Education and the New Cult of Efficiency

Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business goals.

"The procedure for bringing about a more businesslike organization and operation of the schools was fairly well standardized from 1900 to 1925," Callahan argues in his opening chapter. "It consisted of making unfavorable comparisons between the schools and business enterprise, of applying business-industrial criteria (e.g., economy and efficiency) to education, and of suggesting that business and industrial practices be adopted by educators."

This move – the whole "factory model of education" thing – is often associated with the rise of scientific management, but as Callahan demonstrates, the transformation of schools began in the years before the 1909 publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor's book. No doubt, The Principles of Scientific Management would be wielded to reshape – to "engineer" – almost every aspect of society; and schools were a particular target for intervention, as they were decried by politicians, business leaders, and journalists alike as "crude, unscientific, and wasteful.” What was needed, they argued, was better management, both in and out of the classroom.

Management meant measurement, as Taylorism would dictate, and what emerged were all sorts of new, bureaucratic practices in schools: the recording of attendance, grades, test scores, and so on. Instruction, supplies, the layout of the classroom, drills – all this was to be standardized in order to control inputs and outputs, to reduce expenditure, to eliminate waste, and – ostensibly at least – “to increase quality of product, i.e., the pupil.” But teaching itself – the what and the how of it – really mattered only insofar as it was a line item in the school budget, something (someone) to be managed, work always to be done more cheaply.

What emerged in this Taylorist milieu was a new profession, the school administrator, whose interests were not pedagogical as much as financial. This is the “cult” Callahan refers to in his title – a group that believed unwaveringly in scientific management, despite there being very little “science” at all that supported its application to education (hell, even to the factory); a group whose values changed little, Callahan argued, over the course of the twentieth century and had in fact become more and more entrenched, shaping how education was even conceived. And there, efficiency remained – and remains -- the priority.

The whole development produced men who did not understand education or scholarship. Thus they could and did approach education in a businesslike, mechanical, organizational way. They saw nothing wrong with imposing impossible loads on high school teachers, because they were not students or scholars and did not understand the need for time for study and preparation. Their training had been superficial and they saw no need for depth or scholarship. These were men who in designing a college provided elaborate offices for the president and the dean and even elaborate student centers but who crammed six or eight professors in a single office and provided a library which would have been inadequate for a secondary school. ... They saw schools not as centers of learning but as enterprises which were functioning efficiently if the students went through without failing and received their diplomas on schedule and if the operations were handled economically.

One should view the history of education technology in the twentieth century alongside Callahan’s history of education, his history of school administration and scientific management. While there is a tendency to see ed-tech as a matter of instruction – as tools that reshape teaching (and learning) – these are often, more accurately, tools of management, or prescriptive technologies in Ursula Franklin’s framework. This is the learning management system, most obviously. But it is also the “productivity suite,” the software through which almost all school work (and thus all thinking) is assigned and accomplished, where students and teachers can be monitored and timed, surveilled and controlled.