Growing-Up Modern

The Western State Builds Third-World Schools

Bruce Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136871085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Business General

The modern state – First and Third Worlds alike – pushes tirelessly to expand mass education and to deepen the schools' effect upon children. First published in 1991, Growing-Up Modern explores why, how, and with what actual effects state actors so vehemently pursue this dual political agenda.

Bruce Fuller first delves into the motivations held by politicians, education bureaucrats and civic elites as they earnestly seek to spread schooling to younger children, older adults and previously disenfranchised groups. Fuller argues that the school provides an institutional stage on which political actors signal their ideals and the coming of greater modernity; broadening membership in the polity, promising mass opportunity in the wage sector, intensifying modern (bureaucratic) forms of school management, and deepening a presumed commitment to the child's individual development.

Fuller advances a theory of the 'fragile state' where Western political expectations and organisations are placed within pluralistic Third World settings, using southern Africa as an example of the dilemmas faced by the central state.

1
A Faithful Yet Rocky Romance Between State and School

Unannounced, I was rushed into a haphazardly built shelter, a stark room bounded by crumbling brick walls and window frames absent their glass panes. That stale odor—found in any small humid space filled with active sweating bodies—hit me first. Then the rustling of bare feet against a dusty concrete floor could be heard as eighty-five small children, most dressed in fading blue uniforms, sprang to their feet. A seemingly automatic welcome came forth loud and clear, “Good morning, sir!” I recollected with self-conscious discomfort a British novel where the colonial administrator is loudly greeted by his subjects.

This was my premiere visit to an African classroom. I have observed kids in Mexican schools. I grew up in North American classrooms. Never before had I witnessed so many children packed into such a barren classroom. Nor had I felt this disciplined self-subordination so deeply ingrained in children so young.

The State’s Faith in Mass Schooling

As I spend more time sitting in African classrooms, I have come to see that such obligatory salutes are mixed with warm informality, lively spontaneity, and indifferent passivity among pupils and teachers alike. Classrooms also become less crowded by grade 5 or 6, as youths drop out to work the family’s land, or to work the streets selling gum or shining shoes. But that first impression—seeing those youngsters’ deep faith in Western schooling and their reflexive loyalty to impersonal authority—crisply captured how the modern state requires children to grow up. These sharp images from African classrooms accent the two basic questions explored in this book.

The first question is: What forces have historically pushed the relentless spread of Western schooling worldwide? Since the sixteenth-century Reformation, political leaders and commercial elites, in capitals and villages alike, have preached the virtues of formal schooling. The liberal state of the nineteenth century, emerging from revolutions in North America and France, intensified the fight over who should control how children grow up.¹ Since World War II, civic elites have convinced parents that being “modern” requires sending your child to the secular school.² Getting ahead requires more school credentials, even “life-long learning” in formal institutions. Preschools and child care must be expanded to serve young children and infants as parents intensify their own individual pursuit of economic security, status, and personal expression.

The Western state, for two centuries now, has turned reflexively to the school to address a variety of social maladies. No other institution within the secular civic sphere has gained the intense faith now held in mass schooling. The medicinal magic of schooling is applied to a variety of public troubles—whether “the national problem” is defined as lack of economic competitiveness, lack of moral character, incorporating minority groups into the mainstream, or getting kids away from drugs or into more rational sex.³

Fragile States, Frustrations of Faith

The state—simply one bounded institution—is not the sole force pushing the explosive growth of mass schooling. The Western polity’s now sacred commitment to socializing our children in modern bureaucratic schools stems from historical demands of several institutions: churches that hoped to boost literacy and comprehension of the Bible; modest shop owners and traders who still link schooling to modern skills and status; larger firms and industrialists who prefer literate workers; and parents who have come to associate formal schooling and literacy with economic opportunity. We will look at the state’s efficacy within this context of competing institutions, each advancing particularistic ideals and material agendas.

This book does focus on the Western state, especially how its motivations, methods, and influence come to life within Third World societies. 1 am most curious about how political actors in fragile states, or aging states sailing on turbulent seas, reach out to the school institution to advance their own legitimacy. Unsteady states, pushing the liberal bundle of symbols inherent within mass schooling, often confront sharp counter forces: parents who demand their children’s labor at home, in the fields, or in the streets to help eke out a cash income; village leaders who resist government schools and the associated subversion of traditional authority; conservative elites who hope to contain expectations of mass opportunity; churches that seek to retain their control over the socialization of children; and small-scale employers who demand the low-cost labor of children and youth.

The fragile state can ill-afford to ignore these resisting groups. Overly aggressive pursuit of liberal ideals, expressed in part through mass schooling, often alienates conservative forces and shatters the already brittle state. But in order to look modern and to signal mass opportunity the Third World state must express faith in, and materially expand, schooling. Thus, most fragile states pursue a rather rocky romance with the school. My view of the state—particularly its fragility within uncertain institutional environments and its expressive use of the school—also pertains to more mature states within Europe or North America. Illustrative similarities with more stable states will be drawn.

Contradictions Facing the State

Third World states face the deep popular expectation that mass schooling connotes the spread of mass opportunity. Indeed, since World War II newly independent nations have invested enormous resources in secular schooling. The capacity of post-colonial governments to put up schools has been phenomenal. The proportion of children attending primary school in developing countries has doubled in the past three decades, rising from 35 percent in 1950, to 75 percent in 1990. Today 120 million more children are enrolled in primary school than were attending just a decade ago (now totaling 500 million). In Africa, the number of children attending school continues to grow at 5 percent a year, far surpassing population growth and despite only slight economic growth.⁴

Brittle Third World states, already overtaxed and suffering from shaky political and economic foundations, have invested heavily in Westem-style schools. Rapid construction of more schools, as detailed below, serves a variety of state interests: reducing barriers among tribes that speak different languages, encouraging economic integration and entry to the wage economy, building individual loyalty to the nation-state rather than to tribal or religious authority, and (allegedly) boosting economic productivity and growth.

Most Third World states have sparked enormous popular demand for schooling, as political elites earnestly try to signal modern institutions and forms of opportunity. But the state’s resources have not kept pace with growth in child populations and enrollment rates. As economic growth has levelled-off or dissolved, eroding government resources are being spread over more and more students. Already minimal levels of educational quality are declining even further. In many countries rapid post-colonial expansion of the civil service and the wage sector is proving unsustainable. Teacher paychecks appear months late; rising foreign debt brings government cutbacks; private capital dries up; streets, civic buildings, and brick classrooms are literally crumbling. As parents see the wage sector collapsing and fail to see teachers showing up at school (until they are paid), absolute enrollments are falling, for the first time, in several countries. Already fragile states must redouble their struggle to maintain quality and deepen the effects of mass schooling, even revert to rekindling popular demand for mass schooling.⁵

Despite the severity and urgency of these issues, policy-makers and local activists know little about the state’s discrete influence in quickening (or slowing) the rate of school expansion. Enormous expectations are held for the modern state’s capacity to expand schooling and provide minimal levels of literacy. Frustrations over the state’s actual efficacy are equally great. This book argues that we must think more carefully about the antecedents that push the state’s faithful romance with the school, and about the forms of state action that are more (or less) effective in expanding and improving mass schooling. Empirical evidence is accumulating on the state’s influence, much of which I will review.

Deepening the Faith

Beyond the imperative to expand mass education, the Western state (whether fragile or stable) also struggles to deepen the school’s effect on children. In the Third World, the contemporary issue is defined as “declining educational quality.” Similarly, in Europe and North America the recurring issue has been the balance between expanding access to schooling (for all ethnic groups and social classes) versus advancing educational quality. Contemporary political leaders and educators in the United States speak of raising “school effectiveness.”⁶

I frame the state’s involvement with school improvement in a more explicit way by asking: How efficacious is the state in creating, then reinforcing, bureaucratic rules and a rationalized moral order within the classroom? This is the second major issue addressed in this book. The question speaks to whether, and under what conditions, centralized political elites can deepen the effects of schooling, reshaping the consciousness and social rules that children come to abide by.⁷ The bureaucratic tightening of what is taught, and how, is not necessarily the only way by which the central state might attempt to improve educational quality or pupil achievement. It is, however, the most common strategy—whether we look at recurrent “progressive” school reform in the United States or post-colonial schools in the Third World.⁸

The dramatic construction of more and more schools demonstrates the modern state’s ample legitimacy in displacing traditional means of child socialization. This event does not necessarily mean that the state is effective in transforming the teacher’s daily practices or the classroom’s social rules. Prior theorists claim that their models validly explain the forces which drive the expansion and deepening of the Western school, failing to see that antecedent processes and actual effects may be quite different for each outcome. The state has long tried to implement hierarchical forms of authority and social rules within the school, first mimicking the structure of fifteenth-century Catholic administration, then drawing from the magic and legitimacy of nineteenth-century industrial factories.⁹ But has this mimickry of “modern administration” actually influenced the behavior and motivation of teachers, or the performance of students? We will look inside Third World schools and classrooms to see how (and when) the state actually touches the rules and moral order which pattern how children grow up.

Why does the Western state, and political actors within, so vehemently push to expand, and alter the quality of, schooling? How do government activists exercise their ideals, resources, and regulatory controls? And what actual effects result from this tireless action by the state? These are the central questions that we will explore throughout this book.

Energizing the State’s Pursuit of Sacred Rules and Sacred Knowledge

I argue that the state, quite often, is not effective in deepening the school’s effects. This recurring frustration then spurs the state to redouble efforts aimed at shaping the behavior of teachers and children. In plural polities the school faces great difficulty in socializing low-status minorities (or non-modern tribes) to accept mainstream behaviors and rules of achievement. Black American youths, for instance, often remain loyal to the rules of membership reproduced in their own peer or ethnic circles. Concern in the United States over recurring declines in test scores, despite expanding school expenditures, is another example of the state’s limited capacity to actually deepen the school’s effects. This can threaten the state or particular governments, for Western-looking political elites must display competence in harmonizing plural beliefs and behavior into a common moral order.

Overall, the school’s capacity to impress a common moral order is quite impressive. Anthropologist Robert Everhart, for instance, recently examined the meanings that children associate with the words “work” and “play” when they are at school. He found that children define “work” as activities guided and enforced by the teacher, whereas classroom tasks initiated or elaborated by the student were viewed as enjoyable “play.” This is a powerful instance in which the school unobtrusively assigns certain meaning to an authority relationship (between teacher and pupil) and to individual action. This particular meaning of “work” is not questioned; in fact it is legitimated and institutionalized by the school. This is a moral lesson, what Emile Durkheim would call a “sacred (undoubted) social fact.” No particular bit of knowledge is being taught explicitly. Mass schooling quietly communicates to the child a moral order and classification scheme, the understanding of which is critical if the child is to grasp the meaning of “work” in adult organizations.¹⁰

In the Third World, a major educational issue is whether schools have any lasting impact on the literacy, behavior, and beliefs of youth. As schools pop up in rural villages and urban shanty towns, the state signals modernity and opportunity. But the school’s actual effects—boosting literacy, encouraging innovative farming practices, changing health or sexual practices—often are disappointing. In much of the Third World, half of all children do not even complete primary school, greatly limiting intended social and economic effects. Traditional forms of socialization and immediate labor demands placed on children, as well as conventional roles and behavior, swamp the state’s earnest attempt to have children grow up modern.

The state’s recurring impotence prompts political and educational leaders to redouble their efforts aimed at expanding the school’s presence and deepening its impact on children. Ever since the modern state successfully wrestled child socialization into the civic sphere, political leaders have worried about educational quality. Technical remedies are commonly mounted by the state: pupil exams are standardized and given with greater frequency; teachers are evaluated more tightly; the curriculum is simplified to focus on easily-tested bits of knowledge.

Yet administrative remedies often run aground, due to their high cost or inability to touch the uncertain technical process of teaching and learning. Political elites, frustrated by the limited capacity of the state apparatus to control teachers’ local behavior, engage in symbolic action to at least encourage certain moral commitments and behavioral choices. So we see presidents of the United States talking about the need for more homework, as a signal that children must work harder. We see elites of all political colors arguing that teachers must demand higher student performance if the nation is to become more competitive economically. And we see Third World education ministers encouraging more instruction in math and computing, symbolizing how schooling must look more modern. Throughout the book we will explore the state’s means for attempting influence, including budgetary, administrative, and symbolic action.

Organization of the Book

Remaining portions of this chapter describe why, and how, the state vigorously pursues these parallel agendas: expanding and deepening mass schooling. These twin agendas present contradictions and complementarities for fragile, resource-poor states. In turn, contradictions and constraints push political elites to build interdependencies—with Western ideals and deep expectations of the state, with economic organizations, and with the local school institution. This leads me to a novel conception of the fragile state, one which departs from earlier functionalist and deterministic portrayals (based...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Preface
• 1 A Faithful Yet Rocky Romance Between State and School
• 2 What Drives the Expansion and Deepening of Mass Schooling?
• 3 Winding Up Schools: The State Constructs Teachers’ Roles and Tools
• 4 Strong States, Strong Teachers?
• 5 Choice, Community and the Teaching Craft
• Notes
• Index