons in the United States,” Current Population Reports Series P-60, no. 118 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 2 ,table A. [Author's note]
7. Ibid. [Author's note]
8. This figure is an estimate. According to the Bureau of the Census, only 2.6 percent of families in the United States have money income of $50,000 or over. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports Series P-60. For figures on income at these higher levels, see J.D. Smith and S. Franklin, “The Concentration of Personal Wealth, 1922-1969,” American Economic Review 64 (1974): 162-67. [Author's note]
9. Smith and Franklin, “The Concentration of Personal Wealth.” [Author's note]
10. A dominant feeling expressed directly and indirectly by teachers in this school, was boredom with their work. They did, however, in contrast to the working-class schools, almost always carry out lessons during class times. [Author's note]
11. physical and symbolic capital: Elsewhere Anyon defines capital as “property that is used to produce profit, interest, or rent”: she defines symbolic capital as the knowledge and skills that “may yield social and cultural power.”

The Microsoft Touch

Bill Gates should stick to what he does best: selling crappy software. As an education analyst he is a fish out of water. In response to the news that education budgets are being slashed all across the US, Bill Gates put forward an argument (“How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools,” Washington Post, 2/28/11) in which he suggests that the US is actually spending more on education. Wow, Bill, I guess that’s the kind of acuity that helped build Microsoft into the world’s greatest knock-off software company.

According to Bill, for decades the US has spent more on education and garnered less from it: fewer graduates, lower test scores, etc. Blame for this sorry state of affairs rests with (drum roll please) under-performing teachers. How’s that for a fresh, new insight? NOT!

Even better, Bill’s silver bullet is to “flip the curve.” In other words, in the finest tradition of boardroom showmanship, Bill contends that we can solve the education crisis by–wait for it–spending less on education and demanding more. Ta-daa! It’s enough to bring tears to a stockholder’s eyes. You go, Billy Boy.

The only problem is that Bill’s curve-flipping argument is utter piffle. The truth is that education budgets have been shrinking for a long time. Yes, you can jiggle the numbers around to create an illusion of prosperity, but the truth is that education has been taking it on the chin for a long time. If you doubt my word, do some research. Educators everywhere will tell you that budgets have been getting tighter rather than fatter. Further, the long-term educational budget squeeze has netted predictable results: teachers are working harder in resource-starved schools and students are treading water.

The good news is that Bill Gates has figured out how to fix all of those problems. Oh, yeah. Bill is going to develop “new metrics” with which to identify high-performing teachers. Next, Bill is going to crowd more students into those good classrooms. (BTW, there’s no need to be concerned about the negative correlation between classroom over-crowding and educational quality is there? Nah.) Naturally, good teachers are going to love this arrangement because Bill is going to increase their salaries by firing all of the bad teachers. And this will all be accomplished at no additional cost to the taxpayer. Wahoo.

Still, I can’t help noticing that there’s just one teensy little problem with Bill Gates’ vision for American education: Bill doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about. Why does a software geek think that he’s qualified to create educational metrics? Given the many quality concerns that have plagued Microsoft over the years, I think it’s fair to say that quality assessment has never been Bill Gates’ strong suit. If education is experiencing a crisis, I would hazard that it is due to the interventions of self-appointed experts like Bill Gates who wield their ignorance like weapons.

If there is one thing that Bill Gates and I can agree on, it’s that the solution to the education crisis is simple. Of late, our highest national budgetary priorities have been investments in failure: bailing out bankrupt corporations, propping up failing banks, distributing bonuses to incompetent bankers, etc. However, I argue that, instead of investing in failure, we should return to the days of investing in success. Certainly, creating an educational system that was the envy of the 20th century world was not cheap, but it is an investment that has paid huge dividends. Perhaps more than anyone, Bill Gates should grasp the fact that the US became the leader of the information society by making a bigger investment in education than anyone else. If we cut our investment in education–as Bill Gates advocates–then the information revolution will certainly surge ahead in the 21st century, but the US will no longer be at the forefront. However, if we want to sustain the kind of opportunities to which Bill Gates owes his success, then we will have to redouble our commitment to education.

Oh, and one last point: expertise matters. Software experts should run software companies. The more we rely on software experts to design educational policy, the greater the chance that we’ll end up with Microsoft Vista-version of schooling.

Women in Academe

In recent years, women have begun to make inroads into the ranks of teaching staff in Canadian universities. Between 2002-2003, the number of full-time female faculty had risen to 30 percent, which was a substantial increase from only 20 percent one decade earlier (Statistics Canada, 2006). The growing presence of female faculty has been largely attributed to the rising educational attainment of women in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs. However, although female enrollment has never been greater, their increasing presence in all degree programs has not kept pace with the proportion of males occupying full-professorships in Canadian universities. Currently females occupy only 22 percent of full-time professors, 34 percent of associate professors, and 41.3 percent of assistant professors. Furthermore, their pay pales in comparison to that of men while occupying the same position, averaging a discrepancy of approximately $3,500 (Armenti, 2004). At first glance, female presence within academic circles appears to be rapidly growing. Nonetheless, when analyzing current statistics of women’s positions within Canadian universities, it becomes increasingly apparent that their progression is limited to the lower ranks. As a result, a burning question is “Where are all the women?”

Struggling for Full Citizenship: Why Women lack Full Equality

Alfred Marshall (Heater, 1999) argues that citizens are composed of three bundles of rights: the civil, the political, and the social. For the this article, the focus will be on the bundle of civil rights, in particular, the right to work and how this is an essential criterion to possess full citizenship. The critical aspect of assessing one’s freedom is distinguished between the extent of achievement and the freedom to achieve. Achievement is concerned with what we manage to accomplish, and freedom with the real opportunity that we have to accomplish what we value (Sen, 1992). In regards to the extent of achievement, female academics have managed to achieve their position as professors within universities as the result of their educational background. However, they do not possess the freedom to achieve because their prospects for advancement are severely limited. This is because female professors do not have ample time to invest into their careers because they are required to perform a disproportionate amount of childcare and housework.

At present, Canada has two forms of leave, which include maternity leaves and are often referred to pregnancy leaves, as well as parental leave. A pregnancy leave is a right that pregnant female employees have that entitles them to take up to 17 weeks of unpaid and job-protected time off work. This length of time is typically the same for all provinces with the exception of Quebec and Saskatchewan, which provide 18 weeks, and Alberta, which provides 15 weeks (Deven & Moss, 2006). Following the 17 weeks of pregnancy leave is 35 weeks of parental leave. This leave can be 37 weeks if the mother does not take a pregnancy leave and can be taken by either parent or shared, but cannot extend beyond 52 weeks. However, this “gender-neutral” policy was created in 2000 and the length of parental leave was dramatically increased from the 10 weeks parents were provided prior to the amendment. The money that is paid during a pregnancy or parental leave is paid through Employment Insurance (EI), which is under federal jurisdiction. It is a rate of 55 percent of your average insured earnings up to a yearly maximum amount of $40,000. That is, you can receive a maximum payment of $423 per week. The pay provided for pregnancy leave will not exceed 15 weeks and for parental leave it is 35 weeks (Deven & Moss, 2006). For university faculty, the pay provided to them by the federal government is “topped up” by the institution so they earn approximately 100 percent of their pay for the first two weeks of leave and 85-100 percent of their pay during the next 17 weeks of leave (Caut, 2006). However, as discussed earlier, the amendment of this policy did not relieve women of their roles as primary parents since only 9% of men in Canada took a parental leave between 2001-2006 (Deven & Moss, 2006). Since there is a divergence between what women manage to achieve and the freedom to achieve, women do not posses full citizenship. Their rights are confined within a policy that privileges men’s positions in society and provides them with the freedom to achieve.

Traditional Structure of Academia

Academia requires a large amount of time, preparation, and involvement both inside and outside of the university setting. Since these responsibilities are extremely crucial in the consideration for tenure and promotion, they cannot be compromised with the expectations and demands of childcare and housework. In an attempt to combine family life and work without jeopardizing their prospects of attaining tenure, women faculty has typically taken one of two approaches referred to as “May babies” and post-tenure babies. “May baby” phenomenon refers to timing the birth of one’s child for the month of May, or nearing the early summer months, so that women would be permitted to have children without being forced to take time off from work which would be perceived as a lack of commitment towards their careers (Armenti, 2004). A second strategy that many female academics use for attempting to avoid the conflict between childrearing and attaining tenure is referred to as “post tenure babies.” This is where young female academics postpone having children until after they have obtained tenured positions (Armenti, 2004).

Although female representation in undergraduate, masters and doctoral programs is ever growing, the traditional structure of universities inhibits women from attaining equal status, recognition and pay to that of their male counterparts. This reflects what Aisenberg and Harrington (1988) call the “old norms”, a set of historical beliefs and expectations that remain even as new understandings arise. Old norms reiterate the message that female professors must choose between childrearing and work as opposed to combining the two. The upholding of such traditional norms is contradictory because academia is an environment which fosters liberal ideologies and where individuals are encouraged to challenge the status quo without any consequence to their positions (Rhode, 2006). With that, it is unrealistic to assume that the expectations placed on professors can be altered or lessened to alleviate the burden many female academics experience when attempting to balance family life and work. Instead the problem lies with the construction of parenthood, in that women’s primary role has, and continues to be attributed to childrearing which remains unchallenged among many academics.

References

Aisenberg, N., & Harrington, M. (1988). Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press

Armenti, Carmen. (2004). “Women Faculty Seeking Tenure and Parenthood.” Cambridge Journal of Education. Vol. 34: 65-83.

CAUT (Canadian Association of Teachers). “Policy Statement on Parental Leaves.” Retrieved from: http://www.caut.ca/pages.asp?page=248&lang=1

Deven, Fred & Moss, Peter. 2006. “Leave Policies and Research: A Cross-National Overview.” Haworth Press, Inc.

Rhode, Deborah. (2006). In Pursuit of Knowledge. US: Stanford University Press.

Stats Canada. (2006). “University Enrollment.” The Daily-Tuesday October 11th, 2005. Retrieved September 29, 2007 from http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/051011/d051011b.htm

Heater, Derek. (1999). What Happened to Citizenship? Polity Press: Cambridge, UK.

Sen, Amartya. (1992). Inequality Reexamined. Oxford University Press: Cambridge, Mass.

This article originally appeared in Volume Three of The Electronic Journal of Sociology. It is reproduced here as part of the debate on the challenges of higher education.

Introduction

Canada has a well-known history of telecommunications innovation. What many Canadians don’t know  is that Ericsson does as well, with new ideas flowing from our research and development centres for over 100 years. That’s why Ericsson is funding the Centre for Wireless Communications at the University of Waterloo, the first graduate school of its kind in Canada. Soon, CWC graduates will make us proud with creative new wireless solutions made in Canada. Stimulating innovation is a mark of Ericsson’s leadership, both in Canada and around the world. You’re going to hear more from Ericsson.Advertisement, Maclean’s, March 16, 1998

The Business of Higher Education

In the past two decades in Canada, as in the UK before it,” there can hardly be a school, hospital, social services department, university or college …that has not in some way become permeated by the language of enterprise…. from the hospital to the railway station, from the classroom to the museum, the nation finds itself translated. ‘Patients’, ‘parents’, ‘passengers’ and ‘pupils’ are reimaged as ‘customers’” (du Gay and Salaman, 1992: 622). Business attitudes and speech, plus the shades of meaning associated with market theories have engulfed primary and secondary school systems (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996; Firestone, 1994; Ball, 1993). Discourses of efficiency, accountability, and consumerism have transformed the public sector and overflowed into the university, threatening academe’s principles of social betterment, its spaces of public debate, its teaching and its research. The university has become hooked on the discourse of the market-driven enterprise.

The outward signs are the business logos and trademarks that permeate Canadian universities. Pepsi has the monopoly at University of Calgary food courts, while at the University of Alberta, Coca Cola monopolises the campus. Students at the University of Calgary’s Centre for International Peace and Understanding and Fine Arts attend lectures inside” The Husky Oil Great Hall,” or meet peers and talk over ideas in” The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Hub” or” the Scotia Bank Milling Area.”¹ Corporate names mark the entrance ways to buildings on many university campuses. Athabasca University has even placed trademarks on its slogans” Learning Without Limits^TM” and” Canada’s Open University^TM.” And as the University of Alberta tells us,” it makes sense” (or is that cents?). Similar patterns exist at universities across the country (Dwyer, 1997).

Academic positions, teaching and research are also named, marked, and shaped by tied aid. Tied aid is unlike grants and other forms of donations. This money comes with strings attached. As Bruneau notes, it a common practice these days.” …old fashioned philanthropy …unencumbered gifts…become scarce in a period when ‘inputs’ are nearly always tied to ‘outputs’” (Bruneau, 1998). At the University of Alberta, the Networks of Centres of Excellence on Sustainable Forest Management is funded, in part, by the forest industry and, in the main, by public funds. Centre representatives legitimate the union of public and private money by arguing that Centre research “tackles relevant problems and focuses on realistic solutions,” and” works closely with those organisations that are in the best position to implement the results of the Network’s research.”² This means university graduate students and their professors carry out research for, and work closely with, the pulp, paper and forestry companies who exploit the public forests of Canada.

Cultural theorists use the term” discourse” to describe” the cultural ‘fixing’ of certain meanings, and their constant reproduction and circulation.” The fixing of a discourse brings closure to social debate. It shifts attention away from how explanations and justifications are constructed and how cultural meanings are embedded in these justifications. As a result,” other possible ways of making sense … have been absented, discouraged or closed out” (O’Sullivan et al., 1994: 93). This leaves a form of intellectual totalitarianism in the absence of critical awareness. In higher education, market discourses of accountability, enterprise, and efficiency are pressuring teachers and administrators to see themselves as providers of a service to consumers. As such thinking about education penetrates the academy, and funding cuts trickle down, increasingly we are in danger of losing much of the substance of the higher education.

The Service University and Market Discipline

In the late 1980s Newson and Buchbinder (1988) outlined the sociological conditions, inside and outside universities, that gave us the” service university vision.” They encouraged analysis of the social and political context in which linkages between universities and corporations occurred. Since that time, significant changes have occurred that have forced a much tighter union between university and corporation. Increased funding cuts to universities have altered the make-up of university budgets, putting more pressure on universities to seek alternative funding sources.

Alternative funding can come from a number of areas none of which increase the independence of the university. One source is increased tuition fees. In 1980 universities received $6.44 in grants for each dollar collected in tuition fees. By 1995 the figure had dropped to $2.97 (Statistics Canada, 1997). Students have always paid a proportion of their actual education costs. However, under the new market mentality tuition fees rose by 86 percent between 1983 and 1995 (Statistics Canada, 1997). Today, student fees provide, on average, 24.3 per cent of Canadian university budgets.

The explanation for tuition increases is not simply that governments are focused on deficit reduction. Rather, fee increases and cuts to university funding comprise part of the larger discourse that emphasises educational production for the market. This discourse assumes that universities should operate as businesses in the service of a client market. Certain assumptions are made here. First, students are seen as the key customers. Universities are to gear themselves towards satisfying these customers. Second, it is thought that the customers should take greater responsibility for their education by paying higher tuition. Third, higher fees are seen as beneficial because they will encourage students to make more informed choices in choosing their university education. And finally, once students become concerned with the quality of their education, universities will have to pay attention. The end result of this is that market discipline is forced on universities.

Besides subjecting universities to the discipline of the consumer, universities are subjected to market discipline in other ways. While it varies, most garner greater proportions of their operating budgets through corporate donations than they did in the past. In addition a new form of revenue, created by governments steeped in market ideologies, and called” performance based funding,” rewards universities for achievements that reflect their” responsiveness” to the marketplace. In Alberta, universities must take home a” report card.” Among other things, this report card looks for growing student enrollment (when there is no increase in base funding), examines graduate satisfaction with the educational experience (the education must be job or career relevant), and looks at the ratio of administrative overhead to direct expenses. Finally, in this report card, universities are rewarded for” enterprise revenue.” Enterprise revenue is earnings generated by the sale of university” services” in the commercial marketplace. Examples include the sale of classroom space to business or other institutions, or the marketing of survey expertise to the private sector. At the University of Alberta, the Population Research Laboratory (a social survey unit) now competes directly in the commercial market.

Ironically, the performance based funding envelope is quite a small percentage of a university’s operating grant. Compared to the effort required by universities to collect this data, it may cost more than what it is worth (a deep irony when economic efficiency is the ostensible goal). However, it serves the ideological agenda of a Tory government that wants to be seen, by the public, as compelling the university sector to adopt business techniques. The long-term fear is that, if the universities are successful in marketing their services, the government might raise performance funding to 10 per cent of operating funds.

There is more (Alberta Advanced Education and Career Development, 1997), but this gives the reader an indication of the essence of the Alberta government’s university evaluation system. The net results of this shift in funding sources is that universities become less dependent on government sources of revenue, and more dependent on sources of revenue that come with strings attached. The visible representations of this dependence, the Coca Cola monopoly, the lecture hall inscriptions, and now even the students (who are wearing industry jackets) speak clearly about the effects of this dependence. What meager independence the universities once had is being slowly but inexorably colonised physically, intellectually, and spiritually. As Newson and Buchbinder feared” the university means business” and defenders of public funding for universities are being pushed to the margins.

Not all academics oppose this business mentality. Newson and Buchbinder found many splits (1988). And there are winners. Dominelli and Hoogvelt identify two groups benefiting from the market mentality. They are the “privatized professionals” or former state and university employees and the petty bourgeois intellectuals. This latter group comprises” those within universities who are good at grasping opportunities that the market presents” (1996:89). Ranged against these intellectual opportunists are the critics of corporate-university connections. Dominelli and Hoogvelt call them activist and/or postmodernist intellectuals. It is time we examined some of the implications of the new business models for the academies of higher learning.

Accountability

In neo-right discourse, subjecting Universities to the discipline of the market is described as raising the accountability of institutions. Universities become “accountable” to students, taxpayers, and the businesses who fund the research laboratories and lecture halls. Such calls for accountability are not new. In the sixties, this clarion call for accountability was first heard. At that time, universities were jostled out of their self-assuredness by loudly voiced student demands that universities pay attention to student needs. This led to” increased student involvement in decision-making, more diverse course offerings, and greater sensitivity to the concerns of minority groups” (Krahn and Silzer, 1995: 13). Today, however,” accountability” has been redefined not by students for students, but because:

…politicians and the public as a whole started to ask more critical questions about the purpose and performance of colleges and universities. Provincial governments across Canada have made deficit reduction one of their primary goals, and, therefore, have begun to demand more accountability from postsecondary institutions (Krahn and Silzer, 1995: 13).

Today’s post-secondary institutions are held accountable to government for their economic efficiency – a measure more appropriate to the production of goods, than the provision of education. Universities” prove” their value by turning out satisfied consumers and quality products with a minimum of resources. We get the most bang for the public’s education buck. This shift to a” clientocracy” is significant. Instead of accountability to the deeper educational needs of students, to issues of social justice and equity, and to a standard of truth not coupled with hegemonic discourse, we are now becoming accountable to narrow criteria of economic efficiency. This new accountability and these new appeals to innovation differ from those of past critics of universities (Friere, 1971; Stumpf, 1979; Feldman, 1993; Broder and Dorfman, 1994), or from publications devoted to improved learning (e.g., Teaching Sociology and The Teaching Professor).

Some see a positive change in this new climate. Proponents argue that application of market principles to university education will make it flexible, innovative and cheap. However, many more refute the notion that forced accountability through cuts and performance funding will lead to better education (Bruneau, 1998). Yet some universities continue instituting performance criteria willingly, believing it better to retain certain controls rather than have accountability unilaterally imposed.

It is clear that the social and political climate of the 1990s is forcing colleges and universities to move in the direction of self-evaluation. In our opinion, postsecondary institutions would benefit more, and perhaps suffer less, if they took the initiative to devise and implement a valid set of performance indicators rather than wait for someone else to impose a less appropriate set of measures (Krahn and Silzer, 1995: 13).

We can reasonably ask whether or not participating in the colonization is an effective strategy. Outside the university, in the lower systems of education, there is much evidence to suggest that accountability and its accompanying restructuring have caused loss of job security, work intensification, decline in pay, and declining quality of services (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996). From our own perspective, the strategy of beating the government to the performance indicator punch lacks an assessment of student needs, and a pedagogical rationale. It is more of a damage control measure designed to appease those who hold the purse strings. Furthermore, the strategy harbours a built-in conservative bias that makes its efficacy dubious. Given this model, if teachers or administrators innovate, they do so at the cost of not doing well in the government set performance indicators.

Complicity in this performance indicator exercise could be the Trojan Horse that imports new political ideologies into universities through seemingly value- neutral techniques. Ironically, many professors and students seem silent and even complicit in the issues despite the fact that the new accountability means altering the very experience of university life as we suggest below.

Changing Demographics

Cutbacks to higher education funding are ongoing. In response, university administrators have raised tuition fees. In Alberta, for example, there have been tuition increases of between 174% and 227% in the past ten years. And there is no indication that the situation will get any better anytime soon. In Alberta, we expect nearly 37,000 new students by the year 2005. Yet the government has indicated there will be no increase in base funding, instead proposing that any funding increases be tied to outcome-based measures (Faculty Circuit, 1998). Other provinces and other institutions are also experiencing the pressure. At some universities in the maritime provinces of Canada students pay over half of their institutions operating costs (Bruneau, 1998).

Statistic Canada argues that the evidence is mixed as to whether rising fees have become a barrier. Although enrolments fell in 1994 and 1995, they are up 30 per cent between 1983 and 1995 (Statistics Canada, 1997: 23). Nevertheless there is cause for concern. Authors of the report Post-Secondary Education in Alberta(1997) note that in the province’s 1996 High-School Graduates Survey,” 64% of graduates felt that ‘post-secondary education is getting too expensive for people like me’ and 38% of those not attending PSE immediately after graduation were delaying entry because they couldn’t afford it.” It seems naive to think that a continuing rise in tuition will not have an impact on enrollment at some point. While absolute numbers may continue to rise for a time simply because our credentialed society demands more from the future workforce, the social class of people attending our instituions may shift dramatically. As Ball’s study of the UK and USA found, funding cuts and restructuring were thinly-veiled forms of class warfare designed to reproduce “relative social class (and ethnic) advantages and disadvantages” (1993: 4).

While most provinces in Canada place absolute limits on the proportion of the operating expenses that can be extracted from students, these limits are now coming under pressure. The worst possible scenario, unregulated tuition fees, was announced in December of 1997 by the government of Ontario. Astronomically higher tuition rates are expected (Lewington, 1997). If deregulation of tuition fees succeeds in Mike Harris’ Ontario, we can expect other provinces to interpret it as an indication of public acceptance.

The Changing Classroom

The net result of the desire to do more with less, only better, has been a decline in the quality of education, and the creation of Fordist-style degree mills (Noble, 1997). Postmodern theorists call it” performativity,” that is,” the capacity to deliver outputs at the lowest cost [which] replaces truth as the yardstick of knowledge” (Crook et. al. in Delucchi and Smith, 1997: 323). In practical terms,” performativity” means upping the student-teacher ratio. An extreme example must be the first year psychology class with 1200+ students at the University of Western Ontario (University Teaching Services, 1988). Even third year classes with 200 + students are no longer unusual. Assuming a tuition fee of $350, a class of 1200 students would generate $420,000 dollars. With such a classroom model universities would need to hire only one instructor, a few tutors, and some technicians and their budget problems would be resolved. But increasing class size does not lead to increased quality of education

Increases in teacher-to-student ratios have a negative effect on learning because they reduce the time instructors have available for each student and often result in significant changes to instruction and evaluation. Research on class size and student performance suggests that pedagogical technique is the most important variable in determining the quality of a learning experience: classes that are engaging, have the opportunity for one- on-one discussion and encourage participation achieve high quality learning. Class size directly affects the choice of technique (i.e. large classes reduce the ability of instructors to involve students in discussion and debate); rising class sizes make it increasingly difficult to maintain the quality of the learning experience. Large classes force instructors to abandon essay and laboratory exams that test students’ ability to apply knowledge in situations similar to those they will face in the workforce in favour of multiple-choice testing (Post-Secondary Education in Alberta, 1997: 21-2).

Instructors who are shifted from class to class or who are dealing with increased student numbers feel pressure to rethink their teaching strategies. For example, many rely on evaluation methodologies that some have suggested have dubious pedagogical value – such as multiple choice exams coded by computers. Responding to the pressure to develop efficiencies, instructors (sometimes allied with powerful business interests) are also seeking innovative methods of course delivery. Moving in to fill the new demand in this brave new academic environment are the multinational book publishing houses which offer canned class materials, predeveloped lectures, overheads, web-based materials, automated exam banks and other ancillary course material (Anon, 1998). Alongside increased video and computer technologies in teaching, however, canned class materials are reminiscent of the first wave of scientific management strategies designed to separate the individual components of the labour process in order to deskill and deprofessionalise (Braverman, 1974).

These new teaching methods need to be seen in the larger context of the Taylorisation of intellectual labour (Dominelli and Hoogvelt, 1996); the separation of teaching and research; the growth of part-time, contract work (Newson and Buchbinder, 1988); and the use of technology in university teaching (Noble, 1997). The patterns are ominous. Evidence from the lower systems of education suggest that the restructuring of intellectual work has caused job insecurity, work intensification, decline in pay, and declining quality of service to students (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996) It is not unreasonable to assume a future university where teaching technicians, assisted by expensive technology, will deliver multimedia learning materials to hundreds of students. It has already happened in the secondary school system (Sinclair, Ironside, and Seifert, 1996).

Commodification, Colonization, and Discipline

The issues go deeper than access and quality of education. Under subtle but direct attack is the very existence of an academy of free inquiry. Universities have always made space for criticism of the status quo, confirmed over the years no doubt by intermittent assaults on the notion of a tenured faculty. Yet today it seems the new world order is eroding critical inquiry in novel and more effective ways through the ongoing commodification and colonization of the academy with forms of discourse most appropriate for the marketplace. As Norman Fairclough (1992: 207) notes of the process of commodification:

Commodification is the process whereby social domains and institutions, whose concern is not producing commodities in the narrower economic sense of goods for sale, come nevertheless to be organized and conceptualized in terms of commodity production, distribution and consumption…. In terms of orders of discourse, we can conceive of commodification as the colonization of institutional orders of discourse, and more broadly of the societal order of discourse, by discourse types associated with commodity production.

In” Can Virtue be Bought? Moral Education and the Commodification of Values,” Daryl Pullman examines an interesting example of this colonization. As he notes, the growth industry in applied ethics has reversed the decline of philosophy departments. Pullman is wary of this success. Like the processes described by Fairclough, Pullman describes how” moral education as it is ostensibly practised in our university settings and in the private sector, is likened to an industry that produces and markets a certain kind of good.” He argues that academic departments are competing” to convince the powers that be that what they have to offer is important, or better, essential, and hence that their particular discipline deserves a bigger piece of the pie.” The price paid for this wantonness, however, is a pedagogical one. Philosophers end up presenting themselves” as merchants with something to sell,” instead of” catalysts in an important process of moral development” that is,” educating society on the need for a different process” (Pullman, 1994).

In New Zealand, a similar market mentality has impacted educators and students and has had powerful results:

The market has been seen as the ideal model on which to base educational arrangements. Competition between students, staff and institutions has been encouraged. Students have been redefined as” consumers”, and tertiary education institutions have become” providers”. Bureaucrats now talk of” inputs”, “outputs” and” throughputs” in the education system. Any notion of educational processes serving a form of collective public good has all but disappeared; instead, participation in tertiary education in now regarded as a form of private investment (Roberts, 1998).

Du Gay and Salaman (1992: 615) suggest that the implications extend as far as the” conduct and identities of employees” because defining students as “customers” makes it possible to couple administrative discipline of teachers with consumer feedback. Michel Foucault (1977) linked disciplinary power with visibility in his popularisation of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic disciplinary mechanism. Today’s proposals to evaluate student-teacher relations appear designed to increase the visibility of the academic worker inside the formerly opaque classroom. Efforts to make workers visible to management are identified by Fuller and Smith (1991) in their study of” Management by Customers” and less flatteringly, by du Gay and Salaman in” Consumer Cult[ure]” (1992). Consider Townley’s take on Human Resource Management (HRM) techniques:

HRM serves to render organizations and their participants calculable arenas, offering, through a variety of technologies, the means by which activities and individuals become knowable and governable. HRM disciplines the interior of the organization, organizing time, space, and movement within it. Through various techniques, tasks, behavior, and interactions are categorized and measured. HRM provides measurements of both physical and subjective dimensions of labor offering a technology that renders individuals and their behavior predictable and calculable. … familiar tools of personnel management – skills inventories, performance appraisal systems, assessments and evaluation methods, attitude measurements – are all arrangements for ranking, which facilitate a serial ordering of individuals….These schemes are…very much disciplinary techniques (Townley, 1993: 526-529).

The common technique used by universities, the student survey administered at the end of a semester, takes on new meaning when interwoven with discourses of student satisfaction. These surveys are used to monitor and correct instructor performance (Rose, 1989). Tied into the culture of the student as consumer, however,” the rating procedure is… transformed…[from] an irksome, intrusive and threatening technique of management control, ….[to] a benevolent … technique to assist individuals to become their true selves and to realise their aspirations” (Grey 1994: 489). Rarely does an administrative officer have to correct the teacher. Teachers discipline themselves by shifting their pedagogical strategies. The authority of the ideology of” self-betterment” and “good service” vested in the survey instrument make it hard to question, especially for term and sessional instructors. Management control over workers is obscured in the process.

Concerned about survey feedback, and not wanting to create dissatisfied student-consumers, some teachers (especially those not protected by tenure) shift away from critical pedagogy and free experimentation towards classroom teaching that is low risk, more conservative, and more entertaining. Pedagogical strategies are designed to net acceptable report cards. Likewise students, instead of seeing themselves as participants in the education process, or as junior colleagues there to learn from those preceding them, internalise the consumer role and see themselves as purchasers of a product that must meet their own specifications.

Education thus becomes the consumption of non-threatening entertainment, which, at its best, puts pedagogical control into the hands of the students (Edmundson, 1997) and, at it worst, demands that offensive (dare we say challenging) academic material be expurgated from the course lest it offend sensibilities. Merit, hard work, and actually getting students to learn something become less important to staff than pleasing students (Long and Lake, 1996). Indeed, studies have show that personality can explain as much as 90 percent of the variance in instructor ratings (Deluchi and Smith, 1997).

As student’s ideas of what constitutes a good education shift, and as they adopt the consumer mentality, the pressure to pander to student expectations can become intense and irresistable. In California, after reading a psychology course disclaimer saying” This is a class for mature adult students wherein sexually explicit material will be discussed in [an] open, frank manner…” a student promptly initiated a sexual harassment suit saying” I don’t like X-rated movies and I don’t read X-rated books. So I don’t think I should have to take an X-rated class” (Globe and Mail, 1998). The comparison of a university course with other forms of consumer goods, and the call to consumer accountability, is unmistakable.

As Brookfield (1995) notes, the new discourse violates the teachers deeply held convictions about how to teach in a meaningful and critical fashion. It is impossible to teach critically in an environment dominated by the consumer ethic because education is not always easy, painless, or emotionally uplifting. Yet, as noted, the new environment encourages a shift in pedagogical authority towards the students. The result is an environment where the whims of the student’s are catered to at the expense of sound pedagogical strategy. This is not to discount the need to engage the students in a relationship characterized by concern, mutual respect, and dedication (Boyd, 1997). However it is to question whether or not the new environment is conducive to anything more than superficial contact and superficial learning.

Significant learning and critical thinking inevitably induce an ambivalent mix of feelings and emotions, in which anger and confusion are as prominent as pleasure and clarity. The most hallowed rule of business – that the customer is always right – is often pedagogically wrong. Equating good teaching with a widespread feeling among students that you have done what they wanted ignores the dynamics of teaching and prevents significant learning (Brookfield, 1995: 21. Italics added).

Students’ re-definitions of themselves as consumers reinforce, in turn, teacher strategies to produce satisfied and entertained consumers. Students will lose in the long run.

Corporate Boards of Governors?

In Canada in the 1990s, deficit reduction and balanced budgeting have become a mantra and universities seem caught up in it:” We have to operate more efficiently and be more focused because we can’t do everything,” says Frederick Lowy, Rector and Vice-Chancellor, of Concordia University. At Carleton University in Ottawa, this dictum means closing and streamlining programs such as languages, literature, and comparative literary studies and laying-off tenured faculty – despite apparent high demand for their graduates. Such cutbacks are dangerous, and move us towards accepting an economic logic that will justify lopping off other” unproductive” departments. The ultimate direction of this rethinking was succinctly stated by Ontario Premier Mike Harris, who claimed that geography and sociology programs were, in the current economic environment, surplus (Lewiston, 1997: 1).

In Canada, governments appoint public members of university boards of governors. These university boards often have included corporate leaders, in greater and lesser degrees (Ornstein, 1988). Their potential for influence, however, was often restricted to indirect shaping of relatively resilient academic institutions based on collegial decision-making and tradition. Nowadays, in an era of public accountability, restructuring, performance indicators and revenue based funding, members of boards of governors are often involved in questioning the very nuts and bolts of the university as an organisation:” neo-liberals seek to change fundamentally the way in which universities function” (Horn, 1998: 20).

While it is true that some board members are interested citizens, contributing their time and energy to universities (albeit with a business approach to problem- solving and little acceptance of academic or collegial decision-making), in most cases they are on boards to carry out the key functions of approving budget plans and expenditures, and securing funds for cash-strapped universities from the private sector. David Bond, Chair of the Board of Governors at Simon Fraser University and V.P. of Government and Public Affairs at the Hong Kong Bank of Canada, states that:” Board members are put on the board to give money or raise money. It’s like an honourary degree,” …” You either give, get or get out. I can understand concerns over exclusivity. But unless the public opens its cheque book this is the avenue for survival for the great universities” (Bond, quoted in Schmidt, 1997).

Cross-linked with the corporate and finance sectors in ways that would make Domhoff wince, representatives of business in Canada preside over the future of many Canadian universities. That these corporate leaders and university fund raisers, for the most part, champion neo-liberal economic models and have restructured their own firms, means that we could well expect them to think likewise about university affairs. The Vice-President of the Hong Kong Bank of Canada sits on council at Simon Fraser University. The President of the Bank of Montreal holds the chief position at the University of Toronto. A retired banker sits at Acadia. Last year the top decision-makers at McGill University included the chief executive officers of the Royal Bank, Noranda Inc., Canadian National Railway Co., and BCE Inc. They were backed up by senior executives from the Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Ernst & Young and Canadian Pacific Ltd. (Schmidt, 1997).

In the context of this physical (as opposed to intellectual) colonization, significant resistance to the corporate and neo-right agenda disappears. Negative consequences for the public may ensue. For example, might not board representatives from banks encourage and approve higher tuition rates in the name of making students responsible for their education, while banks provide and profit from student loans? Doesn’t big industry gain access to cutting-edge university research without footing the majority of the bill (responsible students and taxpayers still do most of that)? It’s possible though that business may not be satisfied with their beachhead in the universities. They may want more. This was vividly demonstrated by the announcement to construct the Technical University of British Columbia. This is an institution” designed specifically to work closely with industry in turning out job-ready graduates in technology-related fields” (Came, 1997: 65), and structured in such a way as to allow no student or faculty input into governance, and no tenure. Perhaps this is the underlying subtext of the word” accountable.”

The trends seem obvious and, in a way, unsurprising. ”Years ago the university shaped itself to an industrial ideal – the knowledge factory” (Rowe, 1990). Science at the service of culture, industry and the status quo has a long history (Goonatilake, 1982; Haraway, 1986; Shields, 1987; Jacob, 1988; Harding, 1993), so current trends continue many past practices. Now there is renewed vigour in the assault, made possible by the elimination and/or harnessing of alternative discourses that might counter the hegemonic ones of Weberian rationality and economic efficiency (Schiller, 1989). The space where critics once voiced counter discourses is left gapping. Dare challenge efficiency calculations and you risk being marginalised or branded a Luddite educator unconcerned with quality, unaware of the new economic contingencies, or incapable of reason and common sense.

Counterpoints

The ability to pursue ideas in circumstances where failure is not judged by the narrow criteria of profitability is essential for universities. A halt must be put to panoptic controls and one-dimensional educational discourses. Here are six counterpoints:

• Recognize the political struggle over education (Spencer, 1998) and do not reduce issues of efficiency and accountability to some post-modern turn (Delucchi and Smith, 1997,) or a shift in demographics (Eisenberg, 1997). Resist performance indicators or find indicators capable of tapping pedagogical depth. The claim that economic efficiency and accountability is in the best interest of students is false, and must be opposed.
• Show how new forms of accountability are not in the best interests of universities, and must be resisted. This means exposing narrow business assumptions and interests, and demonstrating their pedagogical implications.
• Support the funding of independent research, untied to business interests of goals. Remind the public that important discoveries have historically relied upon long-term government funding of research that showed no obvious signs of commercial benefit. The computer, for example, took 30 years of financial support from the U. S. government before it became the profit generating information technology sector that exists today (Flamm, 1987).
• Stem the culture of consumerism invading universities (based on a discourse of accountability) because it leads to intrusive forms of control. Academics have begun to challenge the efficacy of the consumer accountability paradigm (Sosteric, 1996) and even business is rethinking” the customer is always right” business paradigm and finding that depth of service makes more sense than superficial measures of customer satisfaction. (Keates, 1997). Universities should also emphasise depth of service rather than superficial satisfactions. Instructors could be rewarded for progressive experimentation and the application of innovative pedagogical strategies designed to facilitate this depth.
• Offer a constructive alternative program. A multi-tiered alternative would redefine” accountability” to not only mean accountability to students, but also the accountability of students to their own education. Students need to take an active role in defining their own needs within a critique of the consumer model of education. Universities, for their part, have to emphasise that they can accommodate the needs of students for jobs but only while developing the student’s ability to think critically, provide constructive criticism of the status quo, and offer ethical alternatives (Rowe, 1990).
  It is important to recognise that a shallow, consumer led education system does not produce the skills needed for today’s complex high tech social world. We are constantly being told of the need to create workers capable of” informating” (Zuboff, 1988), that is, thinking laterally, and with depth and breadth so as to be able to creatively problem solve. Students need to be let in on this debate and convinced that the current environment is not giving them these informating skills.
• Recapture the student/teacher relationship with a new metaphor. Apprenticeship seems an appropriate starting metaphor. Others might evolve. Students should be viewed not as consumers, but as junior academic partners who are guided through the steps required to develop logical and theoretical thinking skills. Teachers must do this carefully and with sensitivity, always with respect for student needs, never with the assumption that the student” needs” or even” wants” consumer style education. We can easily create a” post-modern” style of education where student voice and multi-vocality are prized without descending into the dark depths of consumer rhetoric.

The risk is great if we sit idly by and watch our academic and democratic freedoms, and our ability to resist through critical education, placed under a panoptic microscope or rudely dismantled. Criticising the social order and challenging the new accountability are imperative in an environment where governments are shifting farther to the right. In Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s government has” In its 2 1/2 years in office, … removed safeguards against executive and bureaucratic arbitrary action, severely eroded the foundations of administrative justice, bypassed and ignored traditional avenues of consultation, substantially abbreviated legislature debate on its lawmaking measures and truncated opportunities for public comment” (Valpy, 1997). Hugh Segal finds that conservative ideologues are beginning to openly apply the criteria of economic efficiency to political debate – suggesting that” deliberation in politics … is no longer affordable.” (Hugh Segal quoted in Valpy, 1997). In elegant understatement, Michael Valpy notes that” The evidence is all there. It’s disturbing.” (Valpy, 1997: A31).

Successful counterpoints to the market driven model of university education depend on political shifts. Universities are rapidly approaching a new juncture, that could prove historically significant. Progressives need to organise and promote ideas that capture the imagination of the public, students, and administrators as we arrive at this intersection. Certain conditions for challenging the neo-right discourse are currently available. Its time we used them.

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Endnotes

1. The plaque in The Husky Oil Hall at University of Calgary reads:

Husky Oil is a Canadian-based integrated energy company serving global customers through the dedicated efforts of its employees. Husky Oil is proud to share the ideals of the Centre for International Peace and Understanding and Fine Arts and is conscious that only through positive interaction can we achieve the ideal of international Harmony.

2. See http://nce.nserc.ca/blurbs/foreseng.htm.

]]> http://www.sociology.org/columnists/michael-sosteric/university-accountability-market-discipline-late-1990s-2/feed 0 http://www.sociology.org/political-economy/political-economy-of-higher-ed/colorado-stealth-university http://www.sociology.org/political-economy/political-economy-of-higher-ed/colorado-stealth-university#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:24:54 +0000 Timothy McGettigan http://www.sociology.org/?p=73

Power, control, and secrecy in higher education

Over the past few years, the Colorado State University Board of Governors has become increasingly secretive. During the spring of 2009, the BOG’s stealth maneuvers became so extreme that several Colorado legislators introduced House Bill 1369, which was intended to require the CSU Board of Governors to conduct its business with greater transparency. In a separate action, on May 5, 2009, District Court Judge Stephen Schapanski ruled that the CSU Board of Governors violated state open meeting laws when the BOG interviewed Joe Blake behind closed doors for the position of System Chancellor. Thus, there is abundant evidence that the CSU Board of Governors has become more clandestine, however,what is less clear is why the BOG believes it requires so much secrecy.

Transparency is an essential part of managing public institutions. That is, exacting public scrutiny has a tendency to keep leaders honest. In the absence of such scrutiny, leaders tend to wander from that straight and narrow path. Richard Nixon represents perhaps the most troubling example of a public servant who was undone by an excessive penchant for secrecy. Thus, transparency is the key to good governance. Indeed, it is that truism which makes the CSU Board of Governors’ recent passion for secrecy so worrisome.

Again, one must ask, what’s with all the secrecy? As long as the CSU Board of Governors makes decisions that serve the better interests of their constituents, there should be no need for secrecy. Of course, therein lies the rub. Secrets become essential when leaders of public institutions place their own interests above those of their constituents. The decision to install Joe Blake as CSU System Chancellor is an ideal case in point. No doubt, the CSU Board of Governors had some inkling that conferring a plum sinecure on one of its own members would likely stir outcries of cronyism. Therefore, the BOG concealed key elements of the chancellor search process in order to minimize public oversight until its eyebrow-raising conclusion was a fait accompli.

Additionally, the CSU Board of Governors’ dogged secrecy has effectively suppressed the curious circumstances surrounding the departure of former Chancellor Larry Penley — who, hard-working Coloradans might like to know, negotiated a sweet severance package (including payouts of $389,000 per year until 2010) at Colorado tax-payer’s expense. Thus, the lesson to gain from this is, as long as public officials can maintain secrecy, they can violate the public’s trust with impunity.

Of course, there are additional advantages to keeping secrets. Stealth has often been employed by leaders who are angling for additional power. For example, under Colorado Law, creating new public institutions of higher education requires a decision on the part of the state legislature. The power of conferring legislative authority on public colleges and universities remains the sole preserve of the legislature largely because, in anointing new colleges and universities, the state must also assume responsibility for funding those institutions. Yet, in spite of this constraint, several years ago the CSU Board of Governors, without bothering to secure legislative authority, created the third campus in its System, CSU-Global.

If you visit the CSU System homepage (http://www.csusystem.edu/), you will see three boxes in the center of the page that link to the three campuses in the CSU System: including two that enjoy legislative authority, i.e., CSU-Fort Collins and CSU-Pueblo, and one that does not, CSU-Global. Further, on January 28, 2009, Diane Evans, Treasurer for the Board of Governors, affirmed in an open forum at CSU-Pueblo that, though CSU-Global happens to be a “virtual” university, nevertheless from the perspective of the CSU Board of Governors, CSU-Global occupies a stature that is equivalent to the other two CSU System campuses. Dick Robinson, who co-chaired the open forum and who happens to be a past Chair of the CSU Governing Board, concurred with Diane Evans. Robinson stated that, from the perspective of the CSU Board of Governors, there are three campuses in the CSU System and, though each has a different mission, the Board of Governors recognizes each as an independent campus in the CSU System.

Wow. So, who needs legislative authority when you can get whatever you want more efficiently without it?

Although, by this time, the fact of CSU-Global’s existence should be a surprise to no one, nevertheless, the manner in which CSU-Global came into existence should be alarming to everyone. By stealthily arrogating the right to create a third campus on its own volition, the CSU Board of Governors has set a major precedent: no longer do Colorado institutions of higher education need to gain approval from the state in order to create new, publicly-supported colleges or universities. That is quite a coup d’etat.

Okay, so, what’s the big deal? After all, one could argue that the CSU Board of Governors knows what’s best for Colorado State University and, thus, the BOG should have every right to make decisions independently of state and public interference. Compelling as such an argument may be, it does overlook one key point: Colorado State University is a taxpayer-funded institution. The people of Colorado own and operate Colorado State University. The CSU Board of Governors has not been appointed to serve as they see fit, but to serve the better interests of the people of Colorado. In its zeal to operate under a cloud of secrecy, the CSU Board of Governors seems to have overlooked that all-important truth. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem. The people of Colorado can remind the CSU Board of Governors that they work for us. If Colorado’s taxpayers demand more transparency and compliance with state rules and regulations, then the BOG will have no choice but to comply. Isn’t it great to live in a democracy?

Transparency is the very least — and yet it is perhaps the most important quality — that taxpayers should expect from their public servants. It’s time to let the light shine in at Colorado State University.

]]> http://www.sociology.org/political-economy/political-economy-of-higher-ed/colorado-stealth-university/feed 0 http://www.sociology.org/featured/business-higher-education http://www.sociology.org/featured/business-higher-education#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:16:30 +0000 Timothy McGettigan http://www.sociology.org/?p=72

The Business of Higher Education

In recent years, colleges and universities have encountered increasing pressure to operate like businesses. As the logic goes, businesses must survive in a cutthroat climate of unfettered competition and thus these organizations need to be leaner, more efficient and more responsive to the needs of their customers than not-for-profit organizations, such as colleges and universities. In the unforgiving crucible of free market competition, only the fittest businesses (e.g., those that deliver the highest quality products at fair market value), will survive.  Of course, the seemingly endless government bail-outs following the 2008 financial crash cast a dubious light on the above claims, nevertheless, the notion that higher education should embrace a more business-like organizational philosophy remains deeply entrenched. Colorado State University’s recent hiring of its first-ever System Chancellor offers an illuminating example of this sensibility in practice.

On May 6, 2009, the CSU Board of Governors announced the hiring of Joe Blake as its System Chancellor. It is fair to say that Joe Blake is a somewhat curious choice for CSU’s System Chancellor because, although Blake can brag of extensive contacts in the Denver business community (Blake’s most recent job was as president of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce), his resume is conspicuously absent of academic credentials. Indeed, it is noteworthy that, in assembling its search committee, the CSU Board of Governors intentionally excluded faculty and student representatives. In response to protests concerning the limited composition of the chancellor search committee, Michelle McKinney, a public relations representative for the CSU System Board of Governors, stated baldly, “Search committee members were chosen for their knowledge and understanding of complex, billion dollar businesses.” In other words, from the perspective of the CSU Board of Governors, Colorado State University is a business. Therefore, when it comes to choosing the University’s leaders, the CSU Board of Governors considers input from successful businesspeople to be more pertinent than the opinions of academics.

Viewing these events through the most optimistic lens, one could argue that vast changes are in the offing for higher education. In an Information Society, college degrees have become an ever more essential ingredient for success. Yet, indispensable as college degrees may be, with each passing year, students encounter more difficulty gaining access to and completing higher education. Escalating costs coupled with reduced public funding have shifted the burden of college finance onto the backs of individual students. As students face the prospect of accumulating home mortgage-sized debt over the course of their college careers, many gifted, but financially-strapped students will have no choice but to forgo higher education.

Somehow, some way, educators must find a way to change that dynamic: college and university leaders must find a way to make higher education more affordable–and soon! Insights from the business realm will certainly be helpful in that process. Business leaders are only too well aware of the hazards of running afoul of consumer expectations. When a valued good becomes excessively overpriced, consumers tend to take their buying power elsewhere. As a case in point, consider the Big Three automakers. Not long ago the Big Three were the titans of industrial America, but having fallen out of step with their customers, the Big Three have hit upon tough times. Once again, in a free market society it behooves organizations to deliver the highest quality products at affordable prices. Consumer loyalty is not inexhaustible.

Indeed, higher education must change in order to meet the needs of its twenty-first century students. Fortunately, I am pleased to report that higher education has undertaken a variety of initiatives to achieve precisely that goal. To begin with, most colleges and universities have implemented flexible degree programs to permit students with limited time and extensive non-academic responsibilities (i.e., full-time jobs, family obligations, military service, etc.) to progress toward college degrees at a pace that suits their lifestyles. In addition, many universities have employed the latest technologies in an effort to reach out to place-bound students. Thus, many students who lack the necessary mobility and wherewithal to pursue a traditional on-campus education can still procure college degrees via online or “virtual” higher education opportunities.

Changing times have dictated that higher education must also change. Thus far, higher education has responded admirably. Yet, as with all successful institutions, to ensure ongoing success, higher education must constantly seek ways to reinvent and improve itself. Still, as planners look to the future, I believe it is important to consider the strengths and weaknesses of higher education in as broad a framework as possible. Much as higher education can benefit from the insights of business leaders, it is essential to recognize that higher education is not a business, nor should it ever become one. While higher education can and must synergize with business in many ways, business and higher education are distinct pursuits. Elementally, business is a for-profit activity, whereas higher education is a not-for-profit endeavor. This is the case, quite simply, because education is not a commodity; one cannot purchase an education the same way that one might purchase a pair of snow tires. Education is an investment that requires years of patience, diligence and perseverance before one can hope to reap a windfall.

Certainly, education is not cheap. It has taken an enormous investment to lay the educational foundation for the Information Society. However, I think it is fair to say that, having laid that groundwork, the dividends realized thus far have been spectacular: because of its investment in higher education, the US has been able to maintain a position of leadership in the development of the Information Society.

Undeniably, one way of mitigating higher education costs might be to seek new ways of transforming education into a for-profit endeavor–one would expect such initiatives to be a topic of primary interest to business leaders. However, I wonder if it is possible to extract profit from higher education without simultaneously impoverishing it? Further, viewing higher education as a resource from which to extract profit represents the antithesis of the educational philosophy that has propelled the North America and other nations to the forefront of the Information Society. We have has achieved prominence in the global village by investing in, rather than siphoning wealth from higher education. Therefore, I believe it is possible for the us to continue reaping great rewards from higher education, but only by enhancing its commitment to access-for-all, and by maintaining its philosophy of education as a long-term investment in the future. We will continue to play a central role in the Information Society, but only so long as we recognize that the “business” of higher education is to lay the foundation upon which to build a more enlightened, democratic, and prosperous world for one and all.

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