What we accept as “education” through conventional schooling does great harm. This has been widely known for over fifty years – not just to the researchers who have failed to speak out, but to private citizens as well. Yet we continue to do nothing about it, not even to encourage the search for an alternative. We are all complicit in educational bad faith
When I began studying philosophy of education in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the work of two groups of people commanded particular attention – the radical critics of schooling and the analytic philosophers. The radical critics – writers such as Illich and Neil, Goodman, Reimer, Holt, Kozol, and Postman and Weingarten – revealed conventional schooling as deeply harmful to human beings.
Schools, they tended to argue, are not merely irrelevant to life’s most important values, they stifle imagination, creativity and native intelligence, twist healthy attitude and emotion and create a deadening conformity in the supposed “successes” of the schooling process, as well as in the “failures”. A popular image of the day represented schooling as an attempt to fit square pegs into round holes, though perhaps more ironic and depressing, in hindsight, was the image of the school as a factory, taking diverse raw materials and stamping or extruding them out as uniform products, perhaps as sausages.
Though the news was not good, for many people these popular writings were liberating. The confusion and unhappiness they had experienced in their schooling came to be explained, and they could recognise that much of their fumbling in their later lives was a consequence of being ill-equipped. Many were dismayed to see young minds shutting down as they watched the “progress” of their own children through school, and although the task of bringing about much needed change seemed daunting, still, there was some room for considerable optimism. The simple fact of recognising and naming the problems had to be significant in itself.
Once we saw what schooling was really doing to people – once everybody saw – the institutions and practice would just have to change. People would be unable to keep on doing the things they had been doing once they realised what they amounted to. Had theory been stronger, had the relationship between schooling and politics been studied more extensively, had social history – particularly the social history of ideas and ideology – been readily available intellectual tools, these people may have been much more awed by the scale and difficulty of the tasks of reform which they saw facing them, because history has shown that there is often considerable resistance to changing bad ideas.
But the discoveries seemed new, and though worried and dismayed, they were also enlightened by what they found. For many people, moreover, there appeared to be new and useful intellectual tools to help bring about much needed improvement.
The time of the radical critics was also the time of the emergence of analytic philosophy of education. The techniques used by its practitioners were a quick and effective reminder that educational discussion, policy-making and (hence), practice, were a swamp of vagueness, ambiguity and other forms of linguistic confusion. It seemed obvious that just getting clear about what we should be doing and why we should be doing it would effect such a transformation that the problems of the radical critics would dissolve. Schooling wasn’t doing what it should be. It was doing great harm. This was because we literally didn’t know what we were doing. Once we straightened out our concepts, and thereby our thinking, true progress would be inevitable.
This also was naive, of course, and for similar reasons. There was little appreciation at the time that the confusion, vagueness and ambiguity were anything but oversights and mistakes. Instead they were systematic, and held in place by powerful social forces and agendas. There was little awareness of the political, and insufficient social history of the evolution of controlling ideas in the real spheres where decisions were being made. The next two decades, however saw a vigorous pursuit of analysis to the necessary depth.
Beginning with the work of Michael F.D. Young and his colleagues, various critical sociologies swept educational thought in the ’70s ’80s. Initially, the emphasis was on the sociology of knowledge, and particularly on the role and importance of power – two matters that had not been identified by the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers as being relevant to their analyses. This was a fatal analytical and methodological flaw, and they were deservedly left behind. Phenomenology and hermeneutics were reborn. Marxian and neo-Marxian theorising emerged as significant forces in educational theory and analysis, and a substantial body of sophisticated feminist analysis also began to develop.
The diversity of positions that were arising threatened to turn educational theory into a babble of contending voices which swept away the apparent agreement and neutrality of the discussions of educational purposes that the analytic philosophers had begun to open up. It had briefly seemed as if we were beginning to understand what education should be trying to do, but this mission was abandoned in competing discussions about methodology, and about what was at fault in education, and how that fault came to be.
Nevertheless if the research failed to give us clear advice on what could be done effectively , and if it seemed to speak with a multitude of different voices, it is easy to discern a common conclusion, based on overwhelming evidence, despite the theoretical pluralism. All of the work served to refresh and substantiate the insights of the radical critics of schooling from the sixties and seventies about the systematic harmfulness of formal schooling.
It transformed these insights from important ideas that deserved to be taken seriously, into understandings that have been nailed down as firmly as we have a right to expect of any understandings in the social sciences. Going far beyond a recognition of the existence of harm as the overriding consequence of schooling, it analysed and displayed the harm, and it revealed its causes.
Where, in the 1960’s and 70’s we knew in our hearts and from so much anecdotal experience that the schools did not educate; since the 1970’s and ’80’s this has been known as a matter of scholarship for any who cared to read the enormous literature. It is clear, moreover, that we cannot really expect schools, under the institutional conditions that prevail in contemporary, world economic and political systems, to educate in more than name, except fortuitously, locally, and temporarily.
It is important to understand that the harm that has been revealed here is not some peripheral or incidental harm which flows as an unfortunate side-effect of an enterprise that is otherwise doing people a lot of good. It is the other way around. Many of us can recall things we learned at school which we would not want to be without. We are grateful, perhaps, for our enthusiasm for science, or poetry, or cricket, and we can’t imagine how we would cope without having learned to read. If it weren’t that such benefits were obvious to most people, schooling would probably be impossible to sustain (there are many, of course, who do not even receive benefits like these, but since schooling is linked to power, their voice is muted).
This is, however, only the small picture, and we have difficulty maintaining a perception of the whole, where the harm actually lies. It is harm that is built into the very purposes and meanings of the institutions, and is only occasionally and locally mitigated. The schools are there to reproduce various kinds of inhumanity that require substantial forms of social control in order to be maintained. The mission of schools, in practice, reflects the interests of power and its allegiances within the community at large. In our setting, the riverbed through which power flows is carved out by the prevailing form of capitalism.
The demands of capitalism settle the priorities of schooling, and other “educational” priorities as well. These demands include things like the maintenance of political order, and acceptance of the freedoms of commerce, the achievement of a consensus about the most significant distributable rewards, the reproduction of forms of labour necessary to the flourishing of the production of goods and services, and an acceptance that the linkage between the distribution of rewards and reproduction of labour is fair and just.
The schooling system sorts and sifts people and channels them into coordinated life-styles and conceptions of value compatible with economic interests. Because capitalism will exploit whatever the terrain is that exists, we can expect that preexisting injustices that have become firmly embedded, widely or locally, will be exploited and reinforced unless there is a decent buck to be made from turning them around, or unless they become a threat to the political stability that capitalist activity requires. Thus it will exploit and perpetuate racism and sexism where they exist, or exploit their reversal to the extent that there is political or economic advantage to be gained.
The schools are funded, resourced and encouraged according to the extent to which they can serve those purposes. They are to indoctrinate, and to prepare the ground for further indoctrination. They are to propagandise, and to prepare the ground for future propaganda. For the large bulk of people these purposes involve the diminution of insight and intelligence – the “dumbing (of) us down”, the stunting of our ability to see and appreciate the alternatives which might have been available to us, and of our ability to make choices for ourselves.
This is necessary because the preparation of the vast majority must be as compliant, even if grudging, employees who will define themselves in terms of paid employment, and who will accept personal responsibility for their own unemployment when larger conditions than any they can control create an oversupply of labour. Though some may fight their way clear – clear enough, at least to get a greater measure of freedom than most – this is despite the institutions, not because of them. Educational or indoctrinatory institutions are not perfect controllers of learning and experience. They cannot be. They do not need to be.
If the role of the schools in this process has been studied exhaustively throughout all those years, it has been understood for much longer. The harms of schooling processes have been explored in a variety of disciplines for several hundred years, and critique and analysis goes back several thousand, although rarely with the social sensitivity, with the energy, and on the scale that has occurred in more recent times. Given the existence of this knowledge, why do people persist in sending their children to school, and follow their progress with interest? Why do we continue to support this institution?
Part of the answer is that the fundamental nature of the critique, and the soundness of the evidence upon which it is based, is not widely known, and simply “making the evidence available” is not the same as making it known. People are resistant to the implications of the critique. We all have to make our peace in some way with our fellows and the cultural world within which we swim, or we die (a simple evolutionary matter). We are brought up to make our peace, and to see the making of that peace, in certain ways.
Once we make it, there is a lot invested in the decision. Wanting to ease the suffering of our children, we use our “knowledge” to help them find their own peace. We send them to school, and hope they do well. At best, we probably want them to have many good choices, and of course, many of the “best” choices available are often conditional on schooling – choices that open up access to groups otherwise closed, or that enable resources which might turn out to be of use in many highly regarded lives.
It is simply true that a marginalised life is much harder than a mainstream life. The institutions and their operations weren’t designed for the marginalised. If our children are to live a marginalised life, we, for our part, are likely to prefer that they live it by choice rather than necessity. We don’t see that we have any alternative. This, if we recognise the issue at all. Most don’t.
It is important to see how deeply we are implicated. If we conduct our lives in institutions at all – as we must – we are implicated in whatever injustices they may happen to perpetuate. All of our institutions probably incorporate injustices of various kinds. Since we have no choice but to be involved with many of them, we are necessarily implicated in the injustices, but since we have no choice, the most that can be expected of us is that we stand against these injustices when they impinge upon us locally as we go about our business, without that interfering too much in that business.
Schooling, however, is not just an institution that incorporates injustice. It is set up to diminish people; to manipulate their lives beyond what is morally legitimate. People can choose or refuse to be teachers or researchers much more freely than anyone can choose to use electricity, or buy food and clothing. We are therefore much more profoundly, and less excusably, implicated.
To avoid recognising the depth of our hypocrisy, we must engage in various forms of self- deception. One way is to ignore the evidence, or to maintain our ignorance it. Most teachers, and the wider public are in this position; dismissing the research as of no interest, or as wrong, without engaging with it enough to do so reasonably .
The second strategy, which is probably used by most who are aware of the truth, is to magnify the significance of the local. The main source of intrinsic motivation for teachers seems to lie in the achievements of the individual students with which they deal. It is a common wisdom that the light of understanding in a student’s eyes, or the overcoming of some significant obstacle, is sufficient reward to balance other disappointments, or even the abuse that one may suffer, in the course of one’s teaching. We cannot change the big things, but if we can make a positive difference in the lives of one or two people, then perhaps our efforts will be justified.
This is a powerful rationalisation. I have sought peace in it myself, although it has never had the power to redeem, let alone justify, that most teachers find in it. Its power is derived from the concreteness and tangibility of the actual lives with which we deal. In comparison to those shining eyes, any amount of evidence of the harm of the enterprise seems irrelevant. Surely we did some good here! Clearly we did some good here!
I have never heard anyone suggest that six pairs of eyes, shining with understanding and appreciation, should console us for the one pair of eyes that are not. Invariably, however, we are told to take consolation in something that is not the typical experience – the one pair of shining eyes among the six. This should give us pause.
So should all those stories of the one great teacher who influenced us. The fact is that this one teacher stands out against a background, and the background tells us more about what the enterprise amounts to than what was uncharacteristic – this shining and memorable foreground.
The second point has to do with what those shining eyes and that sense of achievement are about. It is worth looking at the kinds of things that are considered achievements in practice, and what the merits are of the aims which are being pursued. At their best, these are impoverished.
Understood ideologically, the explicit aims mask real agendas which, on any serious examination, we would have to reject as not being the sorts of agendas we are entitled to have for other people. This diminishes the redeeming value of the shining eyes. It is useful to note that the sort of rationale most commonly used would be perfectly adequate for a slave State.
Suppose you were a slave charged with preparing young slaves for slavery – a "willing" slave, of course, perhaps feeling that you are a somewhat privileged slave, as you would be. Your satisfaction would be derived from your successes. You would be delighted by the enthusiastic gleam in the eyes of your pupils when they saw, and understood, what you wanted them to see and understand. You would use these cases to console yourself over your failures, and when you became dispirited over your dealings with recalcitrant pupils. You would remind yourself of those students you had taught who had become good slaves. This shows that the basic rationale which we are considering does not even begin to be a justification for teaching in such a system.
But perhaps we will not be willing slaves, and will attempt to subvert from within. Here we are likely to find even more recalcitrance, because students will find our conduct unpredictable, and we will correct behaviour which they have painstakingly spent years trying to acquire. We will violate their expectations, and for every pair of eyes that shine in recognition and appreciation of our aims there will be more than the usual resentment and indifference.
We are likely to be classified by a large number of colleagues, and our employers, as poor teachers, since what we count as success will not be what they count as success. In order to retain some effectiveness at all, we will make many small adjustments, until we achieve an approach that can cope and survive, and in doing so we will compromise our power to subvert. We may have some successes, but by and large we will contribute to the system – as a poor example of it, perhaps, but as a further representative of it nevertheless.
Our internal critiques will be seen as the bad faith they are, and the overriding message is that the structure within which we operate is a necessity of life with which we must all come to terms. In this way, on balance, our resistance will be acceptable, because our success rate will probably not exceed the failure rate of the system as a whole, and our large failure rate will be a part of the system’s success.
There are other satisfactions which teachers and student teachers often point to, of course. They enjoyed school, and want their pupils to enjoy school. They like children, and enjoy the pleasure of working with them. But our slave/teacher can enjoy these things too (as many slave/teachers have, of course). All kinds of harm can be done that are enjoyed at the time of doing them. None of these reasons justify our participation in the enterprise which has been described by the last twenty years of research.
Where is the voice of the researchers? They wrote for each other, and they taught. They knew on the evidence that schooling is wrong, and that their efforts to change it would be futile. They realised that they must limit their expectations of personal effectiveness. They attempted to represent a voice of quiet dissent, and to keep their knowledge alive. Perhaps this is all that can be asked of anyone in their situation.
Yet they tend, on balance, to cling to the illusion that schools can be improved, sharing, in a part of them the enthusiastic idealism of many novice teachers. They resist the idea of “giving up the ship”, and this is shown in their acceptance of an ambiguity in the word “education” which leads them to be widely misunderstood. They are likely to stress that what is commonly called “education” is not education at all, but they don’t decisively and consistently name it anything else – perhaps in fear that this would remove them from the discourse altogether.
It seems, therefore, that there is a specialist and a lay definition of “education”, and the specialist (as usual) is worried about the accuracy of the nomenclature, instead of relabelling the schooling system as the indoctrination system it is. And despite the overwhelming weight of the evidence, they convey the idea that they are on the same side as those dedicated to the purposes of the schooling system by giving the impression that it can be “fixed up” or “improved”. The community is impotent and its literature, for all practical purposes, largely dead.
But perhaps it is even worse than this, because one group of “theorists” read it, and utilised some of what they found to practical and substantial effect. By the 1980s, a considerable body of research already existed. Politically, as a partial result of transitions in global economic conditions, Western countries were moved to the right, with the Thatcherite governments in the U.K., and the Reaganite governments in the U.S. In New Zealand, the Labour party constituency was betrayed by the Labour government of the time, and “Rogernomics” was born.
The thinking of this shift was heavily influenced by what has been loosely termed the “New Right”, or Neo-conservatism, which attempted to regenerate “free market” thinking. Many of the economists and policy makers who were involved, particularly in New Zealand, were familiar with some of the literature critical of schooling and selectively drew on it to support their emerging policies.
Ideologically committed to placing responsibilities more in the hands of individuals and freeing up their productive energy and creativity, they opposed public welfare and the dependency it created. Happily, this coincided with policies designed to “deregulate” the economy. This was accompanied – in the UK and New Zealand at least, by a destruction of the power of the unions, a severe cutting back of the public sector workforce and the services they provided, and fierce layoffs in private sector employment in the search for greater dividends. In a country where private health insurance is still not an expectation, public health services have been run down and continue to move from crisis to crisis.
Top executive salaries and benefits exploded, to the mantra of "if you pay peanuts, all you get is monkeys". Meanwhile, wage increases for the general public were held stringently below the cost of living for decades. Predictably, the wealth of the middle class was driven down, and the gap between rich and poor became extravagant.
The economic ideology was however, so deeply embedded (and intentionally so) that the bulk of the population have voted against their own interests for decades, and governments have been timid about their reversal – signature policies have continued to be tax reduction, as if this has done anything in all these years to return wealth to the bulk of the population. The most effective arguments against anything that might improve welfare or infrastructure continues to be the cry against "tax and spend".
It has also become more common to blame the worst off for their own suffering, and, in New Zealand at least, the unemployment costs have been hidden by increasing schooling, and kept down by creating a "stand-down" period before unemployment benefits can be drawn, which is hard for those who already live below the poverty line, even when employed. Still, we "must be competitive".
The neo-conservative economists who discovered the literature critical of conventional schooling, paid particular attention to the critiques of the meritocatic claims conventionally made in favour of it. These arguments had addressed the fairness with which schools contributed to life chances, and could be read as having suggested that public efforts to manipulate schooling to increase justice had resulted in a significant “middle class” capture of resources. The new answer was to run the schooling industry along market lines, creating the so-called "level-playing fields" and allowing the benevolence of market forces to sort out life-chances and the problems of justice.
The massive, centralised schooling bureaucracy was to be dismantled and administrative authority was to be given to local parents through their local schools – within constraints set by government to create the uniformity that industry and commerce required. The fact that this would necessitate a large new bureaucracy, and that it moved heavy administrative workloads – particularly of "reporting" – down into the schools to compete with the already high demands of teaching, is now history.
All of this was carried out with a theoretical divorce between good decision-making and its educational requirements. Adult, rational decision-makers are taken for granted in this approach, and their rational ability is unproblematic. It does not have to develop, let alone require particular conditions for its development. It just "is". Thus educational decision-making was – at least at the ideological level, reduced to "consumer" "choice".
But rationality itself is educationally problematic. It is, in a fundamental way, why we educate. How adults reason (and how well they reason) depends upon how they have grown up. If adults are to make good decisions in particular areas, then they must be brought up under conditions which facilitate the growth of that sort of reasoning.
By divorcing the powers of decision-making from questions of upbringing and experience, it is possible just to have faith that parents will make wise educational decisions for their children, or about their own lives, regardless of the history of their experience at making them. The only point at which the divorce has not been made has been in the area of economic efficiency, and as a result, educational attention has been collapsed into this interest. Apparently the one area where people do need to be shaped up by some sort of "educational" enterprise, is in their roles as workers and consumers. Otherwise, in all other areas, their "native" wisdom is just taken for granted.
Where, in 1960 or 1970 it made sense to question publicly whether education was occurring or not, by the mid 1990’s such a question makes no public sense at all. The words can be used, but they simply signal a concern about whether people are being adequately prepared for the jobs we wish them to undertake. There is now no adequate place (except in the isolated domain of research in the social foundations of education) for seriously asking whether people are being adequately prepared to live their lives — except through becoming adequately employable.
“Life-skills” programmes are not an anomaly here. Essentially they focus on an ability to participate in financial institutions, to be good employees, and to be a minimal burden on taxation by, for instance, looking after their health. It isn’t about independent self-determination. It is what we teach them to do. Even a pretence at education has ceased to exist.
The reforms have been accompanied by a heavy emphasis on good management and accountability, and there has been much effort directed at rendering schooling problems amenable to “good management”. The New Zealand Qualifications Framework is a classic representative of such an attempt. It was to create a national accreditation system, and to be our partial reassurance that schools will not be captured entirely by their local communities. OECD measurements of educational success are conducted in terms of the percentages of the population holding various kinds of diplomas and certificates. By this measure, New Zealand had a relatively unskilled workforce.
Hence much reform has been aimed at increasing the levels and the spread of credentialling. Good management dictated that the outcomes of schooling processes be readily specifiable and measurable – to the degree that independent observers could certify that the outcomes had been met. The judgement of the experienced person on the spot and in the context was to be replaced, where possible, by measurement which was independently auditable. Knowledge across the whole world of the workplace was to be broken down into its specifiable and measurable components, thereby assuring that the content of schooling must firstly satisfy a model of management, rather than a model or desirable learning.
These units were then to be assembled into a “seamless” national system, containing some elements that were unique to the various vocations, and others that the vocations shared, and which could be assessed on a common scale, irrespective of institution. One should be able to acquire one’s “certificate” unit by unit, transporting as much of it as possible across institutions. This would ensure flexibility, and enhance industrial and commercial efficiency, since it would make for an “adaptable” workforce. The old educational bureaucracy could be replaced by State control of the outcomes, rather than by the management of the institutions themselves.
The idea that such a system would create flexibility turns out to be illusory, of course, as any scan of job vacancies quickly reveals. The first requirement is the appropriate certificate, or diploma, which means that highly specific training – and certification – has to be sought long before entering the job "market". Where non-vocational breadth in schooling and experience was once valued for for the flexibility and critical power that they were thought to suggest, those larger qualities have been lost to job specifics.
This “seamless” system is also to be life-long. As technologies evolve and the requirements of industry and commerce change, it is now expected that people will drop in and out of certification programmes throughout their working lives in order to “retool” themselves for new careers as their old ones disappear. This is not just because our lives will likely contain numerous shifts in direction, but because new certificates will be required for each shift – actual experience counting for little. And learners will pay for their "re-education", not only through taxation, but through an enduring student-loan scheme.
All of this appears to have much more to do with economic efficiency than it does with individual responsibility and freedom, but this is not noticed so readily if the divorce between rational choice and its educational requirements is maintained. If we can accept that all people, as adults, will be able to reason effectively about such things as politics, economics, education, careers and their own lives regardless of what we do about their learning, then freedom seems quite compatible with these demands of economic efficiency.
If, on the other hand, good reasoning about such things takes decades to develop, if it is developmental (so that long sequences of experience are important), if it involves broad cognitive structures (so that they cannot readily be broken down into measurable components), and if it requires assessment by experienced judges intimately involved in the processes, rather than by widely available and public forms of measurement, then it is an approach that will do deep harm to a free people.
It is questionable, of course, that the system does have industrial and economic efficiency as its driving purpose in quite the way that it is claimed. Firstly, the method of building a “seamless” system out of individual components places a priority on meeting the requirements of the management model rather than the needs of industry and commerce. If it should be quite obvious that the things that we must learn in order to live our own lives well can’t be driven through this sort of sieve; it is equally likely that many important requirements of commerce and industry won’t be amenable to it either.
Many positions, to be carried out effectively even in their own market terms, would require a breadth of insight, a continuity of development, and a level of judgement that cannot be met by such an approach. If we would seek real efficiencies in this regard, we would be better to place the control of education not in the hands of local groups of parents, and not in a centralised qualifications authority, but in the hands of the industries, professions and trades themselves.
Nevertheless, although there are isolated examples of this, there is no serious will to do so systematically. Schooling remains largely outside the direct control of the workplace, and under State control, even when the institutions are run as private enterprises. To be sure, if we handed schooling over to employers, trades and professions, then most employment groups would no doubt continue with schooling programmes, simply through cultural inertia.
Though better employees would be those better developed as people, rather than as sophisticated slaves, employers as a whole have a long way to go before they could grasp the importance of this. They are victims of these processes too, even if there are more enlightened figures within management who are groping towards a change. Managers themselves are often too well-schooled, and just as teachers tend to teach as they were taught, managers tend to manage as they were managed.
That is why a public system of education would continue to be needed, but it would need to be ordered by a properly educational purpose, with which vocational education would have to be reconciled (and not the other way around). From the standpoint of neo-conservative theory, however, this should be unnecessary, since learners are already (somehow, and quite remarkably) rational without educational provision, and their use of the free market should correct anything naughty that might be attempted within vocational preparation.
Adults whose educational rationality apparently needs no particular history would natively be able to tell the good from the bad, and any industry that promoted genuinely bad programmes would likely lose recruits. Where preparation for employment is concerned, the "user" is the workplace, and not the learner. Since learners are, on this view, inherently rational, and all they need to do is opt for the vocational stream they prefer, the only "education" they need is the knowledge and skill that the job will require. The ultimate test of the preparation lies there. The student’s task is to pass; not to decide whether what is taught is appropriate for the vocation.
It would therefore be more efficient if preparation was in the hands of those who are responsible for achieving productive efficiencies. It clearly would be more consistent for this user or stake-holder both to pay and control. Given the obvious willingness to embark on very radical reforms in the name of economic efficiencies, what could the interests of the State and its economic partners be that could possibly outweigh the efficiencies which such an approach would produce?
We should recall the research on the real agendas of schooling, and suspect that there are larger political and economic issues lurking in the background, and that they coalesce in the State. We should consider the probable connections between social control and the requirements of commerce and industry.
Schooling has worked to channel people into conceptions of life which serve the interests of power. It has served to create acquiescence in the political and economic system, and acceptance of one’s place in it. These new reforms shift the schooling system to a higher level of intensity in fulfilling such requirements. It doesn’t matter that there is a mismatch in detail between the programmes of the schooling system and the specific skills and knowledge that work requires. It doesn’t matter whether knowledge is distorted out of shape, and important knowledge neglected because it doesn’t fit.
What matters is that the population come to exhibit the traits of “good” workers and consumers; that they participate in the prevailing world of production and consumption, and that they accept the socio-economic order in which the schools participate. Since these are the agendas that are genuinely common and important across the “seamless” system, it doesn’t matter that more explicit curriculum is designed in such a way as to violate obvious principles of education and knowledge with which we have long been familiar.
Consider some of the differences between 1960 and 1990. Employment was relatively unproblematic in 1960 in the West. By the nineteen-eighties it had became very problematic. Where the New Zealand solution of the thirties was to introduce an extensive social welfare system, by the nineteen-eighties the thought of the welfare bill which would follow from high unemployment was intolerable.
In addition, idle hands always raise the spectre of political instability, crime and violence, even when people are on social welfare benefits. In the nineteen-nineties we began to build a system that would extend the effectiveness of schooling in just the ways that its effectiveness has traditionally really mattered. Instead of being idle, the unemployed will go back to school. They will be able to do so because their qualifications will move with them like a package, and they will be able cross back and forth wherever there seems to be a future for them.
Those who don’t attempt to “take advantage” of the system will find it much harder to avoid the opprobrium of being shiftless. Those who do “take advantage” of the life-long “education” system will get a repeated “re-education” in the agendas of schooling, including the agendas of the neo-conservative State, and hence will be even more likely to accept the way things are. Thus they will be mentally and emotionally buffered against the sorts of criticisms and initiatives that might have been a cause of political instability in the past.
The population will be in a good position to handle whatever technological and social changes might come their way. It will be cost-effective, because high OECD ratings will facilitate offshore investment in New Zealand. This will be consistent with neo-liberal thinking because employers, as “users” and "stake-holders" can be expected to make a more intimate contribution, because a competitive system will be more "efficient" than the old system, and because traditional unemployment “handouts” can be translated into student subsistence. If the metaphor of the school as a sausage factory was an expression of real dismay in the nineteen-sixties, those who used it would have looked with even greater horror on our achievements in the nineties, and since.
Of course this does not mean that we won’t complain about the system and the processes that we have to undergo. Employers will continue to criticise the schools for failing to meet their needs, and this will be useful. It will ensure that the system is kept consciously pointed in their direction, and that the emphasis on “good management” will be maintained.
Individually, many people will continue to “see through” the system, but the important thing is that they will participate themselves, and will continue to send their children into it. We will (as we do now), in fact take a certain amount of complaining as a sign that we are a free people. What is important to the success of the system, in the end, is not even as grand as our consent. It is simply that we submit.
The “what” of the programmes won’t matter nearly as much as the fact that we enter them at all. Once in, we need not even believe in them. We will learn what it is required of us to learn, simply as a result of our going through the motions – willingly or unwillingly. We will regard the world of paid employment and the demands it would make upon our lives as matters of necessity.
To the critical researchers of the last years of the Twentieth Century, the course taken by schooling since then should be a cause for depression, but not for surprise. In the absence of strong educational sentiments, and in the course of a restructuring of capitalism, what has happened is more or less what one should have been able to predict as a result of numerous studies of the forces that form schooling.
Nor should the future of schooling be difficult to predict. If you were a policy-maker, willingly or unwittingly pursuing the agendas that have proved traditional in schooling, what would you foresee as the possibilities of the emerging technologies? If there is one clear characteristic for all that enthusiasm for the role of TECH, or in "education", it is to make the processes of schooling and teaching more effective at what they currently attempt to do, and to do so more cheaply, and with less dependence on the human qualities and inclinations of teachers themselves. The larger educational possibilities of TECH have foundered into social media; texting, Facebook and Twitter, of which even teachers despair.
The schools, as they fit into our larger institutional ecosystem, are fundamentally harmful to human beings and are impervious to any adequate educational reform in the absence of serious attention to that ecosystem. Anyone with deep educational passions is caught in a dilemma. The ecosystem itself has the appearance to most people of being impervious to efforts to transform it. It is "the way things are". Efforts to transform schools, however, become assimilated back, in their turn, to the purposes that drive the ecosystem as a whole.
To the extent that they appeared to disclose quite overwhelming social forces at work, the researchers seem to have shown that persistent efforts to understand schools and to inform people about their real effects are futile exercises – though we do need to examine the extent to which they have attempted to make their knowledge known. At best they seem to offer reassurance that free inquiry exists, since they have been permitted to say unpalatable things, however ineffectually from within their structured invisibility. As practitioners, all of us appear to have shown that we either survive only briefly as practitioners with our educational idealism intact, or we adjust and persist, occasionally giving some individuals some additional power over their lives, but on the whole we are systematically reinforcing the harm. We are compromised. What can we to do?
This is partly an existential question. It goes to the heart of what we, as individuals, are to do with our lives. But it is also a practical one. It would be nice to be able to give a formula for a course of action that would enable us to make some positive impression on the educational scene. The most significant characteristic that seems apparent, however, is the degree of self-censorship, and cynicism about the possibility of making a real difference.
In democracies, significant social change seems to occur when a sufficient warmth about an issue is widespread and sustained over a long enough period of time. In the end it seems to have electoral significance, and all kinds of institutions begin to become responsive. It helps if economic benefits are discovered to go along with it. But here there seems to be no shred of a sense of this, nothing to galvanize any activity, even among those who should know better. It is as if our lives don’t matter; even to us.
The literature of the last thirty years has been accurate in showing us that the schools are inherently harmful. It has, however, been fatally flawed in two basic respects. The first of these is that it has, itself, participated in the systematic reduction of education to schooling. Once schooling has been found to be harmful, and incapable of serious internal educational reform, researchers have been unable to do doing anything but repeat the message endlessly, because they have been trapped within the predetermined boundaries of the school, rather than working within the educational domain itself. They do not appear to know that there is anywhere else to look, or anything significant to look at.
While researchers have been able to show how schooling fits within a larger ecology of institutions that does much to give it its form, they have failed to grasp that schooling is but one part of an ecology of educational or indoctrinational experience, and that properly influencing educational experience is a matter of properly influencing the ecology, and not merely a niche within it.
This reduction of education to schooling is ideological and profound. As an ideology, it is held far more strongly and unwittingly than anything which could be based on argument, or which could be modified by argument alone. It is a cast of mind, and it only changes as a consequence of courageous retraining, because there are strong, reductive social expectations to discourage us from changing.
In the educational professions there is an expectation that any educational idea, proposal or hypothesis should be illustrated or demonstrated in cases that are located in schooling or teaching, and there is strong informal censure for those who would do otherwise. Publicly, remarks about education that are independent of schooling are met with blank incomprehension, or immediately trivialised. We will never make real progress until we recognise the need for a profound “paradigm shift” that properly locates schooling as one among many institutions that have significant educational or indoctrinational effects. As a “paradigm shift”, it will only occur to the extent that professionals and lay people make a conscious effort to train themselves to new perceptions. Most of us will do this over issues that take hold with us.
The second fundamental flaw is that there has not been a vivid conception of what the purpose of education should be. This is also no doubt ideological as well. The explicit purposes of schooling, beyond job preparation, are vague and confused, but we do not expect more, simply because we take the institution of school for granted. If we were to suppose that the purposes we currently have are driven partly by illegitimate social purposes and partly by the technology itself – so that the purposes of “education” are, in fact, those that schools are felt best able to meet – then we might feel inclined to abandon a concern for schooling in the meantime and work out independently what we should be trying to achieve.
We should not expect an adequate exploration of the purposes that we should have, to be either easy or brief. A new understanding of purpose must be developed that goes far beyond quotations and catch phrases, and at sufficient length for us to be able to apply it to real institutions and to examine and test against real cases.
I realised this in 1974, when I saw how it could be done, and I spent the time of a rather frustrating career working it through. I think it unarguable that the purpose of education should be equipping people to work out worthwhile lives for themselves, as best that education can enable them, and for the simple reason that they are human beings. All human beings are of equal value, and that value is the prime value at the species level. It is the human being that matters first, and not what we might do with them, or use them for.
At the deepest of levels, I think this is unarguable, but it needs to be argued before it can be implemented in practice. We need sufficient detail so that we can test clearly where it is, and is not, being done, and can be called to account – including calling ourselves to account – for our hypocrisies and our indifference. Otherwise we all nod sagely, as if we are in agreement, and then go about what we talk of as "education" as we always have done, and agree in what we all choose to overlook, though it is an enormous violation of our avowed values.
I have completed an introduction to this better way of seeing education in the book Education – as if our lives depended on it, which is available on-line, and will soon become available in other formats. I have other books and articles in plan, and intend to build a resource around this project.
Education is one of the most vast, complex and important enterprises that we could undertake. As a global issue, education/indoctrination is as important as the major ongoing crises of which the public are aware – be they the environment and global warming, or hunger, immigration, or refugees, or war itself. Indeed, in an important sense it is prior to all of these issues, because human understanding and wisdom are pre-conditions for these questions to be addressed adequately. That the issue of indoctrination does not receive comparable attention suggests something disturbing about the current state of our minds.
What difference would it make if we corrected these mistakes? We should not suppose that understanding these things correctly as individuals would, in itself, give us a key to unlock the massive social changes that would have to occur before our environment could be transformed from an indoctrinational one into an educational one.
Nevertheless, if positive social change were to occur, it would not be possible without a clear understanding of what the purpose of education should be, and of the complex ecology of sites that are of educational importance. All of our efforts are pointless without these understandings, and in so many areas of social life and aspiration our efforts are severely limited without this key educational aspect of our lives being articulated properly. This reason alone could be considered a test of a person’s avowed commitment to education, and even to schooling. Until we can properly decide the place of schooling within an educational ecology, and understand properly what the purposes of education should be, we cannot even have any clear idea of what educational schooling would look like. At best we will be ineffectual. At worst, and more likely, we will continue to share responsibility for, and perpetuate, a significant known harm.
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Apple, Michael W. Ideology and Curriculum. London ; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, 1979.
Apple, Michael W. Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Apple, Michael W. Education and Power. 2 edition. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Apple, Michael W. Cultural Politics and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996.
Apple, Michael W. The State and the Politics of Knowledge. New York ; London: Routledge, 2003.
Berg, Ivar E. Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
Holt, John Caldwell. What Do I Do Monday? New York: Dutton, 1970.
Holt, John Caldwell. The Underachieving School. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1971.
Holt, John Caldwell. How Children Fail. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1995.
Holt, John Caldwell. How Children Learn. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1995.
Holt, John. “Reformulations: A Letter Written after Two Weeks in Cuernavaca.” edited by Ian Lister, 43–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
What we accept as "education" through conventional schooling does great harm. This has been widely known for over fifty years, yet we continue to do nothing about it. Our bad faith
What we accept as “education” through conventional schooling does great harm. This has been widely known for over fifty years – not just to the researchers who have failed to speak out, but to private citizens as well. Yet we continue to do nothing about it, not even to encourage the search for an alternative. We are all complicit in educational bad faith 
