Читать книгу The Education Apocalypse - Glenn Harlan Reynolds - Страница 8
ОглавлениеFROM THE 1ST CENTURY AND BEFORE TO THE 21ST
It all started a long time ago. Although today’s schools – both K-12 and universities – spend a lot of time talking about the future, their models are based on the past. To be exact, American education at both levels is largely based on models imported from Germany in the 19th century, models that served 19th century purposes well but that may be poorly adapted to the needs of the 21st. It is becoming steadily more obvious that those models are beginning to fail and that we will need new models for the future.
At one time, of course, those 19th century models seemed modern themselves. And, in fact, they represented huge progress in their day. But they represented a major departure from the previous entirety of human history, and it may be that the industrial model they represented was a temporary detour. For most of human history, after all, education wasn’t a product but a process, a part of everyday living.
LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES
From the caveman era to classical times, formal education was largely unknown. Children weren’t sent off to school but instead spent their time around adults, watching them go about the business of the day, being pressed into service as helpers, and learning by osmosis or through one-on-one instruction. The most dangerous activities – say, hunting mammoths – were adult-only, but kids grew up quickly and were soon part of the adult world. That modern creature, the teenager, did not exist: people in their teens were mostly adults.
A few specialists – shamans or flint-knappers – might have had apprentices, but the instruction was still one on one and hands-on. There weren’t books, because there wasn’t writing yet. There weren’t schools, because there weren’t subjects to be taught that favored lecturers standing in front of groups of students all learning the same thing.
Over time, with the invention of writing and with the growth of kingdoms, empires, and – perhaps most significant – organized religion, on-the-job training ceased to be the only way to learn. Written language meant that some people (though a minority, usually) needed to know how to read and write, something better taught in sit-down sessions. Wealthy families (and sometimes middle-class families) hired tutors to impart at least the basics of literacy, arithmetic, and culture. Later, eminent scholars would gather pupils around for advanced lessons in philosophy and other subjects, forming the seeds of what would later become higher education.
But even as late as the 18th century, most people had little or no formal classroom education; even the rich often learned their letters at home, and although there were colleges and universities throughout the Western world, they were largely finishing schools for the elites and training centers for ecclesiastics. In the rest of the world, education was still an informal process.1
STANDARDIZED PARTS AND MASS PRODUCTION
Thus, for thousands of years, education was more or less the same. Then came the Industrial Revolution, and suddenly, the old way didn’t work well enough. Society needed educated workers in vastly greater numbers, and it needed them to be educated in particular ways. It was time for something different, for education based on an industrial model.
The Industrial Revolution was marked by two things: specialization and economies of scale. With these two came a third: standardization. The result was a vast increase in productive capacity, making people richer and healthier. A lot richer and healthier. In his book, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100,2 historian Robert Fogel notes that the improvement in living conditions for the working classes in industrial countries during the Industrial Revolution is without any parallel in human history. Life expectancies got much longer (from 32 in 1725 to 76 in 1990 in the U.K.);3 people grew taller and were sick less often, with much better nutrition. The poor of today are much better off in most ways than the aristocrats of the pre-industrial era. But there were costs.
Along with increased health and wealth, industrialization created a lot of social strain as traditional ways of living were disrupted by new ways of doing business. William Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills” weren’t as bad as they’re remembered today – if they had been, people wouldn’t have flocked to them. Or maybe it’s fairer to say that, bad as they were, they were still better than life as a subsistence farmer, where backbreaking labor got you all you could eat in a good year, but where the same backbreaking labor could leave you starving in a bad one anyway. But this new industrial world was very different from life on the farm.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most skills were hands-on skills, or at least skills readily learned one on one. In a small-scale workplace, there was more flexibility about how things got done. Blacksmiths often had their own individual techniques, and it didn’t matter much because blacksmithing was pretty much a one-man job, with perhaps some help from an apprentice or two. (It’s not easy, either: in high school, I took an interest in it, and with a couple of friends we put together suits of Roman armor – a lorica segmentata each – that we hand-riveted and assembled. I then read some books on what was involved in real blacksmithing and quailed.) A blacksmith who was out late the night before could start a bit later the next morning, or skip lunch, or take a day off to go fishing, or just spend extra time on a piece if he thought it was worthwhile.
If you wanted a hundred times more blacksmithing output than a single blacksmith could produce, you had to get 99 more blacksmiths to do it. And each of them would still be working more or less on his own. With no division of labor or mass production, there was no economy of scale.
This single-laborer practice changed with the Industrial Revolution, as clearly explained by Adam Smith in his famous description of a pin factory from The Wealth of Nations:
A workman not educated to this business . . . could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in one day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper. . . . Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. . . . But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations. 4
Division of labor allowed large groups to be organized in ways that were actually more efficient than smaller groups or collections of individuals acting independently. Big machinery allowed big jobs to be done, but because the machinery itself was big, it could only do big jobs efficiently. When the smallest efficient steam engine is big enough to power a whole factory, it doesn’t make sense to use it for anything less: the cost is the same, but the return is smaller. Thus the “minimum efficient scale” turns out to be pretty big. And lots of capital and lots of time and energy are required to fuel these big operations.
So no more blacksmiths under spreading chestnut trees. The price for the efficiency gains in Smith’s pin factory was that the workers couldn’t operate “separately and independently.” Each had to do his assigned piece of the operation predictably, consistently, and in coordination with the others. Big factories full of workers had to operate the same way: when it takes a huge steam engine to power the factory, everyone needs to be at his (or her) machine when the steam engine starts up, and they need to stay there consistently until it shuts down again. Otherwise, its output is wasted.
With jobs broken up into various small, repetitive tasks, as Smith describes, workers have to be patient (because it’s boring), reliable (because one task depends on another), and good at following instructions (because the tasks often don’t make obvious intuitive sense). And while factory work wasn’t rocket science, it required kinds of knowledge – basic literacy, arithmetic, and measuring skills – that subsistence farming and other basic trades did not.
Some of these skills – measuring, for example – could be taught on the shop floor. But reading and writing and arithmetic, even at crude levels, were hard to teach among the whirring machines. And the even more important skills of punctuality, orderliness, and precise attention to directions were harder still.
Military organizations had been teaching these kinds of skills for a while, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that the educational approach aimed at teaching them to future workers came from those devotees of martial orderliness, the Prussians. It was an approach that was explicitly aimed at producing punctual, obedient factory workers; orderly citizens; and loyal soldiers.
In 19th century America, the Prussians had a good reputation. Americans traveled to Europe to look at their schools, and they brought back a system of education modeled on 19th century Germany. This was despite the fact that U.S. literacy rates were already extremely high under the decentralized education system then in existence:
Haphazard and locally controlled as this educational “system” was, Americans were amazingly literate. Newspapers were the major forum for communication during the Revolutionary period. With dizzying speed, they mobilized the nation against the Stamp Act, the Navigation Acts, and actions taken by the royally appointed colonial governors. During the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sold 100,000 copies, and it is thought that 25 percent of the white adult population read the book. A study of a Vermont county at the time of the American Revolution found “almost universal male signature literacy,” with the rate of female literacy ranging from “60 percent to 90 percent,” depending on the locality’s level of commercial development. 5
Nonetheless, American thought leaders looked to the Germans for a model of public education that better suited their sensibilities. One of the most enthusiastic and influential of these Americans was public education pioneer Horace Mann, then serving as the secretary of Massachusetts’ Board of Education. Mann admired the Prussian system:
Upon assuming his new responsibilities, Mann traveled to several European countries to inspect their school systems. Ignoring the locally controlled Scottish and English systems that had been the model for colonial schools, he made careful note of the skill with which the Prussians were using public schools to unify the German people. Centralized institutions, a state-directed curriculum, statistical information, and professional cadres were being mobilized to create a unified national spirit, a common language, and an identity that would transcend parochial loyalties. 6
On his return, Mann extolled the Prussian model in his seventh annual report. This met with some resistance, as critics accused him of wanting to establish a “Prussian-style tyranny” in the schools, arguing that the Prussian model was based on a presumption that the government was wiser than the citizenry, while in America the presumption was the reverse. There was considerable basis for this complaint. Prussian theorists regarded public education, and higher education as well, as an institution of “police” and a way of making students “useful as future tools,”7 – but Mann’s idea ultimately caught on for the most part. Mann wanted to remake society, and he wanted to start with children. In his turn of phrase, “Men are cast-iron, but children are wax.”8 Just as the Prussian model had as much to do with political and social ordering as with teaching and learning, so it was with Mann’s Americanized Prussian model.
This approach not only reflected Mann’s social views but also met the economic needs of the day. Thus, the traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell. Like machines in a factory, desks and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and students go on to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, the assignments are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of individual students.
This was quite a change from the traditional public school’s predecessor, the one-room schoolhouse, where students of different ages were mixed together and where assignments often varied even among students of the same age. A teacher in a one-room schoolhouse was like a blacksmith, doing the whole job in his or her own way. A teacher in a modern industrial-era school was like a factory worker, performing standardized operations on standardized parts. And the standardized parts – the students – were taught along the way how to fit into a larger machine.
Like the difference between artisanal blacksmithing and industrial metalwork, the modern school system provided far less scope for individuality on the part of both its producers and its products. But the trade-off was seen as worthwhile: the modern assembly-line approach, in both settings, produced more of what society wanted, and it did so at a lower cost. If standard parts are what you want, an assembly line is better than a blacksmith. (Interestingly, Horace Mann’s children were homeschooled.)9
Of course, the industrial approach had both upsides and downsides, and over time the ills of the industrial model also set in. Just as an assembly-line worker, in performing the same repetitive task over and over again, loses touch with the end product – and tends to focus on job descriptions over substance – so too did industrial-model teachers lose touch with the ultimate goal of producing an educated person. And with public employees, most notably teachers, becoming de facto or de jure unionized, public school systems began to suffer from the same kinds of labor and productivity problems that plagued industrial-era manufacturing concerns by the late 20th century – bloated pensions, reduced productivity, and the inability to fire incompetent employees. Quality suffered as a result. But despite wave after wave of “reform” efforts – all of which typically had the effect of putting more power into the hands of central offices and education professionals, at the expense of parents and localities – by the turn of the millennium, there was widespread sentiment that the traditional Mann model wasn’t working. The question, then, was what would come next.
* * *
FROM FINISHING SCHOOL TO PROFESSORS’ (AND ADMINISTRATORS’) PARADISE
In the higher education field, meanwhile, German ideas were also taking hold, though their implementation looked much different. Until the second half of the 19th century, American universities followed a traditional English model, being largely places for the education of preachers and the polishing of wealthy scions, with room for a few scholarly types as well. The model was not a notable success, and college enrollment actually shrank from 1850 to 1870. As Brown University’s president, Francis Wayland, remarked, “We have produced an article for which the demand is diminishing.”10 But after the Civil War, American higher education changed.
On the one hand, the Morrill Act – passed while the Civil War was still raging – provided land grants for schools that provided useful education (originally focusing on engineering, agriculture, and military science) to the masses. Further, the demands of the industrial model of K-12 education led to a need for teachers, which was met by the appearance of so-called Normal Schools – teachers’ colleges – that focused on such training.
On the other hand, American higher education was also very impressed with its German counterparts. (In addition, no doubt, American academics were impressed with the fact that the professoriate in Germany enjoyed considerably more prestige than did the professoriate in America.)11 The German model of a research university – focused on graduate education, original research, and scholarly education rather than on lecturing to undergraduates – appealed to many.
German universities stressed academic freedom and featured an innovation called the seminar, in which students and faculty interacted. This was a considerable departure from traditional lecture classes. American students visited German universities and returned home speaking highly of their experiences; American academics visited and found much to emulate.
By 1871, the first seminar in America was offered by Charles Kendall Adams at the University of Michigan, but this was soon copied widely.12 In 1876, Johns Hopkins University was founded in an explicit effort to import Germanic styles of higher education, and other schools on a similar model – Cornell, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Clark University (future home of Robert Goddard) – soon appeared.13
The German research-university model quickly caught on, and schools that initially resisted the change – like Yale and Princeton – soon realized that they’d have to go along or be left behind. In the academic world, scholarly research and the production of graduate students who would, in time, go on to teach at other institutions became the standard for success. Teaching undergraduates, the traditional role of colleges, was less significant. Colleges that focused on undergraduate teaching remained, but as colleges, they were seen as less prestigious than universities.
German-influenced Johns Hopkins set the tone, and its graduates carried the torch:
The foremost objective of Johns Hopkins was . . . to provide advanced instruction of a standard comparable to that being set in Germany. . . . Until 1890, graduate students outnumbered undergraduates by a wide margin, and the majority of Hopkins A.B.’s actually remained at the school for some graduate work. Hopkins consequently gave an impetus to American graduate education and did much to standardize the American Ph.D. at a credibly high level. Hopkins produced more Ph.D.’s during the 1870s and 1880s than Harvard and Yale combined. By the 1890s these made-in-America scholars were carrying the Hopkins spirit into all the major universities of the country. Graduate education entails research, however, and Hopkins far more than any other contemporary American university actively encouraged original investigations by its faculty. Here, too, the contribution of the university was something more than the sum of the works of its distinguished faculty. The scholars at Hopkins aggressively seized vanguard positions in their respective disciplines, particularly through the organization of scholarly journals. Five of the six original departments sponsored such journals, several of which became the central organ of their discipline. Other periodicals followed, wholly or partly lodged at the university. These publications in turn played an indispensable role in the emergence of academic disciplines. Perhaps most important, Johns Hopkins enlarged the range of possibilities in American higher education and by doing so also enlarged the consciousness of educators to include a concrete university research role. 14
Thus, by the turn of the 20th century, the model was set. The highest academic exemplar was the research university, producing published research and sending its graduates out to serve as faculty at other (even if lesser) institutions. And, of course, in this model the prolific professor with a stable of graduate students under his tutelage reigned supreme.
Indeed, the establishment of Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, et al., produced something new in American academia: Moneyball-style competition for faculty. As University of Michigan President James Angell commented in 1892, “Whereas formerly it was rather rare that a professor was called from one institution to another, now the custom is very general.”15 By called, of course, he meant enticed, usually with promises of salary increases and, even more important, support for research. When the University of Chicago opened, it lured away 15 top professors from Clark University alone, a blow from which Clark never fully recovered.16 As always happens in such competitive environments, this threat also pressured schools to preemptively spend more on existing faculty stars, lest they be “called” to another institution.
With this star system showing rewards not only in money but also in the real coin of the academic realm, prestige,17 even the land-grant schools and teachers’ colleges got into the act, over time pushing graduate education at the expense of undergraduate teaching and doing what they could to move up the prestige ladder: plenty of institutions that style themselves as universities today started out as teachers’ colleges.
This trend toward academic upward mobility accelerated when government money entered the picture in a big way. For a while, tendencies to de-emphasize undergraduate education were somewhat restrained by institutions’ need to bring in enough tuition money to keep the lights on. The boom in college enrollment helped, but the problem with financing research via tuition dollars is that the more students you bring in, the more students you have to teach – and teaching isn’t research. With federal research grants, which became widely available after World War II, tuition revenue wasn’t as important. And with federal student aid exploding in the last quarter of the 20th century, undergraduates became less sensitive about costs, which also helped universities pad their bottom lines.
Higher education in the late 20th century gradually became something of a bubble, in which prices – tuition – rose faster than their likely return in the form of graduates’ wages, something that has really come to a head since the onset of harder economic times. Indeed, talk of a “higher education bubble” has become common as unemployed graduates wonder how they will pay back massive student loans and as parents and prospective students begin to view the value of a college degree with increased skepticism.
All good things come to an end. The 19th century models of both “higher” and “lower” education were useful in their day, but this is no longer the 19th century. In the pages that follow, we will look at how we got into our current predicament, and at how we will, in the coming decades, get out of it.
