Schooling and Work in the Democratic State
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Schooling and Work in the Democratic State

Martin Carnoy, Henry Levin

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Schooling and Work in the Democratic State

Martin Carnoy, Henry Levin

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About This Book

A new explanation of the relation between schooling and work in the democratic, advanced industrial state emerges from this study that rejects both traditional views and the more recent Marxian perspective. Traditional views consider schools as autonomous institutions that are able to pursue the goals of equality and social mobility irrespective of the inequalities of capitalist society; the Marxian perspective views schools as serving the role of producing wage-labor for capitalistic exploitation.

The authors suggest that the shortcomings of both views are rooted in the fact that they do not recognize the true functions of the democratic, capitalist state. The state is seen as an arena for struggle between forces pushing for egalitarian, democratic reforms and those seeking to use the resources of the state for private capital accumulation. Depending on which side has primacy at the moment, schools will reflect one set of goals over the other. However, victory is never complete, and the tide of battle has shifted back and forth historically.

The authors develop this theory through interpreting the dynamic relation between U.S. schools and the workplace. Based on this approach, they predict changes in both schooling and work as well as the forms that future conflicts between the contending forces are likely to take.

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1

Historical Traditions and a New Approach

Revolutionary America did not have a public school system open to all classes of people, or indeed an extensive system of any kind. An American’s opportunity to obtain formal schooling depended on where he lived and how much money he had. Even elementary education, if it was available at all, was rarely free. But the next century saw huge strides made, to the point where, by 1876, some 60 percent of school-age children (five to seventeen years old) were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools for an average school term of 132 days. By 1876, too, many of the states had passed compulsory attendance laws (U.S. Dep’t of HEW 1976: 178; Landes & Solomon 1972). By 1920 schooling was compulsory in nearly all the states; almost 80 percent of school-age children were enrolled; and the school term had increased to 162 days (U.S. Dep’t of HEW 1976: 178). By 1972 the enrollment figure was 90 percent, and the school year was 179 days long. Three-fourths of the country’s eighteen year olds were completing high school, and half of them were enrolling in postsecondary education (Cartter 1976: 50). In 1974 some 10,000,000 students were attending institutions of higher education, three times the number only 16 years earlier, in 1958 (U.S. Dep’t of HEW 1976: 187).
How was it possible that in less than two centuries formal schooling emerged from a relatively minor institution to one of such dominance in U.S. society? Why did such a development take place, and what were the forces that shaped it?
The establishment of schools in the nineteenth century was primarily a local undertaking rather than a broad and coordinated social movement; school systems were shaped entirely by local actors and their perceived needs, and were largely an extension of the family. The length of the school day and school year, the curriculum, staffing, and organization of schools, and their financing differed substantially from community to community. Schooling in Northeastern states such as New York and Massachusetts expanded rapidly between 1800 and 1830 (Kaestle & Vinovskis 1980). Many families wanted to see their children move up the social ladder, and even in revolutionary times education (along with wealth) was looked on as a prerequisite for political leadership and social rank. Also, the “more enlightened” and wealthier members of communities (whose children generally attended private academies) often supported local schools as civilizing institutions. “Left to themselves, the [common folk] were ignorant and vicious men who contaminated children of the better sort and disobeyed the laws, and endangered the state. But good schools would save the society, for even the poor were rational beings who might be guided rather than driven like beasts. Education would uphold law and order, and protect the government.” (Main 1965: 251.) Elsewhere, particularly in the South, the founding of local schools was much slower and more haphazard.
Even so, there were unifying themes that helped shape the communities’ decisions. Americans believed that education had something to do with social mobility and with civilizing the poor. Both themes had appeared often in the philosophies of eighteenth-century writers such as Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At the same time, economic reality influenced such perceptions. In the Northeast, industrial expansion and the rapid growth of commerce tended to confirm the belief that schooling led to the best of the new jobs. In the South, a production system based on slavery created a totally different perception of the efficacy of education. Although both regions were part of a thriving transatlantic economy, their different roles in that economy influenced the way their educational systems developed.
Industrialization played no small part in the expansion of education during the nineteenth century. In 1800 the typical American manufacturer was a master craftsman or miller, the typical employee a handicraft worker, and the typical plant a room or rooms in a craftsman’s home or a small building next to a waterwheel. By 1880 the manufacturer was likely to be a factory owner or manager, the employee a machine operator, and the plant an imposing multistoried brick or stone structure equipped to run on steam. Although most people still lived in rural areas, cities sprang up around industries and commerce, inhabited by the illiterate peasants who emigrated in massive numbers from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe to become the principal source of cheap labor for the new industries.
Such a profound change in the nature of work roles and the way people lived was bound to have an effect on schooling. As work shifted from the home and the workshop in small communities to factories in cities or mill towns, the family or family-oriented community school became an inappropriate instrument for socializing the young to the new economic realities of American life. Schooling retained its perceived role for some groups as the path to social mobility and as a civilizing force. By the late nineteenth century the urban poor were not only a significant segment of the population, but also the country’s industrial labor base. The earlier lack of uniformity in the provision and form of education gave way to schooling that was increasingly influenced by the organization of industrial production and increasingly the concern of professional educators and state bureaucracies. These professionals turned their attention primarily to controlling the education of the urban poor, attempting to use schooling as a means of civilizing them into a new industrial society (Bowles & Gintis 1976).
The Massachusetts Common School Reform, a program developed by Horace Mann in 1837, became a model later in the nineteenth century for other states. It established a unified and purposive pattern of schooling for all children under the direction of a state board of education. Important internal changes took place: schools became graded by age, and curriculum, textbooks, teacher preparation, and educational proficiency were standardized. But even so, Mann and his disciples had to persuade communities to adopt these reforms, and the communities retained at least some—and often a great deal of—power over school policies.
It was not until the end of the century, after an already enormous expansion of schooling throughout the country, that businessmen and professional educators organized themselves to take control of school boards in cities and began running schools according to modern business practices (Tyack 1974). By 1916, though businessmen and professionals represented less than 11 percent of the nonagricultural labor force, they accounted for almost 80 percent of the school board members in a sample of 104 cities (Bowles & Gintis 1976: 190). Under their guidance, the schools moved away from the concept of a uniform curriculum by initiating vocational curricula, particularly for children from working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Using standardized tests and vocational counseling, schools assigned students to different tracks and ability groups and to different curricula (Spring 1972). These assignments determined their occupational preparation and the level of schooling it required. Instead of the common school experience for all children that Mann had visualized, public education tended to prepare the children of workers and immigrants for one set of occupations in the work hierarchy and the children of professionals and managers for other, higher positions.
This approach to the schooling of the urban poor was reinforced by the method of financing education that was established by the early part of the twentieth century (Coons, Clune & Sugarman 1970). By relying on local property owners and guaranteeing only minimum financial support to any given district, the states established a systematic financial bias against the poor. Wealthier school districts spent five or more times as much per pupil as poorer districts. Racially segregated schools (with far less funds available to the black schools) were legitimated by an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Plessy v Ferguson) on public transportation (Kluger 1975).
These practices reflected the power of business leaders who had a new vision of the relationship between industry and the State (including State institutions such as public schools). Their ability to impose the doctrine of social efficiency on the schools in the name of increasing school efficiency created an educational system that was organized in the same way as the industrial workplace for which it was preparing workers. Even the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South in the 1880’s and the 1890’s (along with the concomitant segregation of schools) was part of a new alliance between the industrialists of the North and the old Southern landowning class (Carnoy 1974). Indeed, the class- and race-based school system, channeling youth into different curricula for different types of occupations, was organized in the historical context of intense struggles between big business on the one hand and militant labor unions and the Populist movement on the other (Kolko 1963). Part of the triumph of business was the standardized, tracked, “efficient” school that was segregated by class and race.
The democratic, participative dynamic continued even while schools responded increasingly to the new industrial order of American business. Horace Mann’s assumption that expansion and compulsory attendance would make for an egalitarian school system seems naive in the face of community social class differences. Yet schools did expand largely in response to social demand and with community financing throughout the nineteenth century. Industrialists had some direct influence over the expansion and the curricula of schools in this early period, but their influence increased significantly only at the end of the century. And the popular pressure for expansion did not end even then. Moreover, the concept of schools as creators of democratic values and ideals gained new life at the turn of the century in the form of the progressive education movement. This was a response to, and to this day remains in open conflict with, the cult of efficiency pushed by businessmen allied with vocational educators (Wirth 1972).
Just as the period 1880—1929 witnessed the emergence and consolidation of the political power of big business in America, the economic crisis of the 1930’s saw the decline of corporate power and the success of social movements in winning social reform, especially permanent State intervention in the economy (Skocpol 1981). Although business recovered much lost ground, to take a dominant position in the State again after the Second World War, the social gains of the 1930’s created new conditions of capitalist development, conditions that implied a partnership between capital and labor and entitlements for the poor, the aged, and the unemployed. The equality that characterized American society in the war years also had its impact on education in the postwar period. By the 1950’s profound changes had begun to occur: there was a growing demand for the protection of freedom of expression in the schools, for more even-handed educational funding, for special consideration of disadvantaged, handicapped, and bilingual students, for school desegregation, and for the elimination of biases in curriculum counseling against female students. The parallel movements for reform in the workplace did not go so far or have as much success as the educational ones.
Freedom of expression for teachers and students was not an important issue in the nineteenth century. In keeping with the idea that schools were an extension of the family, teachers were expected to reflect the values of the community in both their public and their private lives. They were summarily dismissed by school administrators for not meeting community standards or for controversial behavior.
With the bureaucratization of the schools, national political issues came to have no less an impact on teachers than on the community at large. The “red scare” of the 1920’s cost many of them their jobs as business-promoted anti-Communism cast its shadow on the schools. The National Education Association responded with a fight for tenure protection, which eventually resulted in legislation in 32 states protecting teachers from dismissal without just cause (Wesley 1957). Over time, the courts came to assert the teachers’ right to free expression as long as this did not interfere with their duties (D. Rubin 1972). And in the landmark Pickering case of 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that teachers have the right to discuss school policy without fear of dismissal. Students also gained the right to express themselves freely on the grounds that their entitlement to a public education could not be taken away arbitrarily (Kemerer & Deutsch 1979). The Supreme Court’s Tinker decision (1969) specified that students have the right to due process in cases of dismissal and the right to free expression except where it is educationally disruptive.
These freedoms have no parallel in large parts of the private-sector workplace. Nonunion workers especially are unprotected against arbitrary dismissal for their political views or for virtually any other matter whether job-related or not. The difference, we believe, is that schools are public institutions. Those who work in such institutions have citizens’ rights—rights that are much more limited in private institutions. As the State expands its activities, workers’ rights are automatically increased because of the public nature of the State. This difference between public and private has shifted much of the conflict for greater rights to the State, and this has tended to expand State involvement in people’s lives. Whereas conservative political philosophy regards this increased involvement as coming from a bureaucracy intent on restricting the natural freedoms inherent in the market (the private sector), the growth of the public sector seems to have developed largely in response to demands for services and guarantees not available from the free market. The expansion of schooling and the extension of free speech protection to the schools are simply part of the State’s response to such demands.
Educational finance shows a similar pattern of development. During the years of great school expansion there was little concern that financing schools on the basis of local property taxes would create disparities in the quantity and quality of education received by the children of different districts. And as we have seen, the disparities were great, even within large city school districts, where less was spent on schools enrolling students from lower-income and minority backgrounds (Owen 1972; Sexton 1961).
It was not until the 1960’s that court challenges and public policies addressed this problem—a clamor for reform that soon moved from the national to the state level (Wise 1968; Coons, Clune & Sugarman 1970). The California Supreme Court’s 1971 Serrano decision was followed by decisions in other state courts, all declaring the unconstitutionality of financing education based on the wealth of local districts. State legislatures responded by creating new financing schemes that shifted much of the burden to state treasuries and more fully equalized spending among school districts. Simultaneously, federal compensatory education funding under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and political movements in large cities, went far in reducing the inequalities within large city districts. This period also saw an intensification of governmental assistance for low-income, handicapped, and bilingual pupils, reflecting the vigorous movement toward the equalization and democratization of educational opportunities during the Great Society years. A number of federal and state programs were established to improve the chances for classroom success of students who would normally have learning handicaps. The somewhat later emphasis on educational equity by gender, both in socializing girls in school and in affirmative action for university admission and jobs, was a response to yet another subordinate group’s demand for equal treatment through State action. Indeed, as things now stand, the educational system is not only more susceptible to such demands, it is likely to be the most equal institution encountered by the majority of people during their lifetimes.
Education is therefore subject to tension between two conflicting dynamics attempting to influence the control, purpose, and operation of the schools. On the one hand, schools have traditionally reproduced the unequal, hierarchical relations of the nuclear family and capitalist workplace; on the other, they have represented the expansion of economic opportunity for subordinate groups and the extension of basic human rights. Both forces have been evident throughout the history of public education in the United States, but the ebb and flow of social movements has led to one gaining temporary primacy and greater visibility over the other. For example, the democratic and egalitarian movement of the mid-nineteenth century, which attempted to establish schools for the entire population on the basis of a common set of principles, compulsory attendance laws, community funding, and lay control, gave way at the turn of the century to a movement to professionalize, centralize, and bureaucratize the schools, bringing them into line with the emerging labor needs and disciplinary methods of industrial monopoly capitalism. Then with the Great Depression, the weakening of big business, and the resurgence of strong social movements during the 1930’s and 1940’s schools again became an arena for extending equalization and democratization. The results in the subsequent decades were a greater protection of individual rights and pursuit of egalitarian aims, which undermined many features of the school-workplace correspondence.
The late 1970’s and early 1980’s witnessed another swing of the pendulum, with the rise of forces trying to bring education into line with the political objectives, labor needs, and social vision of business. Demands for greater selectivity, a back-to-basics approach, career education, and recurrent education, as well as support for tuition tax credits and other private alternatives to public schools, became important components of educational debate and practice. These trends were reinforced by cuts in educational support for the disadvantaged, handicapped, bilingual, and female populations, by the increasing reluctance of federal authorities to enforce school desegregation, and by limitations on loans and grants for low- and middle-income students. These reductions in federal spending were clearly aimed at the elimination of programs that tend to equalize social opportunities for the less fortunate or those traditionally discriminated against. Thus, we entered a new period in which the State began to try to roll back the gains in social mobility and entitlements won during the previous 50 years and to bring the educational system into correspondence with the realities of family resources and the marketplace.
How have educational thinkers accounted for this historical development of schooling, especially as it relates to work? In the rest of this chapter we analyze the interpretative perspectives mentioned in the Introduction—the progressive, functionalist, and critical progressive views of education and work. At the end of the chapter, we develop our own critical interpretation, showing how it builds on and differs from its predecessors.

The Progressive Education View

The progressive view assumes that education is a moral undertaking to shape young minds so that they can create a future society organized along the principles initiated by their schooling experience (Childs 1939). To John Dewey this moral undertaking was a process in which there would be a close integration between the realization of individual potential and the sharing of common experiences, common interests, and common aims based on an intrinsically worthwhile and democratic educational process. For “if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for development of distinctive capacities be afforded all” (Dewey 1966: 122). Education was to be a “process of living and not a preparation for future living,” where “the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought” (Kilpatrick 1939: 462-63).
Central to Dewey’s concern was that schooling should be valued in its own right. He rejected the id...

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