Labor of Learning

Market and the Next Generation of Educational Reform

Alexander M. Sidorkin

http://sidorkin.net
University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colorado, USA

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-8790-757-0 (Paperback) ISBN 978-90-8790-758-7 (Hardback) ISBN 978-90-8790-759-4 (ebook)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Cover art work by Svetlana Sidorkina http://sidorkina.com Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved 2009 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi

PART I. THE ORIGINS OF SCHOOL LABOR

Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5. The Stone Age Education The Student Error School Learning as Labor Chrysalization of Class Industrial Revolution and Mass Schooling

1
3 11 19 31 39

PART II. A CRITIQUE OF SCHOOLING

Chapter 6. Chapter 7. Chapter 8. The Labor of Non-Learning The Economic Anthropology of Schooling Chayanovs Rule

45
47 57 69

PART III. THE CRITIQUE OF SOLUTIONS

Chapter 9. Chapter 10. Chapter 11. Chapter 12. Chapter 13. John Dewey: A Case of Educational Utopianism A Case Against Intrinsic Motivation Is Schooling a Consumer Good? A Case Against Vouchers Human Capital: A Case of Mistaken Identity The Soviet Economy: A Case Against Accountability

81
83 93 105 111 119

PART IV. THE SENSIBLE SOLUTION

Chapter 14. Chapter 15. Chapter 16. Relational Economy, Improved In the Event of Learning A Vegetative Reproduction of Practice

133
135 145 157

PART V. THE RADICAL SOLUTION

Chapter 17. Chapter 18. Chapter 19. Chapter 20. Index Pay-to-learn The Curriculum and the Money Trail The End of Schooling The Emancipation of Children

167
169 177 187 193 199

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of this books text was reviewed and published in various journals. I would like to thank the anonymous heroes of peer review who greatly contributed to my thinking and writing. 1 I am greatly indebted to my daughter Maria Sidorkina Rives and to my colleagues Michael Opitz and Susan Thompson for critiquing and editing the manuscript.

Alexander M Sidorkin, Is Schooling a Consumer Good?: A Case Against School Choice, But Not the One You Had in Mind, in Philosophy of Education 2007, Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2007: 75-83. Human Capital and Labor of Learning: A Case of Mistaken Identity, Educational Theory, 57/2, 2007, 159-170. The New Slavery, or Chrysalization of Class, Philosophy of Education 2006, Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2006, 417-425. The student Error, Philosophy of Education 2005. Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2005, 137-145. Chayanovs Rule and School Reform, Philosophical Studies in Education 36, 2005, 67-76. In the Event of Learning, Educational Theory 54/3, 2004, 251-62. Panopticon of the Second Kind: Self-Reforming During the Era of Excellence, Journal of Thought, Summer 2004, 17-33. Student Labor and Evolution of Education, World Futures 60/3, 2004, 183-194. Labor of Learning, Educational Theory 51/1, Winter 2001, 91-108.

ix

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the end of an educational era. In it, I argue that schooling as we know it will cease to exist and be replaced with something else, the outlines of which I put forth in this book. If I am wrong, educational systems will experience decades of slow evolutionary transformation, improving what is already there. If I am right, education will undergo a radical, fundamental change, replacing traditional compulsory schooling with a market-based system of learning that is finely tuned to demand and does not rely on extra-economic coercion. The premise of this entire work is to treat school learning as a form of labor; nothing in it makes sense without at least an attempt to entertain such a premise. My intent is to end what one may call educational exceptionalism, a notion that schooling is somehow different from other industries, and therefore exempt from economic analysis. However, as I will show, the myth about exceptionality of education is a very essential part of the inner workings of its economy. The genre of this book lies somewhere between educational theory and a political economy of education. By training and inclination, I am a philosopher, which shows in the choice of conceptual tools and in the company I keep. Most of the examples, statistics, and vocabulary of this book come from my American experience. Hence by public school I mean the government school, by student I mean pupil, etc. It is my belief, however, that all of the issues and solutions considered herein have universal applications. Part I explores the origins of the contemporary mass schooling models and redefines school learning in terms of labor. I am especially interested in genesis of education and in the history of childhood in its connection with schooling. Part II shows what sort of critique of contemporary schooling is possible if we see learning as labor. Among other things, I find that schools are islands of nonmarket, semi-feudal economies in the midst of the sea of markets, which explains well some of the most common worries about learning motivation. Part III offers several critiques of the most influential thoughts on schooling today: Progressivism, the Human Capital theory, the belief in intrinsic motivation, the voucher movement and accountability reform. And finally, Parts IV and V outline what I consider to be two alternative solutions for educational problems which stem from the essential lack of learning motivation. This book is an invitation to resurrect the tradition of asking fundamental questions about education. Improving what is essentially a flawed institution can take us only so far; I am inviting the reader to go further.

xi

PART I. THE ORIGINS OF SCHOOL LABOR

CHAPTER 1.

THE STONE AGE EDUCATION

I begin with exploration of the origins of education. For the purposes of this book, it is important to establish that education is learning plus power. Learning channeled, organized, and limited becomes a part of the educational enterprise. The Neanderthal Teachers Failure Between toughly 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, modern humans shared the European continent with Neanderthals. The ten millennia of co-existence included cultural exchange and perhaps trade; there is even some disputed evidence of interbreeding. 1 Most likely, Neanderthals were too far removed from us genetically; they were fully human, yet belonged to another human species. When Europe plunged into another ice age, Homo Sapiens survived, while our distant cousins did not. Similar stories are likely to have happened on other continents. Earth was populated by several human species, only one of which survived. The recently discovered (and quite recently alive) species of Homo Floresiensis tell the same story. Why this happened is a subject of a complicated, sometimes bitter debate among archaeologists. Some question the actual competition between the two species; 2 while others emphasize that many factors could have played the roles in Neanderthals extinction. 3 I will use this story for its metaphorical value rather than in attempt to establish the true cause for our survival. Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Dynamics of Human Evolution Laboratory in France, believes that the crucial difference between the two species was in the extent of their respective social networks (the modern humans had wider connections), and Sapienss ability to innovate (they were at a biological disadvantage, so they had to). He also points out the following interesting fact: The technology of the Neanderthals is rather complex in some aspects. But one of the features of this assemblage is that there are no really stereotypical objects. There are all sort of intermediate shapes between these different kinds of side-scrapers, for example. 4 The modern humans, however, were different: One of the most striking features of the industries made by the Cro-Magnons in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic is the occurrence of standardized shapes for tools and weapons. This is something really new. Its obvious with the flint object, but its even more obvious with the bone industrythe spear points, the eyed needles, the harpoons, all these kinds of objects were made following a precise pattern, a very precise model. 5 Paul Mellars agrees: the shapes of the tools not only are more sharply defined, but also appear to reflect more clearly conceived mental templates underlying their production. 6 The standardization of tools allowed them to perfect the techniques of making the tools, so that not only a general idea of a tool, but also the fine
3

CHAPTER 1

details of tool making technique could be taught and thus accumulated in the cultural memory. (Now, there is also some evidence to the contrary, 7 but I will take Hublins lead here, because it seems to reflect a prevailing point of view. 8) As the climate grew worse and resources diminished, modern humans were able to sustain their social networks, while Neanderthals could not. 9 Given the sparse population of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, the social networks did not mean much to trade or to any meaningful sharing of resources through trade of division of labor. Knowledge was the only commodity worth carrying long distances; yet this commodity required an ability to store it in a way that it does not deteriorate in transmission. Knowledge is worth nothing without teaching, for unaided, it cannot survive the generation that acquired it. My interpretation of the story is this: the Homo Sapiens teacher had outperformed the Neanderthal teacher. The ability to teach, to share knowledge across space and time explains the survival of our species in competition with other humans. It was probably not the difference in the ability to learnNeanderthals were quite similar to us biologically and perhaps mentallybut the ability to teach that made all the difference. The story also sheds some light on the nature of education. To ensure standardization of tools, a Stone Age teacher must find a way of focusing students attention on the task, so that these students can repeat the tool making process in exactly the same way. The mental template of a tool is a result of close observation, much effort, and corrective guidance. Teaching is essentially an application of the basic human relation of dominance to the sphere of knowledge acquisition. (Dominance is a universal evolutionary adaptation that ensures social cohesion without constant violence. 10) To establish dominance is to avoid constant fighting. It is requires a significant leap to use the mechanisms of dominance to ensure a specific kind of learning. While learning is very common among mammals, it relies mainly on innate instincts such as play and repetition of observed behavior. Dominance and learning exist in animals independently of each other. Humans have found a way of marrying the two strategies, and thus making learning highly selective and highly effective. Teaching is intimately connected to dominance. Its first task is to channel attention. Even today, teachers want the students eyes on them, not looking out of the window. Looking at the teacher and listening to teachers voice is the precondition of intentional teaching; therefore, humans had to figure out how to use the common methods of domination to ensure such channeled attention. Teaching Humans Quite literally, teaching has created and saved humanity; what and how we teach defines the character of human social existence. Teaching is as substantial an advance as the use of fire, tool making, and the invention of agriculture. All other inventions would have been long forgotten if not for the one invention that allowed knowledge to become the property of large groups of people. Many animals can learn from their own individual experiences; many social mammals also have the ability to transfer collective experiences of a group to future generations. 11 Like all
4

THE STONE AGE EDUCATION

other human gifts, teaching is not unique to us; we share it with other animals. Yet the extent and efficiency of teaching is certainly unparalleled, and sets us apart not only from existing primates, but also from other species of intelligent humans. Large brains, intellect, language, culture, social organizationNeanderthals and other human species possessed all of these. Yet only our ancestors made major advances in teaching as preserving vast amounts of knowledge against the death of its individual bearers. Our species has a fundamental problem that may be represented in familiar terms of data transfer. Human brains are excellent at discerning patterns in their environment. They also possess very effective data storage faculty, where more important data is kept and less important is constantly discarded. The weakness of this marvelous machine is that it deteriorates rather quickly, and there is no easy way of transferring the data onto new units. No FireWire connection between two brains exists, which is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because young brains can learn something new about the ever-changing environment, and useless knowledge dies with its hosts. It is a curse, because humans developed an ability to select socially significant information that tends to be useful for time spans much larger than one generation. Although we possess some rudimentary genetic memory (for example, the instinctive fear of snakes), most of the data is irretrievably lost with the physical death of its storage unit. Thus we are faced with the ever-growing task of a manual transfer of most essential data from older generations to younger ones. John Dewey has made a similar observation: The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education. 12 He, however, denies the presence of teaching in pre-literate societies. Dewey makes a mistake in equating schooling as an institution and intentional teaching in general. In underdeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social membership. 13 This is simply not true; the savages engage in systematic instruction without an institution of schooling. 14 This small mistake (and the inability to conceive of learning as labor in an economic process, which we will discuss in Chapter 9) is what made Dewey to arrive at wrong conclusions. From an evolutionary perspective, the essence of teaching is making learning selective. To teach is to determine what needs to be learned, and what does not. It involves an exercise of authority. Paradoxically, teaching involves both the enhancement and the restriction of learning; it involves channeling the omnivorous hunger of young minds into a narrower path of learning what the adults consider the most useful things. Spontaneous learning, by contrast, is indiscriminate; children learn everything in their environment. In other words, teaching begins when an adult selects what should be taught and how it should be taught. It involves a judgment about the important and the unimportant, between knowledge
5

CHAPTER 1

specific to one person or to a narrow situation and broader knowledge applicable to many situations. For example, teaching how to make a perfect arrowhead eliminates much of the trial and error of individual learning. This is the secret of standardization that the Neanderthals could never grasp. In a way, the Neanderthals were somewhat more creative than we were, because each individual experimented with the concept of an arrowhead, and developed his own sort of arrowhead. They shared some of the key premises of Progressive education, and learned much by discovery. However, the restriction of creativity is at the very core of the teaching enterprise. Castro, Medina, and Toro suggest that the development of language can be explained by selection for the ability to categorize behavior: at an early stage of hominid evolutionpossibly some ancestor of Homo Ergasterthe development of a new capacity was arising: the capacity to categorize learned behavior as good or bad. 15 Some hominids developed the capacity to approve or disapprove their offsprings learned behavior, that is, to teach. Apparently, humans were much better at it than Neanderthals. The Three Gifts of Childhood The success of teaching depends on the efficient exploitation of one crucial biological resource that humans possesschildhood. Let us consider three gifts of childhoodthe essential elements of human condition that made education possible. These gifts of childhood are altriciality (the need for extensive care) curiosity and play; all three are powerful internal drives to learn. Altriciality means helplessness at birth. Human babies are born premature (so that they can grow huge heads and still be born without killing their mothers), and learn an extraordinary number of things. Chimpanzees infant brain is about 40% of its adult size, while the humanonly 25%. 16 Again, the extended period of learning is not unique to humans, but we simply have a lot more of it. The extended juvenile period is demonstrated to be an evolutionary choice made by all primates, 17 and we a simply taken it to an extreme. Humans retain the precious resource of childhood for some 10 years, while other mammals only for a couple of years, or only a few months, even if their life span is similar to ours. Long childhood, however, is a biological asset that also imposes significant economic burdens on any human population. According to Tracy Joffe, Extending the growth period in primates imposes considerable cost to the animal, not only in terms of reducing overall reproductive fitness, but also in terms of extending the most precarious portion of the lifespan, subadulthood. Juvenile primates are more likely to starve to death or fall victim to predators than are adults. 18 These burdens are paid off when youngsters become capable adults. Joffe believes that it is the acquisition of social skills rather than foraging skills that has been a primary selective force behind an extension in the juvenile period. 19 This is an

THE STONE AGE EDUCATION

important extension of my argument: the knowledge that needs to be transferred first is the knowledge of the social world, not of the physical environment. Altriciality ensures long and sustained interaction and a strong emotional bond with the primary caregivers; this pattern of relationships then extends to others and allows for flexible social bonds. Immaturity is a psychic resource; the process of growing up gives our psyche the basic pattern of scarring and healing that is then used again and again for making and breaking selective relationships. On the one hand, the high dependency on mothers makes us capable of love and ethics 20; on the other hand, the unavoidable harsh separation creates the perpetual trauma called the self. The self is primarily the psychic scar tissue, a knot of congealed relationships, a pattern on the surface of the psyche. It is essential for teaching purposes, because the self makes possible the separation of knowledge into the more or less useful, and because knowledge becomes attached to significant others. On the other hand, the self contains the memory of separation from the significant other, so humans are capable of a constant rethinking of which relationships and associated with them knowledge are worth retaining. Thus, humans also possess the Neanderthals creative impulses, and the possibility for different kinds of knowledge. Curiosity stores vast amounts of surplus information, the practicality of which is not immediately apparent. Teaching both limits this primary learning motive, and uses it. Much teaching consists of constructing an artificial environment, where stimuli to which a child is exposed are intentionally limited. In other words, being locked up in a classroom makes one curious about whatever the teacher has to offer. Curiosity is omnivorous; it tells kids to consume any intellectual and spiritual food placed on their plates by teachers. As an adaptive mechanism curiosity requires an animal to explore whatever environment it is in; humans use this mechanism to teach things well beyond a childs immediate environment. Play creates a motive for practicing skills and sorting the knowledge. If curiosity is the minds hunger, play is its digestive system. According to Jerome Bruner, 21 plays function is to minimize the consequences of action, which enables children to learn in a less risky situation, by giving them the opportunity to try combinations of behavior that might not otherwise be tried. D.W. Winnicott connects play with the intermediate area where external and internal reality meet, and where a child learns to accept external reality. 22 Whatever plays psychic mechanism is, it is clearly an invaluable resource that humans have learned to exploit. Teaching presents knowledge that seems to be inconsequential, removed from the every-day experience. Play is a unique gift that allows children to be preoccupied with the inconsequential. Children sort out, store, and apply the knowledge through play, while teachers only have to make sure that kids play with the selected information. The three gifts of childhood are elements of a biological resource that modern humans have learned to utilize well. Neanderthals probably had the same resource but did not learn to exploit it efficiently enough. Teaching is basically a technology that uses the gifts of childhood, just like well digging is a technology of underground water use. (Animals can be walking on a large aquifer and still die of
7

CHAPTER 1

thirst if they do not possess the technology of getting it out of the ground.) Whether a resource is scarce or plentiful is really a matter of technology, not a material property of the resource. But to extract these valuable resources, humans had to learn how to control their young in such a way as to make them learn what the adults deem important. This original feature of education still defines it, although the specific technique of domination has also evolved through time, and is now once again up for a major revision. Evolution of Teaching The technology of teaching has not remained unchanged since our survival competition with the Neanderthals. Let me break down the evolution of teaching into three stages, somewhat arbitrarily: apprenticeship, classic schooling, and mass schooling. The first stage involves systematic, deliberate teaching, but does not have a specific social institution dedicated to teaching; teaching is embedded into the production process. This type of education appears first, but never completely disappears, and is still with us today. In fact, most human occupations require certain periods of apprenticeship. Education as a social sphere appears as a particular form of division of labor. One can imagine an ancient master potter, tired of all the apprentices taking too much time from the regular potters, deciding to build another shop just for the apprentices to learn some basics of pottery-making first. Of course, historically the young scribes and the future clerics were probably the first ones to be moved from the regular workplace to separate facilities, but this does not change the nature of the change. The broken pots just provide better imagery for the sort of things an educational institution produces. The world of education as a separate social sphere was thus created. Classic schooling was a large step in refining the technology of teaching. It is characteristic of large societies with complex social structures. The emergence of the state and its ruling classes is generally linked to the beginning of organized classic schooling. Classic schooling evolved as an essentially selective technology; it implies and reproduces the class structure. This form of schooling is aimed at teaching a narrow class of schooled people to manage complex societies. Schooling added another dimension to the exploitation of childhood; use of force and threat of exclusion. The revolutionary significance of schooling is that it forces children to work beyond what the gifts of childhood compel them to do. The difference in social status between schooled and unschooled classes is a great extrinsic motivator allowing the society to cram even more knowledge into few select heads. Schooling turned learning a form of labor. Schooling is a form of artificially extending childhood as a time for learning beyond the biologically determined 10-12 years of life. The needs of growing civilization and literacy demanded going farther than the already generously lengthy period of childhood allotted to humans. At the same time, the work of schooled children had to be intensified beyond levels sustainable by natural curiosity, play and social connection. In a certain sense, the classic schooling is a revolution similar to the Neolithic revolution, the move from hunting and gathering
8

THE STONE AGE EDUCATION

to agriculture and animal domestication. In both cases, humans exhausted the natural methods of resource exploitation, and took upon themselves to reproduce the needed resources artificially. Schooling is a way of producing more childhoodboth quantitatively and qualitatively, where childhood is a capacity to learn outside of actual productive processes. Mass schooling is an entirely new phase of educational technology; it is very young in historical terms, and its long-term success is uncertain. In my view, it wont survive without the major make-over proposed in this book. Its aims are paradoxical and may seem unachievable. Mass schooling seeks to force all children do what only elites used to do because they were the elites. Class difference was indeed the engine inside the technology of classic schooling; the promise to preserve the privilege and the threat of expulsion, were the simple and reliable carrot and stick of a classic school. With the shift to mass schooling, a new engine, a new motivating force had to be created, and it has been, as I will show later. Classic schooling and mass schooling are two very different social technologies. They may appear remarkably similar, and coexist within the same society, and yet they are two different approaches to using and extending the gifts of childhood. They are no more similar than competitive track and jogging for exercise: in both cases people run, but the motive, the aim, the attitude, the meaning, are quite different. The classic school was and is motivated by the drive to advance socially or to keep previously existing privilege. Mass schooling uses some of the mythology of social advancement, but it is quite clear that the majority of students cannot advance above average without creating the Lake Wobegon Effect (where all the children are above average). The ideology of social mobility does not have much credence among the lowest social classes: poor kids understand that no matter how much you learn, someone has to remain at the bottom. *** When we think about the contemporary institution of schooling, it is important to keep in mind that it is one specific institution, one particular technology of teaching, with its own limitations and capacities. Mass schooling is not the pinnacle of social development; in fact, it may and will be surpassed by other forms of teaching.
NOTES
1

See, for instance I Tattersall, J.H. Schwartz Commentary: hominids and hybrids: the place of Neanderthals in human evolution, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (1999): 7117 7119. J.R. Stewart, Neanderthalmodern human competition? A comparison between the mammals associated with Middle and Upper Palaeolithic industries in Europe during OIS 3, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 14/34 ( 2004): 178189. P.B. Pettitt, Disappearing from the World: An Archaeological Perspective on Neanderthal Extinction, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 18/3 (1999): 217240.

CHAPTER 1
4

5 6

10

11

12 13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22

Jean-Jacques Hublin, Who Were the Neanderthals?, 2001 WGBH Educational Foundation and Clear Blue Sky Productions, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/l_073_02.html (Accessed June 29, 2008) Hublin. Paul Mellars, Major Issues in the emergence of modern humans, Current Anthropology 30/3, (1989), 349385: 365. Anthony Marks, Harold J. Hietala, and John K. Williams, Tool Standardization in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic: a Closer Look (with comments), Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2001), 11:1744. Donald K. Grayson, Stone Tool Assemblage Richness during the Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic in France, Journal of Archaeological Science (1998) 25, 927938. Clive Gamble, The Paleolithic Settlement of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See an excellent explication of dominance in Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Ballantine Books, 1993), 201218. C.J. Nicol, The social transmission of information and behavior, Applied Animal Behavior Science (1995), 44/24, 7998; C. M. Heyes, Imitation, culture and cognition, Animal Behavior (1993), 46, 9991010. John Dewey, Democracy and Education. (Macmillian: Toronto, Ontario, 1966), 3. Dewey, 7. See for example Kaplan, H. S., Hill, K., Lancaster, J., & Hurtado, A. M. A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence and longevity, Evolutionary Anthropology 9 (2000), 156185. Laureano Castro, Alfonso Medina and Miguel A. Toro, Hominid cultural transmission and the evolution of language, Biology and Philosophy 19 (2004): 721737, 732. H. Coqueugniot, J.-J. Hublin, F. Veillon, F. Hout and T. Jacob Early brain growth in Homo erectus and implications for cognitive abilities, Nature 431 (2004): 299302. Tracey H. Joffe, Social pressures have selected for an extended juvenile period in primates, Journal of Human Evolution 32/6 (1997), 593605. Joffe, 593. Joffe, 594. Eli Sagan, Freud, Women and Morality (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Jerome S. Bruner, The nature and uses of immaturity American Psychologist, 27/8 (1972): 160. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1971).

10

CHAPTER 2.

THE STUDENT ERROR

My aim here is to convince the reader to change some common assumptions about education. To do that, let us examine what I call the student error. The aim is to understand where the error comes from, and what truth about education and schooling it can reveal. Helping me today are Valentin Voloinov and Pierre Bourdieu. The student error is a set of erroneous assumptions many students make. The following definition is made in the hope that it will be easily recognized by those who teach. For a moment, I will assume the reader to be a teacher. Here is what our students think: A students effort must determine his grade. Ultimately, a high school or a college diploma costs a certain amount of work. No teacher can expect students to work over a certain customary amount of time and level of difficulty. Teachers somehow benefit from forcing students to work more; schoolwork is something done for teachers. The underlying assumption of these statements is that schoolwork is a form of labor performed by students for the benefit of us, teachers. It is not performed for the benefit of the student. Even though most of us will agree that schoolwork may appear to be like that, we also insist that students work benefits only them and no one else. We demand work for students own benefit, and manifestations of the student error are frustrating to us. The student error makes teaching itself look like a rejected gift; and nothing hurts as much as a rejected gift. Student error is thus directly opposed by our truth about education in general and schooling in particular. The teachers truth includes linking education to such lofty virtues such as being truly human, realizing every persons potential, promoting social justice, and preparing students for adult responsibilities. According to teachers, schooling is not a form of student labor; rather, it is a service provided to students at public expense, or with public support. The apparent refusal to accept or appreciate such service is seen as a sign of immaturity. Teachers and adults in general receive a right to override the immature persons will, and force him or her to learn. An alternative explanation is that students may refuse some or all of this service because schools alienate them by being biased, elitist, prejudiced, or boring. A more accurate account would find many more variations of teachers truth; I simply wanted to show the shared fundamental interpretation of schooling as a service. Errors are prized catches for philosophers and social scientists. Every major social theory is built on reinterpretation of some common human error. It is enough to mention Freud, Marx, and Piaget: all three assumed that a common error (the slip of tongue, the commodity fetishism, or misunderstanding of volume conservation laws) sheds light on some deeper reality of the human mind and society. The prominent role of error is not an accident. Knowledge about humans is always radically different from any other knowledge. Humanities and social
11

CHAPTER 2

sciences subjects are roughly the same as their audience. Scholars tell people something about these very peoples lives. How is it possible that someone could tell me anything new about my own life? One could only if I am missing or misunderstanding something about it. In other words, the very possibility of plausible knowledge about humans rests on the assumption that receivers of the knowledge are capable of making a systematic error. Natural sciences, however, rely on ignorance, not on error. The receiver of their knowledge may simply not know anything about neutrinos, composition of soils, or structural characteristics of steel. Some kinds of knowledge stem from ignorance and other kinds from errorthe distinction does not exactly coincide with natural sciences vs. social sciences/humanities, and there is some of both in all newly produced knowledge. Yet the distinction holds. The knowledge from ignorance does not need to replace other, pre-existing knowledge, while the knowledge from error does exactly that. As a result, the latter is so much more contentious. It manifests itself in struggle with other knowledge, and such a struggle is never fully resolved. Errors are not really errors, as long as they have discernable patterns. A systematic error explains a reality that escapes the every-day understanding of the world. It offers a glimpse into another dimension of the world. Any common error reflects a well-hidden and more profound truth of a parallel universe where what is normally wrong is right, and what is usually right is wrong. Of course, it is more profound only because a scholar makes an effort to discover it. The relationship between the error and the truth it produces is ambivalent. No profound truth has been ever spoken without rejecting a common error; such truths both discredit errors and elevate them into the profound status. For example, in the course of the Freudian revolution, such a common thing as neurosis is suddenly revealed to possess the sacred powers to speak with the inaccessible depths of ones psyche. The very possibility of understanding a social theory lies in the human ability to recognize ones own errors, and admit that there might be some truth in them. However, calling something an error in the first place is already a result of a long pre-existing process of categorizing utterances as correct or erroneous. I will use Freudianism: A Marxist Critique by V.N.Voloinov 1 to explain the existence of the parallel universes. The author offers several critiques of Freud; of these I will focus on two interesting claims about an alternative explanation of Freuds discoveries. First, Voloinov claims that Freuds method is nothing but interpretation of utterances. Every utterance is the product of the interaction between speakers and the product of the broader context of the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges. 2 Therefore, whatever utterances are produced in the psychoanalytic session, result from the situation of the session, not from the patients psyche. A patient wishes to hide from the doctor certain of his experiences and certain events in his life. He wants to foist on the doctor his own point of view on the reasons for his illness and the nature of his experiences. The doctor, for his part, aims at enforcing his authority as a doctor, endeavors to
12

THE STUDENT ERROR

wrest confessions from the patient and to compel him to take the correct point of view on his illness and its symptoms. 3 This account suggests that the reason for the existence of parallel universes of meaning lies in quite trivial power dynamics between people who participate in common discourse. Voloinov suggests that the very notion of psychodynamics, of internal psychic struggles is nothing but a projection of external, mainly patientdoctor relations. The phenomenon of repression, so central to psychoanalysis, may be a product of the therapy, not its object. Thoughts and memories become repressed because of the discourse in which they are newly recovered. Given this claim, perhaps the act of naming the student perception an error is a projection of teachers struggle with the students. The thinking goes something like this: I am a teacher; my truth is that education is something my students need and should want. The work they do in my class is not really for me, but for their own benefit. Therefore, if their truth is different from mine, I cast their version of truth as an error, as fallacy, in need of debunking, as something to joke about, as something shared with other teachers in the student story swapping routine. This thought process is not about just one person imposing his view on others; rather, it is a dynamic process of explication of both mutually exclusive truths resulting in one of them being named erroneous. Power imbalance makes the two meanings incompatible, but it does not eliminate one of them. The other meaning becomes the wrong one, an error that is also allowed to exist, but as an error, as not a meaning that is not correct. Do I want the student error to be eliminated? Not at all, for the teachers truth only makes sense in the opposition to, and against the background of, the student error. In fact, education can be conceived as a process of movement from the student error to the teachers truth. Not only the knowledge of schooling, but the very practice of it depends on teachers ability to overcome the student error. Second, Voloinov makes a much larger claim. He recasts Freuds distinction between the conscious and subconscious in the following way: the subconscious motives differ from the conscious ones not in kind of being, that is, ontologically, but only in terms of content, that is, ideologically. In this sense, Freuds unconscious can be called the unofficial conscious. 4 In other words, the unconscious is just the unsanctioned part of the conscious. Certain utterances, thoughts, and motives are allowed, and others are disallowed. This is another representation of power dynamics, but one that relies on society to sanction or not sanction certain thoughts and desires. The sanctioning then becomes internalized as an intrinsic attribute of these thoughts and desires. Any motivation of ones behavior, any instance of self-awareness (for selfawareness is always verbal, always a matter of finding some specifically suitable verbal complex) is an act of gauging oneself against some social norm, social evaluationis, so to speak, the socialization of oneself and ones behavior. In becoming aware of myself, I attempt to look at myself, as it were, through the eyes of another person, another representative of my social group, of my class. 5
13

CHAPTER 2

According to this second claim, then the struggle with students about suppression of the student error is not just a function of power dynamics in the classroom. It is contextualized by certain societal interests, by an ideology that decrees my version of truth to be correct, and deems theirs an error. A teacher has good allies in her struggle, so the student error has to exist as an unofficial, unspoken truth. The world appears to be telling students: what you believe about schooling is a paranoid, ridiculous self-deception. Voloinov gives the suppressed truths a much different meaning. His ostensibly Marxist, revolutionary outlook allows him to imagine a reversal of the roles between the official and the unofficial truth. What is suppressed is untrue only within a certain dominant ideological framework. His reasoning gives rise to the question: May we assume that in some other social context, the student error may become the official truth? While the question appears simple, the answer is complicated. Pierre Bourdieus analysis of the gift illustrates that the two parallel explanations of school learning, i.e. the student error and the teachers truth are not simply two competing ideologies; they are actually two sides of the same ideology. Bourdieu draws on theories of the gift by Mauss and Lvi-Strauss, but tries to explain the time interval between the gift and the counter-gift, and the fact that those must be different from each other (a gift of sheep cannot be reciprocated in sheep). He shows that the function of the time interval is creating a screen between the gift and countergift and allowing two perfectly symmetrical acts to appear as unique and unrelated acts. 6 Now, Bourdieu acknowledges the structural truth of the gift as described by Lvi-Strauss, and agrees that the participants of gift exchange also understand the objective nature of exchange, even when they try to conceal it. But this structural truth is collectively repressed. The time interval can only be understood by hypothesizing that the giver and the receiver collaborate, without knowing it, in a work of dissimulation tending to deny the truth of the exchange of exact equivalents, which represents the destruction of the exchange of gifts. 7 He goes on to show that the so-called economy of symbolic exchanges always has double truths, and the duality of truth is only possible if there exist a collective self-deception or a collective misrecognition. All sides must accept the need for repression of the truth. Gift giving is not always strictly symmetrical; anthropological evidence 8 provides abundant examples of using the gift or reciprocity in general to establish class dominance. When that happens, the collective conspiracy of silence will benefit some groups more than others. As long as the institution holds, however, there must be an agreement to repress the objective truth. Perhaps the structural (objective) truth of schooling is different from one held to be the official, powerful truth of the teacher. Yet for the schooling enterprise to exist, we need collective repression of that truth, and unspoken agreement between students and teachers that the truth is never made explicit. And when it is displayed, we relegate it to the realm of errors and misunderstanding. Those
14

THE STUDENT ERROR

students who violate the taboo of making things explicit suffer the consequences by being portrayed as nave or immaturenot only by teachers who are directly invested in repressing such truth, but also by other students. Most students go along with the program, and act as if the teachers truth was the only truth about schooling. They will say the right things when asked to speak, or to fill out surveys. To a significant extent, they also believe the official truth, even though like most people, they are not consistent in their beliefs and actions. The student truth/error comes out through complaints, objections, and actions of resistance. Before I venture into explaining what the objective truth of schooling is and why it needs repressing, let me point at an important mechanism of repression, also described by Bourdieu: Symbolic violence is the violence which extorts submission, which is not perceived as such, based on collective expectations or socially inculcated beliefs. 9 Bourdieu claims that symbolic capital and symbolic violence present themselves in pre-capitalist societies, and in non-market spheres of modern societies. The symbolic capital fundamentally requires denial of explicit calculation, of revealing the structural truth of an exchange. Similarly, schooling requires massive symbolic capital to sustain itself. School is good for you, stay in school, school is cool,these and many similar messages permeate the informational sphere. They are complemented by news stories about the academic success of disadvantaged children, of the dangerous minds remade into productive and obedient minds, of schools that work and teachers that care, of inner city kids learning algebra, etc,. etc., etc. The whole accountability reform movement is one giant build-up of state-sponsored symbolic capital. The ethics of academic honesty is another important ideological apparatus. The discourse of academic honesty is rarely met with open student opposition. However, if one accepts the premises of the student error, the moral outrage over cheating ceases to make much sense. The ethics of academic honesty in effect reinforces the idea that because cheating is wrong, the work performed by students is actually very important for the society and for the student. Of course, the explicit claim made by the academic ethics is the opposite of this: the student work is important, therefore, thou shall not cheat. (Most ethical claims, however, are really trying to prove their premises rather than conclusions.) A full ethical consideration of cheating is not among my objectives; all I wanted to do is to show a sophisticate way of keeping the structural truth of schooling unspoken. Another way of repressing the truth is evoking the language of affection. Bourdieu makes interesting claims about family and love: Threatened by its specific logic by the market economy, [domestic economy] increasingly tends to affirm explicitly its specific logic, that of love Housewives, who have no material utility or price (the taboo of calculation and credit), are excluded from market circulation (exclusivity) and are objects and subjects of feeling; in contrast, so-called venal women (prostitutes) have an explicit market price, based on money and calculation, are neither object not subject of feeling and sell their body as an object. 10

15

CHAPTER 2

In other words, the language of love comes up when the economic systemic cannot compensate womens labor, when certain forms of exploitation need to be justified. Such claims have been made in the feminist literature before Bourdieu, starting with Virginia Woolf. Teaching is, of course, a similarly gendered labor of love, underpaid but over-sentimentalized. There is a similar stirring up of affective relations in schooling in order to disallow more exact calculations of value. I would like to emphasize that students work is also presented as a matter of faith, of hope, of duty, of determination. It is less gendered, but more connected to the romantic discourse of childhood. Children, like women, are outside of the sphere of economic relations. Their work is therefore above (or beyond) exact value calculations. Virtue talk saturates schooling as it does no other institution outside of the family. Teachers are supposed to care, and students are obligated to repay them with love and gratitude. More importantly, students must repay with hard work. We try to keep the school pure and non-commercial, perhaps because we dont want the purity of mutual affection between students and teachers to be contaminated by mundane economic relations. Public education is a non-commercial domain of civic virtue, where students work is described as a duty. So valuable is love in schools, we dont want anything to threaten it. Love and caring do not cost taxpayers anything, after all. What is the structural (objective) truth of schooling, and why does it need hiding? One way to begin answering this question is to point out that student error is relatively more prevalent among lower class and minority students. The higher the student is on the social ladder, the less likely she is to express the beliefs associated with the error. Students from more elite, more selective schools tend to be more sincerely engrossed in the teachers truth. By no means an ironclad rule, it may describe a strong tendency. The reason is that indeed, the higher the social class of the student, the more he or she benefits from staying in school and performing necessary labor. This is a trivial point and needs no special proof; however, the economic implications of it are not fully understood. Mass schooling is organized around unpaid and compulsory labor of students, labor that benefits the society to a much larger degree than it benefits the individual who performs it. In other words, what students do in schools is pay taxes in the form of free labor. Of course, what I am saying here must never be said out loud. It would destroy the fragile mechanisms of gentle coercion called public education. Here is Bourdieu again: rendering explicit brings about a destructive alteration when the entire logic of the universe rendered explicit rests on the taboo of rendering it explicit. 11 He does it anyway in his work, but makes a distinction between the objective truth that is repressed, and the lived truth of practices. 12 The latter actually includes the hiding of the former. So, educational ambivalence must not be outed to the extent that it will be difficult to repress, because there is a higher truth about it, which includes repression of the objective truth.

16

THE STUDENT ERROR

*** My purpose in this chapter is not to replace the teachers truth with the student error. The power mechanisms of symbolic violence have been so far the means to socially necessary goals. The aim is to simply show that there is much truth in the student error, and that truth might be finding its way to being acknowledged. The rest of the book is an explication of the student truth that leads to revealing the economic condition of schooling. The economy of schooling is changing in such a way that the teachers truth becomes less and less sustainable, and the student truth demands more and more acknowledgement.

NOTES
1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Valentin N. Voloinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, Translated by I.R.Titunik (NY: Academic Press, 1976). This books belongs to so-called disputed texts that some attribute partially or fully to Mikhail Bakhtin. Without getting into the debate about the texts authorship, I will refer to Voloinov as the sole author, although similarities of major parts of the book to Bakhtins writings are striking. Voloinov, 79. Voloinov, 78. Voloinov, 85. Voloinov, 87. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 94. Bourdieu, 94. See for example Marshall D. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972). Bourdieu, 103. Bourdieu, 106. Bourdieu, 113. Bourdieu, 114.

17

CHAPTER 3.

SCHOOL LEARNING AS LABOR 1

This chapter is an attempt to understand learning as labornot metaphorically, not psychologically, but from the point of view of the political economy of education. Where does school learning fit in the great scheme of things in the contemporary economy? In schools, students are asked to produce numerous thingsliterary essays, stories, poems, statistical reports, mathematical calculations, graphs, tables, musical performances, scientific research papers, posters, models, theatre shows, oral presentations and written reports. I am interested in the things that students produce, and will try to explain them using economic terms of value and use-value. The God of Useless Things The products of the students work lead a rather shadowy and invisible existence in educational theory and in common educational discourse. An art teacher friend joked that whenever it is time to throw away his students drawings, he feels guilty, as if the god of children was watching disapprovingly. Every teacher can probably share this sentiment. It is a sad moment in teaching when the cute and awkward things children produce end their short lives. Teachers usually try to burden parents with such a responsibility. Take your work home, show it to your parents, hang it on the wall Pieces of art are especially hard to let go, but so are student essays, stories and even worksheets. Perhaps because we feel guilty throwing childrens work away, we also tend to ignore these things on a theoretical level. Consider a paper airplane and a Boeing 777: there is something in common between these two things, besides the ability to fly. These are both results of human work; someone spent time, energy, creativity; someone spent a portion of ones life creating these things. These are both objects of transformed nature. Therefore, there is something in common between making the real airplane and making a paper airplane while learning about flight. Learning is largely a function of making things; it is a consequence of making something. The kinship of learning to making things, or to the world of utilitarian production is definitely not new and is commonly assumed in Marxist discourse, but also in the writing of such Progressives as Dewey and Montessori, and in the Vygotsky and Leontyev traditions in Russian psychology. However, one may point at instances when students learn without leaving any material trace, simply by listening and observing. This is an important special case to which I will return later. For now let us assume that learning at school more often than not involves the production of numerous tangible and intangible objects, such as those previously mentioned. Here is an elemental observation: from the point of view of a student, learning is an utterly unproductive activity, and here is why. Learning is the production of useless things. The things that students produce while learning are never being consumed; no one needs them. In contrast to utilitarian production, learning can be defined as a wasteful activity. Indeed, if the things children produce become useful
19

CHAPTER 3

directly to them or to someone else; if they are sold, exchanged, given to someone, or simply used by their makers, then education loses its essence, and schools become factories. In a very physical sense, education occurs only when materials are turned into useless things. A potter must make a number of faulty pots in order to learn how to make good ones. As long as he is making faulty pots, he is a student; as soon as he starts turning out good ones, learning is over, and real production begins. Of course, the shift is gradual, but the difference still stands. A student must write essays no one wants to publish; as soon as she has paying readers, she stops being a student and becomes a writer. She still remains a learner, but not a student. The boundary between the world of production and the world of learning is thus quite clear. Dewey formulated them as follows: From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various studies represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from the experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. The subject matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical with the formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc. The latter represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing state. It enters directly into the activities of the expert and the educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner. Failure to bear in mind the difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of teacher and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge. 2 Dewey thinks in terms of the subject matter; my focus is on the things produced. However, the point is similar: what children do in the process of learning cannot be the same as what adults do in the process of production. This is not a critique of education; this is, rather, is a straight-forward attempt to define learning in terms of production. I am making the disclaimer simply because some mistaken reactions to earlier versions of this claim. Useless is not a negative term, but rather a comment on the utility of the things produced by students in the process of learning. However, it does create specific difficulties for learning motivation. Since the dawn of time, teachers have realized how hard it is to motivate all children to learn. One can motivate all children to learn some of the time, or one can motivate some children to learn all of the time, but one cannot motivate all children to learn all of the time. I will return to this point later in the book, but for now let me bring it up as a self-evident truth. It is connected to the fact that the products of student work have no utility. The lack of motivation is a direct consequence of the fact that the things produced by the students are useless, that is, they are not good enough to be utilized in comparison to the future products the adults will produce through their work. In a way of a brief illustration, imagine yourself working at a mathematical research lab. Your supervisor asked you to perform a set of complex calculations. It was difficult, tedious, and only sometimes interesting work, which took you a week to finish. Today is a good day, because you are done. You bring the results to
20

SCHOOL LEARNING AS LABOR

the supervisors office; he looks at your papers and says What a marvelous job! You talk for a few minutes, and then he promptly crumples your papers and throws them away into a wastebasket. Such a scenario is very hard to swallow, no matter how well you are paid to work. Your morale and motivation will inevitably suffer; never mind any rhetoric that you were doing it for your own good. Yet this is what all students have to do every day for many years. The absurdness of this experience is not apparent only because we are used to it. People commonly assume that students produce knowledge, skills and attitudes to be used in the adult lives of workers and citizens. Yet the phenomenology of student learning would immediately indicate that students produce almost nothing; and what little they produce can be called useless. The material things students produce are such things as worksheets, coloring books, reports on dissected piglets, clay figurines, and essays about the MexicanAmerican War. An inventory of the non-material things students produce would reveal the same list of generally useless theories, ideas, poems, and concepts; useless not in a sense that students will not use them sometime in the future, but useless in terms of immediate use, or exchange for something else. One of reviewers of an earlier draft of this material commented that perhaps grades (and eventually, credentials), and the approval students receive for their work make the things they produce not so useless. Yet these goods received for effort do not alter the nature of student work. In a very real, physical sense, all they produce ends up being thrown away; these are things created for practice, and therefore, by definition, not useful to others. No teacher grades papers for enjoyment, no math teacher expects to find algebraic discoveries on quiz sheets. The fact that useless work is rewarded does not change the more basic fact that the products of student labor serve no utility. The fact that all of the artifacts produced by students have no obvious utility creates a strange wastebasket economy, which, in turn, affects the students motivation, the character of social relations in schools, and the nature of schools as organizations. The appearance of uselessness has the profound effect on learning motivation, which is the most central theme of this book. Learning motivation, or rather, lack thereof, is also, in my opinion, the most fundamental, root cause of such problems as dropout, alienation from school, inequality of educational opportunity and school violence. Some of the consequences of the wastebasket economy are examined in Part II of this book. The most important objective for me is to reverse the assumption that making useless things is a by-product of learning. To the contrary, learning is a by-product of making useless things. The Value of Useless Things To all products of student work Karl Marx account may apply: Nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labor contained in it: the labor does not count as labor, and therefore creates no value. 3 The things produced by students obviously do not exist as commodities. They are
21

CHAPTER 3

neither sold, nor exchanged; they are not gifts, nor are they produced for personal consumption. Therefore students perceive their work as zero-value production. Such is the appearance available to students, but as Marx himself has convincingly demonstrated, appearances in economic relations can be very deceiving. Moreover, the appearance of learning as non-labor has very serious economic implications. If not deliberately calculated, such appearance is certainly useful to those benefiting from the capitalist mode of production. I will show below that learning is a form of productive labor, although it creates value of a very special form. According to Marx, the value of a commodity is nothing but a mere congelation of homogeneous human labor. 4 Marx viewed labor power as a unique form of 5 commodity that is a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. The value of labor power is in turn determined by the labor that went into the creation and recreation of labor power. In other words, the value of labor power is the labor of all other workers that went into the production of food, clothing, and shelter for the worker. Note that accumulating or storing value in either material objects or human beings is not the same thing as capital investment, as human capital theorists may sometimes lead us to believe, see Chapter 12. Marx considered education to be one of these components of labor that goes into the creation of labor power: In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skills and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labor power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. [] The expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary labor power) enter 6 pro tanto into the total value spent in its production. 7 Two points are to be made here. First, things have changed dramatically since Marx was writing das Kapital. The portion of labor power value associated with training and education has grown tremendously, as post-industrial society becomes a reality. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a college graduate earns, roughly, 1.7 times more than a high school graduate per lifetime, and a person with a Ph.D. earns 2.6 times more money. 8 The very fact that the U.S. economy is functioning and thriving shows that even though the value of labor power really increases dramatically with the input of more education into it, workers still are able to create much more value than their labor power costs. In other words, it makes good economic sense for capitalists to hire educated workers, despite the cost differential. Again, I would like to refer to the human capital theorists who extensively demonstrated this point, and effectively repudiated Marxs and other classical economists simplistic assumption about the homogeneity of labor. Second, Marx was no educational theorist; he simply did not know much about education. Had he more opportunity or desire to look closely into the processes that make up education, he could have noticed that the labor that goes into education is only partially the labor of a teacher and other school staff. Students themselves do the lions share of work. At any given time, about thirty students work in a classroom per one teacher. We may argue that teachers work is more
22

SCHOOL LEARNING AS LABOR

intensive or more complex, or that for each classroom teacher there is at least one administrator or school support staff working, but still one has to agree that most of the work put into learning is done by students. Dewey made clear the connection between the students own activity and learning. A child cannot learn unless she does something, unless she expends her muscle, brain, and imagination. The work a student puts into writing a paper, solving a problem, or making a paper airplane, is a necessary and major component of the educational process. Dewey made such an argument in the context of supporting his ideas of new Progressive education; he did not see the same connection between students work and learning applied to the old, traditional academic learning. Indeed, from a psychological point of view, there is a huge difference between the traditional academic learning and the active learning Dewey had in mind. However, from an economic standpoint this difference does not exist; all learning involves student activity of some sort. Even passive listening to a teachers lecture is work, a purposeful expenditure of individuals strength. Importantly, learning is students workbut is it labor? When we pay a doctors bill, we cover not only the value of services rendered, but also the value of, say, a one-paragraph story about a princess in the far-away land that the doctor wrote when she was a second grader. In order to be able to make her diagnosis and write a prescription now, it was necessary for her to write the princess story (just as her internship training was necessary). As customers, you and I purchase a fraction of that story when we receive medical services, even though we have never read it, and do not know about its existence. In a similar way, when purchasing a ceramic pot we also pay for the production of all the broken pots on which the potter practiced his craft. Student labor is unique in that it deposits value not in its immediate product (the princess story or a broken pot), but in the doctor, the worker herself, or, more precisely, in her labor power. The Princess story has no utility; it is a non-commodity which does not mean that the little girls labor is non-labor. She creates real value by writing the story, but this value is transferred only much later from her onto an entirely different product, the medical services. The value created by students is like the Sleeping Beauty that appears to be dead only to resurrect itself again under different circumstances in another form. The things produced by students are, in essence, means of production, like machines or materials in an industrial process. Here is how Marx describes the process of value transfer from the means of production to a new product: While productive labor is changing the means of production into constituent elements of a new product, their value undergoes metempsychosis. It deserts the consumed body, to occupy the newly created one. The property therefore which labor-power in action, living labor, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the laborer nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist inasmuch as it preserves the existing value of his capital. 9

23

CHAPTER 3

The specifics of learning as labor are that its material products are really shortlived. As soon as they are completed, they are already consumed, and the value created in them deserts them so quickly that no one even notices they had any value. Producing the princess story is consuming it; by the time the story is ready, it is consumed, and what remains is a valueless corpse of a thing. Yet the value created does not just disappear in smoke; it is now a part of the future doctors labor power, and is only awaiting the right circumstances to show up in medical services she provides. The doctor then not only creates new value but also preserves (transfers) the value created by her as a studentlargely as a free gift to her employer. Two Sides of Activity: A Definition of Education It is easy to notice that any labor, indeed any activity, has two sides to it: one side is increasing the value of the object of labor; another side is increasing the value of the labor power of the worker. In other words, any labor is a production of something external to the worker, and at the same time it is a process of changing the worker herself. Even an experienced potter learns something every time he makes a pot; this is why work experience is valued so much on the labor market. Marx never had a chance to develop the anthropology of labor, but he was certainly aware of the fact that a laborer, besides changing the material world around her, also changes herself: By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. 10 On the margins of The German Ideology, Marx wrote about two sides to every activity: transformation (Bearbeitung) of nature by people and transformation of people by people. 11 Let us notice that Marx is referring to that second side of activity as transformation of people by people. The change occurring in the laborer as a result of the labor process is significantly social in its nature. What we learn by doing something is a specifically human, or social way of doing it. The very notions of skill and knowledge refer to the social knowledge of better ways of doing things. I will need to abstract from this fact, however, so that the main point remains more visible: anything we do has two sides to itthe productive side, which refers to the immediate goal of the persons activity; and the learning side which is a sum of all gainful changes that occur in the person who is the subject of such activity. The mere fact that a person is learning something does not make his or her activity a learning activity, and it does not make the social institution in which it takes place educational. A distinction between learning activity and learning as an effect of any activity may help clarify the duality of human activity. Learning as an effect is present whenever we do something, whether we are active for pleasure, for utilitarian purposes, or specifically for learning. However, only when we do something primarily for learning, do we engage in a learning activity. For instance reading a

24

SCHOOL LEARNING AS LABOR

book for fun may result in some learning, but it is not a learning activity. Reading a book for school is a learning activity. The only difference between a learning activity and productive labor is that in learning activity, the first, productive side of labor is missing or greatly overshadowed by the second, learning side. In real, adult labor, the productive side of labor clearly dominates. Learning activity is simply the sort of labor with a hypertrophied side that Marx called the transformation of people by people. This difference defines learning activity and demarcates the boundaries of the whole of the educational world, not only of learning in schools. Of course, there exist a great variety of human activities with different ratios of the two sides; some are closer to learning activity, some to the productive labor. Some, like on-the-job training, are in between, which means that workers produce real commodities to be sold, but not as efficiently, and with lesser quality. Yet things being thrown away usually clearly indicate an educational institution. One can tell a school from a factory by their dumpsters. A school can be defined as a building where delivery trucks unload, but never load. Instead, every morning school busses bring as many children as they take away in the afternoon. Totally invisibly for drivers and for the passengers, the afternoon buses carry more valuable cargo than the morning busses do because of the value accumulated during the day in the minds and bodies of future laborers. There are times when learning occurs seemingly without producing any object, tangible or intangible, by simple listening and observing. Academic learning activity in a sense of gaining knowledge is a case of knowledge production. A distinction between knowledge production and knowledge consumption may prove helpful in understanding the economic significance of learning. One can produce knowledge without consuming it, and one can consume knowledge without producing it. One can also produce and consume knowledge at the same time. To produce knowledge is to record certain meaningful information on any mechanical, electronic, or biological media, including human memory. To consume knowledge is to use it for any number of practical and not so practical purposes, from impressing a cocktail party acquaintance to developing a new technology. Generally, people want to produce knowledge for at least four distinctive purposes, which separate four types of knowledge consumption. The first one is for immediate personal consumption. We open the phone book to produce some knowledge that is immediately useful for some practical task at hand. The second is knowledge gained for pure pleasure and without any practical goal in mind. In this case, knowledge production and knowledge consumption are very closely intertwined, but the type of consumption (pleasure) is different from type one. Such pleasurable consumption of knowledge is not without practical consequences (we never know what will become useful in the futurethis applies equally to theoretical physics and to watching Jeopardy), but its primary motivation is pleasure; Eros of the mind drives it. The third is to produce knowledge for others, knowledge to be sold or exchanged just like any other commodity. Most of the research and much of the information technology related work falls into this category. And finally, the fourth type of knowledge production is one specifically
25

CHAPTER 3

designed as a learning activity. As such, it is no different from producing faulty clay pots. What students produce is not new knowledge and it is as useless as broken pots or paper airplanes; it is obviously not the knowledge production of type three, since no one else consumes it. However, it is also rarely types one and two. The big hope of Progressive education was to change academic learning activity in a way that its components would fall into either type one, two, or three of knowledge production. Variations of the same hope still inspire many curriculum theorists. Admittedly, some serious progress has been made in this direction, and I would be the last to underestimate the importance of hands-on, project-oriented, student-centered, or constructivist learning. Yet theoretically it is very unlikely that such attempts will be ultimately successful. We cannot make all the knowledge production needed for contemporary education pleasurable or personally useful, or socially needed. The hope that all kids will learn quadratic equations and the names of amino acids out of sheer curiosity is simply unrealistic. In todays complex society, one has to produce enormous amounts of useless knowledge in order to be able to produce some useful knowledge. The real benefit of academic learning is not the knowledge that students produce; rather, it is the enhanced ability to produce knowledge of types one, two, and three. The Progressives have always had trouble realizing that to achieve their goal of totally motivated learning they would have to eliminate education itself. A school where kids learn out of sheer curiosity is really an entertainment establishment. A school where they make real discoveries and produce valuable information is a research firm. A school where kids learn only what they really need right now is a street corner. A school that is really a school is where students produce useless knowledge in order to learn to produce useful knowledge. For the purposes of my argument, learning activity can be defined as an activity, the immediate product of which is not as important as the changes that occur in the performer of the activity. Education, in turn, is a social sphere where learning activity plays a central role. 12 Education is the sum of social institutions and practices that are specifically designed and focused on the practices of learning activity, as defined above Who Benefits? Let us get back to the value created by learning activity. The total labor that goes into the value of each commodity on the market consists of two parts: the immediately productive labor and the labor of learning. The economic shadow of the little princess story, as intangible as it is, remains in the doctors mind and body, and quietly trickles down to the prescription slip. As I have pointed out earlier, the portion of learning labor tends to increase as society moves towards a more knowledge-based economy. A contemporary worker in an industrialized country spends at least 12-13 years in classroom, which means that for every three years of employment we spend one year in the classroom. Every hour of

26

SCHOOL LEARNING AS LABOR

productive work now requires almost 20 minutes of learning. Every 8-hour workday is in reality at least a 10-hour day, if we add years of education to it. Critics of schooling have long observed that most of the learning that takes place in schools is irrelevant to work experience; yet it makes no difference that much of the learning is irrelevant or has little to do with future productive labor. In part, this is only a perceived irrelevancy, resulting from the difficulty with which we can link the princess story with the medical services directly. Let us assume that part of learning is a complete waste of time, or is even detrimental to the value of labor power. Just as with any labor, the socially necessary waste and labor associated with that waste should be taken into consideration when determining the value of the final product. In other words even a skilled potter breaks a pot or two now and thenwe pay for the wasted materials and wasted labor anyway. The opinion that modern education is especially wasteful is true, but it has very little to do with economic value of learning. Here is Marx again: Suppose that in spinning cotton, the waste for every 115 lbs. used amounts to 15 lbs., which is converted, not into yarn, but into devils dust. Now, although these 15 lbs. of cotton never becomes a constituent element of the yarn, yet assuming this amount of waste to be normal and inevitable under average conditions of spinning, its value is just as surely transferred to the value of the yarn, as is the value of the 100 lbs. that form the substance of the yarn. The use-value of 15 lbs. of cotton must vanish into dust, before 100 lbs. of yarn can be made. 13 As long as more efficient forms of education are not a reality, the waste in education is a normal part of the economic process. I am using the term efficient only to indicate an idealized form of learning where all student activities would significantly contribute to increasing students skills and knowledge. Such an arrangement is possible, as I will explain in the last part of this book, but it does not exist now. As the labor of learning is hidden and removed from the actual production of commodities, contemporary capitalism uses it as an additional form of surplus value extraction. Students work for free for many years, and as a result their labor power accumulates enormous value. However, when time comes for workers to sell their labor power on the market, what they sell is their actual labor power, that is capacity for work, not their past labor power as students. The labor of learning and value created by it are not counted when labor power is sold. The difference between selling labor and selling labor power is the central claim Marx have made, and I refer the reader to the Capital for clarifications. One may object by suggesting that the value accumulated from learning results in the higher wages of a more qualified worker. In other words, though one can argue that learning is well paid as labor. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, having completed a bachelors degree increases ones lifetime income by $ 600,000. Following this logic, a college student makes $150,000 (in future earnings) per year just by being a student. Even considering the skyrocketing cost of higher education, this is not a bad investment. I am not denying that more
27

CHAPTER 3

educated labor power has more value and therefore costs more to employers. Yet the students own labor during the years of primary and secondary education is not taken into consideration when labor power is purchased. In other words, thought educated labor power has much more value than uneducated labor power, the difference is larger than the income figures may suggest. Let us assume for a moment that the Learn nowget paid later theory that the U.S. Federal government assumes to be true is valid. Even then, however, education may not benefit students that much, if at all. A high school graduate makes $ 821,000 during her lifetime (the Census bureau assumes average 40 years of work between ages of 25 and 65). The 13 years of schooling can be then assumed directly factored in. We should really spread the amount of earnings over 53 years of work life. Just by doing that we can see that the real average yearly income of a high school graduate is $15,490. Even the Statistic Brief tells us that the income of high school graduates actually dropped during the twenty years from 1974 to 1994 if adjusted for inflation. One needs a college education now to maintain the same standard of living that ones parents could afford with a high school diploma. In 1973, only 30% of high school graduates enrolled in college, but by 1993, 41% did. 14 In other words, people need to work longer hours to earn the same amount of money, if only we assume that learning is real, valueproducing work. Americans have some of longest workweeks in the world, 15 but on top of that, consider two facts. First, women who massively entered the workforce in previous decades dramatically increased the total workweek of an American family. 16 A two-income family works twice as much as a one-income family of the 50-s. Second, by shifting towards universal 13-year education, Americans now put significantly more hidden school hours into their total working time. It would take massive statistical research to illustrate these trends, and I must limit myself to pointing them out. The unprecedented economic growth is not only a result of new technologies; it is also a result of the unprecedented exploitation of a labor force educated to an unprecedented degree. I must acknowledge that these statistical manipulations make sense if, and only if, one spreads the lifetime income over the years of learning. In reality, however, students are not paid at all during their years of learning. The essential elements of sale and purchase of labor power are obviously missing here. The specific form of laborlabor of learningnever figures on the balance sheets of employers, it is never compensated, and is never thought of as labor. For all practical purposes, learning is work gratis. Students spend 13 years of their lives just to get to ground zero, where they become barely employable. Employers, in turn, accept much of these 13 years of value-creating labor as a free gift from the public and the workers. Most of this labor is unpaid, but moreover, it is compulsory. Securing unpaid labor is not a trivial task; it required mobilization of a number of cultural and political mechanisms of coercion.

28

SCHOOL LEARNING AS LABOR

*** The entire society greatly benefits from student labor; employers especially benefit from it, for they receive well educated workforce subsidized by the public money. As for the students, only some of them benefit, while others do not. For many students, school learning is a labor for someone else; why should we be surprised if they dislike it? Viewing school learning as labor allows focusing on its economics. Schooling is a puzzle that has an economic solution.
NOTES
1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15

16

Portions of this chapter first appeared in Alexander M. Sidorkin, Labor of Learning, Educational Theory 51/1 (2001): 91108, and then in Alexander M. Sidorkin, Learning Relations: Education, Deschooled Schools, & Dialogue With Evil (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002). Dewey, 182. Karl Marx, Capital (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1957), 16. Marx, 15. Marx, 93. To that extent. Marx, 81. US Census Bureau, More Education Means Higher Career Earnings, Statistical Brief (1994), http://www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/sb94_17.pdf. For more recent numbers, see Current Population Survey (CPS), A joint effort between the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/perinc/new03_001.htm. Marx, 100. Marx, 85. Bisher haben wir hauptschlich nur die eine Seite der menschlichen Ttigkeit, die Bearbeitung der Natur durch die Menschen betrachtet. Die andere Seite, die Bearbeitung der Menschen durch die Menschen Karl Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie, http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me03/me03_anm. htm#M1 I use the word sphere as Michael Walzer uses it in Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Marx, 99. Bureau of the Census, Our scholastic Society Statistical Brief, http://www.census.gov/apsd/www/ statbrief/sb94_25.pdf. In 1997, about 30 percent of men and 15 percent of women usually worked more than 44 hours per week: http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1998/dec/wk4/art03.htm. In 1991, there were 1.6 million latchkey kids in the US between the ages of 5 and 14, http://www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/sb94_5.pdf.

29

CHAPTER 4.

CHRYSALIZATION OF CLASS

The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the worldThey enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. 1 George Fitzhugh, 1857 If school learning is a form of productive labor, how is it organized? This chapter shows that the emergence of modern childhood can be explained by a need to secure the unpaid labor of school-aged children by means of extra-economic coercion. Pre-modern Europe needed to compel a growing segment of population to participate in unpaid work of school learning. It was accomplished by creating a special group with curtailed rights, and by convincing everyone that the labor of schooling was actually a kind of service provided to children. Ultimately, a modern conception of childhood was born of power relations formed by economic necessity. As I explained in Chapter 1, all education is rooted in power relations, but the form they take has varied throughout human history. The modern redefinition of childhood is a special case of social class formation. To support this claim, I will rely mainly on Philippe Ariss account. Foucault, Bourdieu, and Marx provided ways of thinking about mechanics of power and the nature of class. A disclaimer: the main thesis of Ariss Centuries of Childhood is overstated. No doubt,writes Aris,the discovery of childhood began in the thirteenth century, and its progress has can be traced in history of art in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. 2 It is unlikely that following Antiquity, Europeans had forgotten what children actually were. Age grouping is probably the most commonly noted anthropological phenomenon; why should Medieval Europe be an exception? Some of Ariss evidence is dubious, too. 3 For example, he thinks that medieval artists failed to perceive any distinct physical features in children, and depicted them as smaller adults. Aesthetic conventions would explain this choice of representation much better. Yet Aris is not a historian in the traditional sense; rather, he is a history-inspired thinker like Foucault. His analytic descriptions are worth much more than his conclusions. Almost any way of grouping people may be used in power relations. Some differences are culturally based (caste, lineage, religion, ethnicity, class), while others use an existing biological marker (gender, race, and possibly sexual orientation, but also shade of skin color, hair structure, facial features). In the latter case, one can always tell the difference between a man and a woman, a child and an adult or dark skin versus light skin, but making those distinctions significant is a feature of a given societys power techniques. Childhood is one of such categories, loosely based on biology, but utilized in a specific form of power relations. Europeans, like all humans, have always known that children are physically and developmentally different from adults. What Aris describes is an instance of the

31

CHAPTER 4

reinvention rather than invention of childhood to accommodate a new form of division of labor. Redefining Childhood Aris demonstrates several means by which childhood was redefined in the European societies at the end of the Middle Ages. Among these means are: distinctive dress; segregation from adults in play and work; exaggeration of childrens immaturity; the idea of childhood innocence that needs protection; linking schooling to biological age; stripping students of political self-governance and the withdrawal of many previously existing rights; corporal punishment and intrusive supervision. The history of childhood resembles the formation of other subjugated groups, such as lower classes, women, the non-European races, etc. The same legal and cultural mechanisms, the same rhetorical techniques, and the same ideological moves were employed. Moreover, children were symbolically linked to and compared with such groups already subjugated. Aris describes the appearance of a special dress to set children apart from adults. Every social nuance had its corresponding sign in clothing. At the end of the sixteenth century, custom dictated that childhood, henceforth recognized as a separate entity, should also have its special costume. Aris notes that boys were the first specialized children; 4 their dress was made distinct much sooner, perhaps because boys began going to school in large numbers in the late sixteenth century. Three elements separated a middle class boys dress from that of an adult: it was archaic, effeminized, and reminiscent of lower classes. The symbolism here is quite clear: children were linked to backwards times, and to old, feeble people. Boys were made to look like girls, a reference to another dominated group. Finally, the link to the lower class evoked the imagery of subordination. Sailors suites, short pants, and militaristic uniformall of these signified patterns of subordination to not just adult authority, but the authority of adult institutions such as schools. Interestingly, the fashions in childrens dress did not penetrate the lower classes: They kept up the old way of life which made no distinction between children and adults, in dress or in work or in play. 5 This happened, I believe, because lower class kids did not go to school, so there was no need to subjugate them beyond already available class and social status domination. There were also claims of innocence. The simple assertion that children are not supposed to have sexual desires or violent impulses creates a whole class of young deviants, and helps keep the rest of the children in check. Aris writes (approvingly, one must note) that towards the end of the sixteenth century, certain pedagogues refused to allow children to be given indecent books any longer. The idea originated of providing expurgated editions of the classics for the use of children. This was a very important stage, which may be regarded as marking the beginning of respect for childhood. 6 Respect has little to do with this. Consider women, who constituted another group whose submission was assured by the presumption of innocence. If women and children as groups are by nature innocent, then one has to make sure each
32

CHRYSALIZATION OF CLASS

individual child and woman are made to comply with their nature by any means necessary. And then, of course, women need to be subordinated to men, so their innocence can be protected from corruption. The idea of keeping children ignorant of sexual matters is but a sophisticated way of controlling them. If we assume that children are not supposed to have sexual (or any other bodily) desires, any manifestations of such desires will serve as evidence of their corruption, and therefore justify their dependency on adult authority. In exactly the same way, women who have shown sexual desire or aggression were justifiably subjugated to men, simply because such behaviors went against their presumed nature. Linked to innocence, was the idea of immaturity: the better to distinguish schoolboys from adults, it was necessary to exaggerate the puerility of their characters, even of the oldest among them. 7 The presumption of immaturity (puerility) is the basic justification for limiting childrens electoral, property, and personal rights, and compulsory education. The concept of the separate nature of childhood, of its difference from the world of adults, began with the elementary concept of its weakness, which brought it down to the lowest social strata. 8 There is a reason to believe that immaturity is not only greatly exaggerated, but is specifically trained, created. Consider the classic experiments of Jean Piaget. He had shown that young childrens cognition is different from that of adults: they cannot comprehend laws of conservation; they believe that a row of six bids widely spaced has more bids than a row with the same number of bids positioned closer together. In their famous Naughty Bear experiment, McGarrigle and Donaldson have demonstrated that children react to the expectations of the adult conducting experiment, while they actually understand the conservation laws. 9 They interpret the request to compare the two strings of beads as a hint that the adult wants them to find a difference, and comply. If the experiment is reconstructed to eliminate such bias (the Naughty Bear came and disrupted the bead lines), children correctly conclude that the number of beads is the same regardless of how wide they are spread. In general, childrens immaturity may be as much a result of social expectations as it is a result of their innate limitations. There is also some evidence that powerlessness negatively affects performance. Pamela Smith and her colleagues have experimentally shown that a lack of social power reduces a persons ability to keep track of information and make plans to achieve her goals. 10 This suggests that childrens low performance on cognitive tasks can also be a result of their utter powerlessness rather than of innate immaturity. Political Subjugation The emergence of childhood also had all the signs of a political struggle. Aris describes in detail that until the end of Middle Ages, student life was governed by traditional customs of comradeship and self-government. 11 Yet as early as fifteenth century, ecclesiastic and civil authorities systematically sought to strip the student societies of self-governance. This was not met with indifference, but
33

CHAPTER 4

resulted in violent, sometimes armed confrontations between students and authorities. In the middle of the fifteenth century, certain aristocrats had funded houses (colleges) at the University of Paris for poor students. Soon after, well-todo families started to send their own offspring to the colleges, because of their stricter discipline. Aris comments: Thus with the institution of the college appeared a feeling unknown to the Middle Ages and which would grow in strength until the end of the nineteenth century: revulsion at the idea of mingling of the ages. Henceforth schoolboys would tend to be separated from adults and submitted to a discipline peculiar to their position. 12 Eventually, a new system of discipline emerged. This system was distinguished by three principal characteristics: constant supervision, informing raised to the level of an institution and a principle of government, and the extended application of corporal punishment. 13 Corporal punishment, virtually unheard of until the end of fourteenth century, had become common and brutal. Initially applied only to the youngest and the poorest of students, by the sixteenth century, corporal punishment had become ubiquitous. In the adult world, being subjected to corporal punishment was a marker of lower class; students of all classes suffered from humiliating public beatings. 14 In the second half of the eighteenth century, French colleges (but not English schools) had largely abandoned both corporal punishment and the use of student informants. It was not so much a sign of liberation, as an advent of a more militaristic model of discipline. After Napoleon I, French schools resembled barracks more than cloisters. Aris believes that this development indicated the birth of adolescence. This notion of adolescence was to bring about a major transformation of education: the pedagogues henceforth attributed a moral value to uniform and discipline. 15 The militarization of schooling could be viewed as the replacement of compulsion mechanism. Schooling was equated with service and sacrifice. The ethics of toughness and heroism was nothing but a labor extraction mechanism, an ideology justifying unpaid labor. The correlation of the adolescent and the soldier, in school, resulted in an emphasis on characteristics such as toughness and virility which had hitherto been neglected and which henceforth were valued for themselves. 16 Aris believes the subjugation of children was well worth the pain: The solicitude of family, Church, moralists and administrators deprived the child of the freedom he had hitherto enjoyed among adults. It inflicted on him the birch, the prison cellin a word, the punishments usually reserved for convicts from the lowest strata of society. But this severity was the expression of a very different feeling from the old indifference: an obsessive love which was to dominate society from the eighteenth century on. 17 The obsessive love is a particular way of channeling the affective currents to forge dependency, and to achieve compliance. Aires becomes a victim to what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence, which is the violence which extorts submission, which is not perceived as such, based on collective expectations or socially inculcated beliefs. 18 The use of such violence
34

CHRYSALIZATION OF CLASS

has one major consequence: the transfiguration of relations of domination into affective relations. 19 This is what happened to childhood, but why it happened can be explained by one word: schooling. The Connection to Schooling While Aris documents a clear connection between childhood and schooling, he does not explain the causes for the gradual emergence of the new childhood. He claims that children had become relatively much more important; therefore, adults paid more attention to them, and invested in their education. Aris remains a prisoner of the assumption that education in general and schooling in particular benefit mostly its bearer, so the school learning is self-enriching and self-fulfilling work. I would argue that the very notion of education as self-enriching, or as a vehicle of upward social mobility, was an ideology imposed on children to ensure their compliance with societys demands for unpaid labor of school learning. It was an act of symbolic violence with economic purposes. The gradual emergence of the knowledge-intensive economy revealed one crucial bottleneckeducation. Starting with the invention of printing, human knowledge became remarkably easy to accumulate and transmit; machines and division of labor made most forms of labor infinitely more productive. The cost of such a transition was that now many more people need to learn to use all this information. The laborer, a crucial component of the information-labor cycle, has a nasty habit of dying, and taking all his knowledge to the grave. To combat this constant leak of knowledge, we have developed a huge industry that fills the new workers with the knowledge and attitudes needed in the new economy. How does one secure sufficient labor for the new industry? How does one compel all these children to work? Forced labor came as an obvious solution, and it came packaged with certain cultural/political tools. Linking schooling to biological age was a successful attempt to confine the labor of schooling to a specific, easily identifiable group. Just as racial slavery was a more efficient way of domination than a race-neutral one, equating childhood with studenthood used a pre-existing biological marker to define a newly subjugated group. The confinement and strict discipline of schooling, the subjugation of children served one main purpose; to make more students work harder, and without pay. Efficiency gains in school labor come from stricter discipline, which in turn, means shortening of free time, and increase of on-task time. To this day, this is the main way to gain productivity of school learning; it is not better teaching methods or better curriculum. This has to do with specifics of learning: unlike any other labor, its efficiency directly depends on effort, and such labor cannot be significantly automated or specialized and divided. Learning is still extremely time consuming, tedious, and labor-intensive; it is an archaic kind of work, characteristic of pre-industrial civilizations. By its very nature, learning is difficult; since the results are proportional to effort, no machine will do much good. Drudgery has been leaving fields and factories only to reappear in schoolhouses. Such a shift has created a new social class of school-aged students.
35

CHAPTER 4

Children as a Class of Bound Laborers Can this new group be called a class? Vladimir Lenin has provided the best Marxist definition of class, for Marx himself had not done so: Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. 20 The definition fits well. K-12 students are a group of people who work in a specific industry, performing a specialized form of labor. The society uses a number of legal and cultural devices to make sure students perform the required work. They are denied basic legal rights, and are subjected to a separate legal system. The state exercises some ownership rights over the persons of children through provisions of school authority. The school-aged children cannot own property, and are legally barred from entering the existing free labor market. This is to ensure that they perform only one form of labor: school learning. Laws compel them to attend school, and compel their parents to ensure such attendance. Students economic situation is similar to some other forms of non-free labor, such as indentured servants of colonial America or bound laborers in the British Empire. However, the childrens legal condition is most similar to chattel slavery. 21 Parents act like owners whose rights are regulated: children cannot be sold, but also cannot be practically emancipated; they may be transferred from one owner to another. The state also monitors humane treatment of children (which was also common in American slavery), while recognizing parents almost unlimited authority over them, except for preservation of life, health, and the absence of physical abuse. Parental authority over children looks more and more as if it is delegated to parents by the state, which has an overriding interest in ensuring large and uninterrupted supply of student labor. The phenomenon of non-free or bound labor was and still is common throughout the world. The capitalist labor markets have never been comprehensive, and always included large islands of non-market labor relations: the domestic labor of women, military service (both conscripted and voluntary), the modern New World slavery, serfdom, peonage, and other forms of bound labor, as well as volunteerism. Although we may admire some institution on this list, and condemn others, this does not change the deep economic affinity of these forms of labor: they all require extra-economic mechanisms, because they all are unpaid or underpaid. In some cases, they depend on brutal force, in otherson symbolic violence, and in moston the force of law. Moreover, the contemporary labor market uses multiple ways of obtaining labor at significant discounts. Examples of such semi-free labor are both legal and illegal immigrants, women and minorities. Yet compulsory schooling dwarfs any other forms of non-free labor by the number

36

CHRYSALIZATION OF CLASS

of workers employed and value produced by the industry: almost 1/5 of the American population are students. Aris was confused by the apparent ambivalence of the emerging childhood: it had all the signs of subjugation, and yet it apparently resulted in betterment for children. The liberty afforded to children in the Middle Ages is appealing, if a bit shocking, and yet their well-organized, disciplined modern status can be interpreted as a sign of general progress. From the very beginning, the formation of the new subjugated class has been disguised as an act of liberation, which is typical of symbolic violence. I would argue that such a disguise is strictly ideological, and does not alter the underlying relationship of economic exploitation. Children are just another class of bound laborers, whose work benefits the public at large to a much greater extent than it benefits the individual student. The Economic Chrysalis Traditional classes implied membership for life for overwhelming majority of their members. This feature was and still is the main cause of class struggle. Yet contemporary knowledge-based capitalism has changed this assumption. Nothing in the notion of the class requires such a vertical, along the life-span separation. Some economic domination is distributed differently now. Throughout their life spans, many people now move from dominated to the dominant groups. I will call this phenomenon the chrysalization of class. Like butterflies, we undergo social metamorphosis throughout our lives. In addition to traditional classes, the population can also be sliced horizontally. For the first few decades of human life, one has to be an economic chrysalis, compelled to perform unpaid labor. Later in life, a significant part of population will migrate into a more prosperous position; some will also reach retirement age and wont have to work at all. The purpose of the class division is still the same: to extract labor. Yet the new chrysalized class structure has none of the ills of the classic class struggle. An individual is put into a position where she exploits her younger self for the benefit of the larger society. However, the new situation also hides the old class structure. The trick is that many chrysalises will never turn into the butterflies, and will never benefit from the unpaid labor of their childhood. The official truth is that no one really knows which ones will and which will not turn, and that it depends on how hard they have worked. Such is the myth of contemporary meritocracy. However, all chrysalises will intuitively figure out their chances rather well, relatively early on, and these expectations become the self-fulfilling prophecies of the new economic order. *** Children as a quasi-class emerged when demand for learning labor in schools becomes noticeable. Children were marked by special dress, segregated in separate group for the purposes of work and play; they were re-described as immature and innocent. Of course, the saga of the invention of childhood does not end; its new chapter unfolded with the advent of the industrial revolution.
37

CHAPTER 4

NOTES
1

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, Electronic Edition, (Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998; original 1857) 2930. Philippe Aris, Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life; translated from the French by Robert Baldick (New York : Vintage, 1962): 46. For a critique of Aris, see Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-child Relations from 1500 to 1900. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 268269. Aris, 57. Aris, 61. Aris, 109. Aris, 164. Aris, 262. See the description in J. McGarrigle and M. Donaldson, Conservation Accidents, Cognition 3 (1974): 341350. From he that hath not, The Economist, 387/8581, May 2430, 2008, 104. Aris, 253. Aris, 156. Aris, 254. Aris, 261 Aris, 267. Aris, 267. Aris, 413. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998): 103. Bourdieu, 102. Vladimir Lenin, A Great Beginning, Marxist Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/1919/jun/19.htm For legal support of such a claim, see: Diane I. Bonina, Ruth A. Bahe-Jachna, The Treatment Of Children as Chattel in Recent Adoption Decisions, Human Rights Magazine 28/2 (1999), http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/sp99bonina.html.

38

CHAPTER 5.

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND MASS SCHOOLING

In this chapter, I will continue to consider the origins of childhood and of the school labor as both changed during the industrial revolution. Child Labor Laws If we assume learning to be labor, then the compulsory character of education comes to new grim light. It is one thing to justify compulsory learning, if it something a student does for his own good, but it is much more difficult to justify compulsory labor. Here is how the U.S. Department of Labor used to describe the history of the child labor laws to kids: From the mid 1800s to the early part of this century, many young children were employed in what we now call sweatshop conditions. These children spent many hours working hard at dangerous jobs instead of going to school and getting a good education. Many factories and other firms hired kids because they could be paid less than adults. Many children were overworked and underpaid, often working 16 hours a day, six days a week, and earning only pennies an hour. Kids often were injured or killed while working under these brutal conditions. The child labor laws came into being to stop these abuses and help young people obtain schooling. These laws were passed to protect the health, safety, and well being of young workers while at the same time affording them an opportunity to obtain an education. 1 The introduction of universal compulsory education is clearly linked to the abolition of child labor. In 1827 Massachusetts adopted the nations first compulsory education law, mandating tax-supported schools in every Massachusetts community with 500 families or more. In 1836 Massachusetts Legislature adopted a law prohibiting the employment of any child under 15 years of age who had received less than three months of schooling in the previous year. 2 As years passed, child labor became more and more obsolete, but schooling became more and more compulsory, sometimes absurdly so. In the late nineties, Detroit parents, for instance, could spend 90 days in jail if their children skip school. 3 It looks bad enough if you think of schools as forced baby-sitting; this looks even worse if they are in fact forced sweatshops. Let me mention again, that if I ignore the social aspect of schooling (the imposing of work ethics, reproduction of class structure, etc.) that Marxist theorists described, it is not because I think of it as unimportant, but simply because from the point of view of social justice the core of schoolinglearning activityis as worrisome as the social aspect of schooling. David Nasaw documents the prominent role of manufacturers in establishing compulsory education: It was they [manufacturersA.S.], after all, who were most in need ofand best able to profit fromthe character-trained and disciplined workforce the common schools intended to provide. 4 After brief initial support, working class organizations had become either indifferent to common
39

CHAPTER 5

school reform, or demanded changes to curriculum, and supported education outside schools. He notices, that The South, by hitching its future to cotton and slavery, ruled out common schooling. 5 In other words, common school reform is clearly tied to the industrial revolution and the labor needs of industrial capitalism. [Universal schooling] was contingent on something reformers could not produce: the acceptance of child labor regulations by employers themselves. Without this acceptancebased on the recognition that unregulated child labor was destroying workers before they reached their productive primeno child labor or compulsory schooling legislation could produce widespread common school enrolment. 6 This seems to be only a partial explanation of how common school reform is linked to the industrial revolution. Indeed, manufacturers cared about plentiful and cheap labor, but they also cared about an obedient and trained workforce. Common schooling reduced labor expenses and maintenance costs, because more educated laborers were less likely to damage machinery and more likely to follow directions. If the taxpayers agreed to support the initial work training, this in effect reduced manufacturers expenses on the same. Manufacturers not only cared about saving labor power from premature destruction; they also supported public investment in raising labor powers value. One may dispute the extent to which the value of labor power increased through 19th century common schooling. However, because it was, essentially, public subsidy, any positive return on zero investment would be a gift. More precisely, manufacturers have lost the discounts on labor cost associated with child labor. In the end, common schools have become reality when the losses of discounted child labor were outweighed by the benefits of having educated laborers. The Invention of Adolescence In the twentieth century, notes Nasaw, educational reformers shifted their attention to adolescents, when G. Stanley Hall invented the notion of adolescence. 7 The obsession with youth sexuality is similar to the obsession with childrens sexuality described in the previous chapter. Halls argument was that adolescent sexuality (delinquency) must be controlled. The claim coincided with influx of immigrant and rural youth into the cities. Though the psychologists provided the conceptual framework around which the adolescent problem was constructed, it was the reformers who provided the problem with its solutions. 8 The result was not only argument for including adolescents in the compulsory education framework, but also a specific change in legal status of adolescents. The Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899 was the first step in that direction. This was an act of direct stripping of legal rights from an entire group of population singled out by its age. Again, I argue that the expansion of childhood into adolescence has economic rather than simply cultural reasons. It is simply a way of reinforcing the justification for compulsory school labor of adolescents.
40

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND MASS SCHOOLING

I cant resist sharing an anecdote about the juvenile justice system. My son, then a teenager, was issued a traffic ticket for violation of a non-existing ordinance the police office invented on the spot. Upon a discovery of this problem, the public defender (!) came up with another ordinance that might have been violated; the judge then tried to find something in the law to make the ticket stick. Finally, he exclaimed that, well, the young man must have violated something, and needed to learn a lesson for his own good, and issued both a ticket and community service, for yet another offense. He was genuinely concerned with driving a lesson home, and not at all concerned about the law. Our experience is not at all unique, and the juvenile courts educational bent often results in arbitrary punitive actions. 9 Police harassment of youth is also very common, although it does not attract as much attention as racial and ethnic profiling. The unconstitutional youth curfews are relatively common, and no one seems to be bothered about them. Why? It is because youth cannot vote, or bring law suits against authorities. Once you strip a group of people of legal rights, no one is there to restore them. It must be noted, that the trend to control adolescent sexuality and other vices is stronger now than ever before: various abstinence movements, sex education, teacher-student sex scandals, all get to the same point: young people need supervision, because otherwise they might develop wrong desires. And if their desires look exactly like ours, well, they are young and therefore must not have those desires. The circular reasoning does not stop anyone. The trend may actually be expanding into post-adolescent ages. For example, the current U.S. Law extends economic dependency of young people on their parents well beyond legal definition of adulthood. To be declared an independent for the purposes of college financial aid, an undergraduate student must be 24 years old. Is this the new territory of expanding childhood, the conquest made in the name of education? The abolition of child labor in industrialized nations was in fact a shift to a different, more efficient, and unpaid form of child labor of mass school learning. It is very similar to the shift described in the previous chapter, but now involves more and more youngsters for more and more years. Let us notice that the 19th century child labor was still paid at a higher rate than the labor of learning in the 21st century. As terrible as working conditions were, the child factory laborer of the 19th century could still support himself; a contemporary child is completely dependent on his parents or on public support. In other words, more people are forced to work for more years and lesser pay as students. No doubt, the conditions of child labor in early industry were much harsher than the current conditions of child laborers in schools. However, it makes more sense to compare schools to contemporary offices and factories, not old ones. Similarly, schooling is the best choice for children in developing countries, but we cannot compare our schools to the third world sweatshops. Conditions for children have improved alongside similar improvements for adults. However, their economic condition did not improve in comparison to the adults. Compulsory schooling is a contemporary form of child labor. The huge accumulated invisible value from the child labor of learning becomes a major source of corporate profit and economic growth. The unprecedented gains
41

CHAPTER 5

in work productivity are only possible with the more educated labor force. To do well in todays economy, a capitalist needs to convince workers to spend many long years in school preparing themselves for the workplace of the future. A theory like human capital, or a version of it the U.S. Census Bureau subscribes to is quite suitable for it. Unfortunately, large portion of educational theory implicitly supports such a theory by searching for better forms of learning without thinking about who really benefits from it. Justifications for Compulsory Schooling There are many justifications for the compulsory schooling. The theoretical wheels have been churning non-stop since the practice in need of justification became common. I will only briefly mention two. First is the notion that education benefits the student. I address this in Chapters 3 and 12. Even if school learning is beneficial to students, what do we mean by a student? Human life looks genuinely different from different vantage points; one may not plausibly describe a human life only in terms of development. What is the economic interest of a child? We often assume that it is the same as one of a potential adult contained in the child. Indeed, from an adults point of view, working hard in school is a great choice. However, this is mostly hindsight wisdom. There is a logical fallacy here: Because you will thank me in the future, I can force you to do something now. Yet your future thankfulness is a direct result of my present use of force, so it is a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Does the anticipated result justify todays denial of rights, and to what extent? The discussion on intergenerational justice, initiated by Rawls, 10 brings forth the existence of certain ethical obligations to the people of the future and of the past. 11 The problem is, we do not have relationships of reciprocity with people who do not yet exist, and we do not know their identity (or what they would want). While there is a strong claim in favor of inter-generational justice, it is limited by such considerations. Following a similar logic, we must acknowledge our obligations to the potential adult, yet such obligations are limited by the mere potentiality of such a being, and by our lack of knowledge of his or her preferences. At the very least, we have certain obligations to actual children that are different from our obligations to potential adults. Our obligations to actual children must be governed by general concepts of justice, which exclude forced labor. Children have a right to exercise their own judgment about what constitutes their self-interest. We may consider it erroneous, but we cannot deny it on the basis of such a consideration. 12 Another ethical justification of compulsory education is related to the notion of the self-regarding duty: children owe it to themselves to learn, and if they do not understand it, we should force them to learn. Marcus G. Singer lays out the case against self-regarding duty as following: (1) Your duty to another person implies a right that person has against you. One cannot have the right against oneself; therefore, one cannot have a duty to oneself. (2) An obligation implies the ability to break it (a physically unbreakable obligation does not have an ethical content), or be released from it. One cannot meaningfully release oneself from an obligation
42

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND MASS SCHOOLING

to oneself or refuse to carry it out. I find these arguments convincing, because duty as a moral category is very difficult to use out of context of relationship between at least two distinct individuals. What does the existence of self-regarding duty mean, exactly? It seems that the only way such a duty can exist is that if someone else (like the teacher) enforces the duty, or at least reminds about its existence. In other words, how do you find out about the existence of such a duty?why, from someone else informing you about it. The reminder is an act of enforcing the duty. And what exactly is the role of the informer/enforcer? If the duty is to oneself, what right and interest does anyone have to insist on that duty being carried out? It does look like the self-regarding duty is a duty to the informer/enforcer who does not want to acknowledge ones interest in enforcing it. Teachers cannot ignore their own self-interest in the context of the childrens interest discussion. If we are asked to be honest with students, this conflict of interest cannot be ignored. Teachers jobs depend on students willing or unwilling compliance; therefore a teacher who appeals to students sense of duty must at least disclose that he directly benefits from students willing compliance. It would also be ethical to disclose to them that the society as a whole greatly benefits from a well-educated workforce and citizenry. Even if it is in the interest of students to do well in school, one would be unethical to hide the fact that many other people benefit from that. The credibility of a moral argument depends on such disclosures. The paternalistic restriction of anothers will can only be permitted when actual consent is impossible to obtain. For example, an unconscious person cannot consent to life support removal, but in all cases, the preference of the patient must be respected. A small child cannot give consent because of linguistic or cognitive development, or ignorance of possible consequences. Furthermore, the paternalistic enforcer should know that any action in question would benefit the child beyond all reasonable doubt. A small child should be stopped from walking into a busy street, because adults have very specific knowledge that it is likely to harm her. Both of these conditions are not met in case of forcing children to learn. Children can articulate their willingness to learn; they can learn later in life, and finally, we do not know for certain that lack of education will cause them foreseeable and considerable harm. Paternalistic enforcement is an extreme measure. Thankfully, it is not the only way of ensuring willing compliance. Everywhere but in education, we pay people to do things they wont do for pleasure. Beneath the rhetoric of self-regarding duty, teachers more commonly remind students that uneducated individuals become a burden to society, so the obligation is to the society, not to oneself. But this does not work well either. Society also needs the willing compliance of construction workers to the will of managers and engineers, but it does not appeal to their sense of duty to secure such compliance. Rather, we pay workers for performing such work. *** The history of childhood and adolescence I tried to outline in the two preceding chapters put learning labor in a historical context. My main claim is that childhood
43

CHAPTER 5

and then adolescence emerged as a response to the needs of schooling. This is not something new, because education has always been based on dominance; it always required the exercise of power over the learner. However, contemporary notions of childhood and adolescence are historically specific forms of such dominance, linked to the institution of schooling with its bound labor. To secure the unpaid labor of children and adolescents, it was necessary to describe them as being very different from adults, and therefore to find justification for limiting their rights. Understanding school learning as labor can put a very different light on the history of childhood and adolescence, and may make it more difficult to see it as a story of uninterrupted progress. School learning is labor in the economic sense of this word. It does create tremendous value embedded in labor power. However its organization as unpaid, compulsory labor creates certain problems for schools, learning motivation being the chief one. I will now explore some of the consequences of this essential problem. Part II is a critique of schooling meant not only to show what is wrong with it, but also how it really works, and what its limitations are.
NOTES
1

5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12

U.S. Department of Labor, http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/youth/cltour1.htm (retrieved in 2001, no longer available). Child Labor, Encyclopedia Encarta. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761552027/child_ labor.html. Brian Harmon, Truants parents may be charged, The Detroit News, November 29, 1999, http://www.detnews.com. David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Nasaw, 4850. Nasaw, 80. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence; its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904). Nasaw, 93. Aaron Victor Cicourel, The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971). I acknowledge an extensive use of the debates summary by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-intergenerational. This ethical argument is surely insufficient, yet I was unable either to elaborate on it within the limits of the book, or skip it altogether.

44

PART II. A CRITIQUE OF SCHOOLING

CHAPTER 6.

THE LABOR OF NON-LEARNING

Two groups of people can engage in opposite behaviors, and both can consider these activities to be productive. For example, building houses and demolishing houses are both proper kinds of productive labor. Helping women to get pregnant and helping other women not to get pregnant are also both respectable medical practices. The economic meaning and value of a certain activity depends not so much on the behavioral content of it, as on how the market valuates its results. Similarly, both learning and non-learning can be presented as positive economic contributions, as two distinct forms of labor performed by different groups of students, but both producing value for the market economic system. In this chapter, I develop a framework for understanding the school failure in terms of political economy. The basic assumption of this chapter is that certain percentage of failing schools is good for the economy, therefore powerful economic interest must be behind maintaining schools that fail. The failure itself can be understood in economic terms. Non-Learning as Work Herbert Kohl has made a convincing case for separating failure to learn from refusal to learn. Failure can only be possible when one makes an effort, but does not succeed. The non-learning is a conscious effort to avoid learning. We are not sure how much of school failure can be attributed to failure proper, and how much is a result of non-learning. However, Kohls account suggests that the role of nonlearning is significant. Kohls book warrants attention at this age of accountability, the rhetoric of which largely ignores the role of students will and free choice. Kohl suggests that conscious non-learning is an activity requiring students ingenuity, and an expenditure of energy and creativity. In his view, not learning in schools is often motivated by a rejection of the system of schooling. Kohl describes such students: They had consciously placed themselves outside the entire system that was trying to coerce or seduce them into learning and spent all their time and energy in the classroom devising ways of not-learning, shortcircuiting the business of failure altogether. They were engaged in a struggle of wills with authority. 1 Regardless of motivation, though, these students need to make an effort not to learn, just as other students make an effort to learn. From a purely psychological point of view, learning and non-learning are remarkably similar activities. Kohl is far from idealizing the phenomenon of resistance to learning. He acknowledges that such resistance can be very costly to the student. The balance of gains and losses resulting from such a turning from experience is difficult to assess. 2 For example, he regrets his own youthful resistance to learning Yiddish, which prevented him from developing important relationships later in life. However, Kohl also tells very sympathetic stories about the non-learners, and shows how the refusal to learn can make sense, and even be necessary to maintain
47

CHAPTER 6

students dignity. To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes a major loss of self. 3 In other words, he implies that non-learning is an unfortunate consequence of the wrong teacher-student relationship, or the relationship between students and the world of schooling as a whole. Kohls observations about conscious non-learning are important for my task here, because they establish non-learning as an activity, as a rational expenditure of students energy. It can be plausibly defined as work, that is as a purposeful activity not directly motivated by any immediate need. Of course, some students goof around just for the sheer fun of it, but this is not what we are considering here. The non-learning Kohl describes is a systematic, planned, and not very pleasurable work one has to do, rather than an exercise in self-entertaining leisure. Nevertheless, his classification of non-learning as resistance does not help us understand the economic implications of non-learning. Kohl underestimates the degree to which the economy of schooling uses the work of non-learning as a special form of labor. Ironically, the resistance to the system also makes the system stronger. Whatever the motivation non-learners have, they contribute to the national economy rather than subtract from it. Labor of the Unemployed Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it was clearly understood by contemporaries that industrial capitalism depends on the availability of a workforce that is destitute without industrial employment. Marx has done extensive historical and theoretical analysis that shows how the working class can only be forced to work at factories if all other means of sustenance are expropriated from it. Wages alone cannot motivate and discipline workers; the fear of losing their jobs is just as important an economic factor. the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. 4 Marx has shown that industrial capitalism began with the forcible removal of agricultural population from land, and making their labor power available for sale. From the end of the fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth centuries, the series of acts Marx calls bloody legislation both forced the dispossessed to seek work for a starvation wage, and actually legislated maximum pay. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labor, and
48

THE LABOR OF NON-LEARNING

therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the laborer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. 5 In other words, fear of starvation was an extremely important economic factor of the early industrial capitalism of the primitive accumulation period. The European governments did not hesitate to use direct political power to force former peasants to seek employment in the nascent industries. However, the whole structure of industrial capitalism was based on economic coercion rather than on direct state violence. For the economic coercion to work, society needed the figure of a beggar with his ultimately unpleasant life, shunned upon by moral authorities and persecuted by the state. To ensure that working class individuals made the choice between factory and work and vagabondage, the latter needed to be sufficiently unattractive: Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless someone will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offence, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless someone will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons. 6 The class structure of capitalist society remained relatively simple until the twentieth century, so a simple understanding of the working class motivation was sufficient. However, contemporary post-industrial capitalism has produced a much more complicated, multilayered social structure that includes both unskilled and low-skilled manual labor as well as several categories of blue and white collar workers. The structure of wages has changed, and so has the structure of fear. From a fear of starvation and flogging, it gradually became the complex multilayered fear of a lower-paying job. Hunger is a powerful biological force capable of shaping human behavior, along with the avoidance of pain and pursuit of sexual pleasure. When the threat of hunger ceased to be the primary motivator to work, certain economic and cultural changes had to occur to make the fear of a lower paying job as effective as the fear of hunger. The option of working for a wage has become immeasurably more appealing to a worker. However, the option of not working had to stay sufficiently unappealing to create the needed motivational tension. The figure of the modern vagabond had to be created. Milton Friedman has developed the economic theory of the natural rate of inflation, widely accepted by economists, and apparently by the American Federal Reserve. The theory accepts the need for a certain level of unemployment, which safeguards the economy from hyperinflation. Because of the embarrassing nature of the theory, most economists prefer to use the euphemism NAIRU, which stands for Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. 7 Simply put, low levels of unemployment will create pressure from workers to increase wages and

49

CHAPTER 6

benefits. The economic cost of hyperinflation could be staggering, so it is better to maintain 5% of reserve workforce than risk entering into inflationary cycles. The link between unemployment and inflation is very simple and still explainable by Marx original theory. The unemployed manufacture and sell fear: the fear of losing ones job and becoming just like them. Similarly, workers of every level manufacture fear of downward mobility for the consumption of those just above them. The cost of labor for employers is higher than direct wages and benefits; they have to pay for the fear employees have of losing their jobs. Capitalists purchase that fear and then use it to motivate and manage their own workforce. No workplace discipline, no gains on productivity would be possible without the threat of firing, which in turn depends on the presence of the visible unemployed minority. The price of fear is maintaining unemployment at a certain level, supporting the unemployed, and slowing down the rate of economic growth (and consequently, diminishing profits) to maintain certain a level of unemployment. When the Federal Reserve Board raises the short-term interest rates, effectively cooling off the economy, no one in the industry gets upset about lost profits. Business people understand that such is the price of the precious commodity of fear. Fear is as necessary to the economy as oil, research, and raw materials. It is an invisible commodity, but it has very tangible economic value. Being unemployed can be considered labor in the literal economic sense of the word. The unemployed and the low-skilled workers perform an important economic function of motivating those just above their own economic status. As soon as unemployment becomes too low (although this value has become debatable in the 1990s), the pressure from workers for higher wages is likely to create higher inflation, or even hyperinflation. Of course, the cost of unemployment is significant, but the potential cost of low unemployment is much, much higher. Clintons welfare reform was thus an attempt to reduce the cost of the fear manufactured by the unemployed; it is, in effect, a pay cut administered to the unemployed labor. The U.S. Federal Reserve will not allow full employment, while the U.S. Federal Government cuts the benefits for the unemployed. This apparent paradox can be explained as an attempt to produce more fear with a smaller number of workers. Theoretically, one can calculate the value of not-working (the economic value of being miserable). Uncontrolled inflation has a tangible economic cost; avoidance of inflation is an economic benefit produced by the unemployed. The cost of inflation minus the cost of the unemployment benefits will determine the value produced by the unemployed. Estimates can also be made if the labor of notworking is fairly compensated. Stanley Fischer, using money demand estimates for the United States, calculated that lowering the inflation rate from 10 percent to 0 percent would generate a welfare gain of between 0.3 and 0.8 percent of output. 8 While this figure may seem fairly modest, when applied to U.S. GDP for 1999, it implies a deadweight loss of between $28 billion and $74 billion. 9 I am not prepared to give specific estimates; my intentions are simply to point out that the unemployed are an integral part of the economy, and their contribution
50

THE LABOR OF NON-LEARNING

canin principlebe measured. Just as an example, let us multiply the $51 billions of losses (a midpoint of the range above) by 1.88, which will represent some of the worst U.S. inflation figures in the 20-s century (18.8% in 1946 10). The $95.88 billion of the worst-case scenario losses from inflation for 1999 can be then divided by roughly 6 million unemployed in 1999. 11 It turns out, every unemployed has been saving the U.S. economy almost $16,000 annually just by being out of work. Of course, we did not consider the possible losses from a three digit hyperinflation, because the U.S. has not suffered such a crisis in a hundred years. However, nothing prevents the U.S. economy from slipping into one should unemployment be dropped to dangerously low levels. Martin Bailey studied seven European hyperinflations between 1920 and 1946, and found that the largest welfare cost was on the order of half of income, while a typical cost was around a third of income. 12 Non-Learning as Labor The main purpose of the natural rate of unemployment is to keep wages down. At the same time, unemployment is expensive, because of the welfare cost, medical benefits, elevated crime rate, etc. From an economic point of view, the most efficient type of unemployment would be minimal in size, but producing the maximum amount of fear of losing ones job. Here is where public schooling comes into play. The best type of the unemployed is someone who is cast aside from middle class society by virtue of his culture, race, and behavior. Most importantly, the ideal unemployed individual is one who deserves his miserable fate because of the poor choices he made during his years of schooling. In other words, a figure of the unemployed who is just unlucky does not do the trick. The unemployed must also be a bad person. Becoming unemployed must have significant ethical connotations, because the fear of being bad is much more effective than the fear of being unlucky. Like with any other process of production, the production of fear has been made more efficient through division of labor. Unemployment has gradually become just another occupationaspecialized vocation, requiring distinctive skills and special training. We are not talking here about aircraft machinists or software engineers who lose jobs, and then find them again. The figure of a professionally unemployed and underemployed takes central stage. In theory, one can imagine a capitalist society where people remain unemployed for the same amounts of time regardless of their educational level. This would be a case of de-professionalized unemployment. All workers would simply take turns being unemployed. Such a practice would, of course, create economic disaster, because the professional unemployed can produce more fear of better quality, for a much lower cost than anyone else, because they deserve it. A middle class worker is not simply scared of going hungry by losing her job. Rather, her very identity is at stake; she has invested years of hard work at school and in the workplace into being a working person. Her fear of losing her job is associated with the professional
51

CHAPTER 6

unemployedsomeone fully alien to her, and yet someone she could easily become. The most important mechanism for the manufacturing of the new, sophisticated version of the old fear of unemployment is the institution of public schooling. The Public education system plays an important role in producing the differentiated fear of downward social mobility. The short-term interest rate is one well known tool of regulating the inflationary processes. However, the economy also needs a long-term mechanism of producing the professionally unemployed. If most of the nations work force is well educated and is competing for the same jobs, then the institution of unemployment will become too fluid, and not stable enough. A modern capitalist economy needs to have a solid bottom of the professional unemployed. The unemployed have to become professionalized. Just like with any other form of labor, the labor of the unemployed is highly specialized. It delivers fear in sufficient quantities and on demand. News of a middle class friend who lost his job may be sad, but not earth shattering. A constant presence of uneducated, unhappy, and hopeless unemployed, who are a burden to the society, is a much more powerful deterrent against letting ones job go. In a very real sense, the services provided by the professionally unemployed are the foundation of the contemporary capitalist economy. Failing schools are factories specializing in the production of the professionally unemployed. One needs to learn the art of being unemployable and employable at the lowest levels. Many public schools perform the great economic task of maintaining professional unemployment and low-wage work. They do that in two different ways: first, by training the unemployed, and second, by legitimizing professional unemployment. Let us consider again Kohls description of non-learning, with which this chapter began. Regardless of the personal motivation of non-learners, what they actually do is acquire the skills needed to remain professionally unemployed. They invest their time, creativity and energy into acquiring skills that will likely disqualify them from any job except the minimum wage, dead-end kind. Subjectively, they may perceive this as resistance to the system, or as being disrespectful to teachers. However, the objective content of their labor is to acquire the skills needed to produce fear in other peoplethe fear of becoming like them. As I have argued in Part I, regular school learning is a form of labor; because the skills produced during school learning become a part of the labor process in the future. Therefore, spending a significant part of ones time and effort in a failing school may feel like a useless activity, but in fact it has tangible economic benefits for the economy. The training to become a good unemployed citizen includes acquiring the skills that make one unemployable. Non-learning is also labor, although of a different kind. Now, the second and perhaps even more important economic function of a failing school is to reproduce the myth of educational meritocracy. Public education securely links success with personal effort. Schools are thus the factories of cultural production. They produce the cultural myth of personal failure, and of responsibility for this failure. The 13 years of free public schooling for the poor are meant to supply ample evidence that their station in life is personally deserved.
52

THE LABOR OF NON-LEARNING

Paradoxically, the stories of individual success (so-called resilience examples, the educational American dream) serve the same purpose. They illustrate that success is possible, and it is contingent upon individual talent and effort. In fact, widespread success of the underprivileged students would have jeopardized the very foundation of the capitalist mode of production. As one of my undergraduate students succinctly put it, If everyone does well in school, who is going to pump your gas and bag your groceries? While the economy depends on an ever bettereducated workforce, it also has a stake in maintaining a relatively small but efficient cadre of the professionally unemployed. These two needs of the economy are very closely linked, and cannot be fulfilled separately. Non-Learning and Educational Reforming Failing schools are important economic contributors. They manufacture the labor power of a very special kind, the labor power of legitimately unemployed. Not only they supply the economy with highly qualified unemployed, but also serve as a scarecrows used in constant educational reforming. Policymakers use the imagery and statistics of failing schools to make the labor of middle-class students and teachers more intense and more efficient. The relationship between working and unemployment reproduces itself as a relationship between learning and nonlearning. Every hour of not-learning is an hour of perversely productive labor performed by poor youth for free. The current school reform has very little to do with providing learning opportunities for all. The No Child Left Behind is a deceiving name, because equal testing of unequal schools will leave more children behind. The class of professionally unemployed has dangerously shrank during the years of the economic boom in the last decade of the 20-s century, and the NCLB legislation will re-establish that class on a new objective and scientific grounds. The logic of division of labor makes it more economical to have a few failing schools than to distribute the unemployment training throughout all schools. Like in many forms of production, concentration makes economic sense. The processes of regular school learning and non-learning are very different, and need substantially different environments. Mixing a significant number of non-learners with the crowds of learners will disrupt both groups training. Thus, most small town and suburban schools specialize on learning, while many inner-city and some rural schools concentrate on non-learning. The two types provide distinctly different educational experiences for different groups of workers. However, this logic may not be applicable anymore. The long existence of failing schools destroys the legitimacy of individual school failure. The public begins to suspect that perhaps student failure has something to do with failing schools. The class of the professionally unemployed may look like a result of social conditions rather than of individual choice. The more efficient training of the unemployed may contradict the other function of school, the cultural production of the meritocracy myth.

53

CHAPTER 6

The set of laws united under the banner No Child Left Behind, implemented by the Bush administration over the past several years, deals with this new problem in two ways. First, by means of accountability, it raises both the intensiveness of the regular labor of learning, and the dropout rate. The dropouts make better unemployed without destroying the legitimacy of public schooling. Second, by the means of school choice, NCLB will reduce the number of failing schools, and disperse the non-learners throughout other schools. The amount of individual failure is likely to stay the same or increase, but this failure will be even more legitimate than before. The phenomenon of school failure is a result of economic necessity deeply imbedded in the structure of the contemporary economic system. This does not justify it, of course. Slavery and the domestic labor of women both contributed greatly to the development of the American variety of capitalism, which makes neither justifiable. The economic analysis offered in this chapter leaves me in a difficult place, because it suggests two unacceptable positions. Indeed, what can one say in response to the opinion that school failure is deeply imbedded in the economic system? One obvious answer is to leave it alone, because it is so important. The other answer is to change the economic foundations of society. Both answers are unacceptable for different reasons; the first, because it is unethical, and the second, because it is irresponsible. To some degree, all those who try to use Marxian analysis in the early 21st century share this dilemma. Marxs analytical approach still works; his solutions obviously do not. The most important conclusion I draw here is that the existing economic form of the learning produces inequality premised on school failure. Because all schooling is forced, the schooling that leads to educational failure is doubly unjust. Although I cannot imagine unemployment completely eliminated, it does seem important to mitigate the injustice of forced failure by addressing the whole premise of compulsory schooling. Even if educational failure is inevitable, its concentration in lower class and ethnic minority populations is the direct result of schooling being a part of the economic system. The intent of accountability school reforms runs contrary to powerful economic forces that constantly reproduce failing schools and thereby allocate poor and minority children to roles of the compliant unemployed. Let us consider the vicious cycle of failing schools. So many people contributed to its analysis that I am unable to identify the original author of the theory, and will treat it as common knowledge. It goes like this: (1) white flight to the suburbs leads to a depleted tax base for inner cities; (2) Lack of funds and a high concentration of poor children make for especially challenging teaching conditions; However, attracting highly qualified teachers is impossible because of the same lack of funding and difficult teaching conditions. (3) Consequently, the schools deteriorate even further, and middle class parents have no choice but to settle in the suburbs, where schools are generally better. The circle is now complete. Again, everyone knows about these mechanisms. However, fundamentally, it is simply an instance of a further concentration and consolidation of industry. Like any other industry, the manufacturing of fear will concentrate in a few places,
54

THE LABOR OF NON-LEARNING

simply because the consumption of fear means staying away from its sources. The U.S., with its peculiar taxation patterns, presents perhaps the clearest example of how fear manufacturing will consolidatenot because of conspiracy or poor policy, or the middle-class selfishness. It will consolidate when education is closely tied to the institution of schooling. Should we offer meaningful and affordable education alternative outside of public school systems, many middle class families will move back into cities, especially if commuting expenses will continue to rise.
NOTES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

10 11

12

Herbert Kohl, I wont learn from you (NY: New Press, 1994), 7. Kohl, 4. Kohl, 6. Karl Marx, Capital, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm. Marx, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm. Marx, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm#2a. Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994): 4047, http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-chinairu.htm Stanley Fischer, Towards an Understanding of the Costs of Inflation: II, CarnegieRochester Conference Series on Public Policy 15 (1981): 5142. Cited in Paul Gomme, On the Cost of Inflation, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, May 15, 2001, http://www.clev.frb.org/ Research/ com2001/0515.htm. Paul Gomme, On the Cost of Inflation, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, May 15, 2001, http://www.clev.frb.org/Research/com2001/0515.htm. The Financial Forecast Center, http://www.neatideas.com/info/inflation.htm. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, http://stats.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab5.htm. Select Total, 16 years and over in Number of unemployed persons Column. Martin J. Bailey, The Welfare Costs of Inflationary Finance, Journal of Political Economy 64/2 (1956): 93110.

55

CHAPTER 7.

THE ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCHOOLING

My interest in this chapter is very far from examining learning motivation in the psychological sense. Rather, I would like to consider it as an economic question. Schoolwork does not serve any immediate needs of the worker, and therefore does not fall into the category of immediately rewarding activities like eating, resting, or sex. It does not usually satisfy such needs as the need for entertainment, or curiosity. Of course, schoolwork may entertain or fascinate, but we may safely assume that in most cases it does not. Many students do their work anyway, and this chapter is an attempt to understand why.

Why Do Students Learn? In the industrialized world, the experience of going to school or sending ones children to school has become truly universal. Yet some very fundamental questions about this experience remain unanswered. One such question seems quite important, if only for the purposes of school improvement: Why do students make an effort to learn at all? What makes them come to class, bring books, fill out worksheets, listen to teachers explanations, answer questions, take tests, and so on? This question is different from Why do they come to school? children go to school because they enjoy the social interactions with friends and some teachers. My question is why they perform the schoolwork. I find it much easier to understand why some students refuse to do some or all of these things. From a theoretical point of view, a normal, moderately successful, boring school is infinitely more interesting than a chronically failing school at one end, and a spectacularly successful one at the other end of the spectrum. Normality always contains a bigger mystery than abnormality, because by its very definition, normality lacks prominent features and thus is more difficult to understand. We call normal that which no longer requires or yields an explanation. Rather, we use normality as a measuring stick against which the peculiar and the unusual can be understood. One has trouble focusing on the normal, because much of our quest for knowledge is fuelled by the desire to solve problems, to fix whats abnormal. Students have been going to schools for many centuries, and despite perpetual school reforms and the sense of a perpetual educational crisis, most students, most of the time, manage to come to school, and do their work. In light of my analysis of school learning as a form of labor with inherent motivational problems, one has to explain why many children in normal, not failing schools, keep coming back to school and make at least some effort to learn. The normal school is actually a marvelous organization; it works even though it really should not. The bumblebee impresses us not with the grace or speed of its flight, but with the fact that it flies at all. Similarly, the typical, normal, school impresses me with the fact that it works at all. Despite a seeming lack of economic
57

CHAPTER 7

motivation, most students come to school nearly every day, and keep working. It may not impress others for the same reasons, but again, if school learning is labor, there has to be an explanation of not only why it should not work, but also of the fact that it still works. The simple comparison between a typical workplace and a school reveals no obvious reasons for students to do the work. The apparent lack of strong incentives for students makes it very easy to understand why some schools fail. It is much more difficult to say why so many schools succeed at least to some degree. Of course, all definitions of success are debatable. However, no one will dispute that most schools succeed in maintaining a certain level of organization, discipline, and, most importantly, a certain level of schoolwork. The question remains: Why do so many students work at school? As I explained in Chapter 3, school work is a form of labor, because it creates significant value, and because it is not leisure. Why do children work at school? Three obvious answers come to mind first: (1) they enjoy it; (2) they understand that learning is important for their future; and (3) parents and other adults in positions of authority tell them to go to school and do their work. On the surface of it, the first answer seems very reasonable, but it flies in the face of reality. Despite significant and sometimes heroic attempts by teachers to make learning interesting, schools clearly lose out to friends, television, the Internet, and computer games in terms of entertainment value. This is no accident, and not a result of a failure on the part of teachers and curriculum developers. In most cases, learning activity seems to involve more work than pleasure, and by its very nature cannot be more entertaining than entertainment proper. Let us consider the second answer, that students understand the importance of school for their futures. I have serious reasons to doubt that the economic benefits of schooling are real for all students; see the critique of the Human Capital theory offered in Chapter 12. However, let us allow just for a minute that schooling is beneficial for everyone. Most students have a hard time connecting each piece of schoolwork to their future, until very late in high school; partly because the concept of a personal future takes time to develop, and partly because learning is broken into thousands of small incrementseach individual part seemingly irrelevant to students future lives. Every student, even a kindergartner, is generally aware of schools usefulness, but it is not clear how this general idea is linked to the everyday activities of students. If school is good for everyone, why do some students in some schools seem to ignore this fact? The very fact that learning motivation varies dramatically in both intensity and character shows that schooling does not have a universal appeal the same way as getting and holding on to a job, for example, motivates an overwhelming majority of people to work. If it is true that students go to school because they need to learn, this would be the same as saying that people fall in love because humans need to reproduce. A need does not necessarily translate into a desire. For example, most people need to exercise and know this. Moreover, many people do exercise. However, such awareness does not translate into universal or nearly universal motivation, because exercising requires sustained effort, and
58

THE ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCHOOLING

competes with many other more pleasurable activities. Going to school, undoubtedly, is closer to exercising than to eating or sleeping. The fact that most students are aware of the potential benefits of schooling does not explain the dramatically high rates of participation in schooling. The third answer (children obey adult authority) seems more promising, and yet is unsatisfactory. If students simply obey their parents and teachers, the question remains: Why do they obey? What is the source of adult authority? Under similar circumstances, very few adults would work. Students work is vital to all modern economies, yet students are not paid for it. Schools are compulsory but lack any real means of enforcement. There are no real penalties for students who do not wish to go to school, even fewer for those who are physically present but refuse to work. How many grown-ups would work without getting paid, and without the fear of punishment? Of course, parents exert various amounts of direct and indirect pressure on their children to ensure a certain level of productivity. However, for most kids, the family consequences of poor school performance are not that great. Parents are still going to provide the necessities, by law or out of parental love and sense of duty. Many policymakers and practitioners base their understanding of schooling on a misleading macroeconomic analogy: Students (and their parents) are considered to be consumers who receive educational services from schools. Schools are public or private service providersthe analogy goeswho serve the client. No doubt, schools can be understood in such a way. However, this is not a particularly useful analogy. The truth is, most students perceive school as a chore, and rightfully so. This is the student error that is not really an error, as I tried to show in Chapter 2. School learning is something one has to do, like taking out trash, or doing dishes, or cleaning ones room. This is something they are required to do, something that eats away at free time, energy, takes years to complete, does not bring much pleasure, and consists of tasks that are almost impossible to connect to any future use. Just imagine that you would be required by law to visit your doctor regularly, and undergo series of unpleasant testing procedures, supposedly for your own benefit, but also to save public money. Would it still be a service or a citizens duty? The very notion of service implies a choice to receive or not to receive it. Even if the work of students is found to benefit them significantly in the future, one still has to describe what students do as a self-serving labor, not an act of receiving services. Simply put, students do most of the work associated with learning. They greatly outnumber teachers and administrators, while working for about the same amount of time, or even a greater number of hours per day, including homework. If school were a restaurant, a patron would have to bring her own groceries, rent a stove and pots, cook her own food, serve herself a dinner, and clean the dishes when done. Of course, there would still be an element of service here: The restaurant would provide supervision, advice, and assistance. However, the client would rightfully walk away with a feeling that she workedfor her own benefit, and with outside assistance, but with the element of work greatly outweighing the element of service. Schoolwork is labor, and schools should be considered places of employment for students, not service-providing organizations.
59

CHAPTER 7

Students, teachers, and administrators must all be viewed as economic agents. Schooling as an economic system organizes production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The most obvious observable feature of school life is organized and sustained labor performed by students and teachers. If teachers economic motivation is relatively easy to explain, this is not the case with students motives. Some hidden economic mechanisms compel most students to put in long hours of schoolwork and homework. People work for a reason, and the understanding of reasons behind human work is probably the only way to attribute rationality to their work. These reasons, as we will see later, are much more complex than working for a pay check, yet it would be implausible to assume no reason at all for this work. An economic motive is behind student efforts, and this chapter is an attempt to discover it. Before we can continue, one crucial disclaimer: Contemporary schools can be analyzed as small economies, but not as market economies. This does not mean that in the future education cannot be transformed to function within market economic relations; it simply means that this is not the case today. A school truly integrated into a market economy would have to pay students for their labora shocking proposition, which I will nevertheless defend in the last part of this book. Can we simply apply the apparatus of mainstream economic theory to describe and explain currently existing schools? Can we think in terms of supply and demand, markets, and so on, about schools and student work? This is a tempting but implausible proposition. Mainstream economic theory concentrates heavily on market economies. Most economic theory is not useable without the institute of market and market mechanisms. Schools are not market economies, although they are surrounded by an ocean of market relations, just like the spheres of domestic labor and motherhood remain spheres of a largely non-market economy. The attempts to understand contemporary schools using mainstream economic assumptions are unproductive at best, and could be disastrous at worst. There have been several attempts to understand schooling in economic terms. Such attempts have failed because of the assumed identification of the term economy with market economy. One such attempt is Garry Beckers human capital theory; perhaps the most influential attempt to consider education in the terms of a market economy. 1 Another is the school choice theory, which originated in Milton Friedmans writings. I will consider both analyses in Part III. Schools and schoolwork, as they exist today, simply do not make much sense in terms of a market economy. Student labor is not compensated, as is almost any other form of labor in contemporary capitalist society. Yet schools do operate, and hundreds of thousands of students perform an enormous quantity of work. Schools could be much better explained in terms of a broader understanding of economics. There is more to economics than the market. Relational Economies Mass schools have more in common with what economists used to call archaic or traditional economies. The small field of economic anthropology can provide a
60

THE ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCHOOLING

much more useful set of tools for education than mainstream economic theory. Economic anthropology seems to take off with the influential works of economic historian Karl Polanyi, 2 although both Marcel Mousse and Bronislaw Malinowski greatly contributed to Polanyis thinking. Malinowskis study of the economy of the Trobriand Islands off the east coast of New Guinea has probably been cited more often than any other single ethnographic work in discussions within economic anthropology. 3 Malinowski describes the Kula trade as an example of an intricate economic system that involves reciprocal exchanges of goods and services without determining the exact value of each object. In fact, some objects have no use-value at all; their only value is in association with former owners. 4 Polanyi convincingly shows that the concept of a market and market exchange is not uniformly applicable to economies. Polanyi critiques Adam Smith for his assumption of mans propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another. In retrospectwrites Polanyiit can be said that no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future. 5 Polanyi argues that both historical and anthropological data show market economies to be an exception rather than the rule. For tens of thousands of years, men and women acted not in pursuit of their individual material interest, but upon other considerations: The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that mans economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve his end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that that the required step be taken.6 Polanyi develops this idea further by considering both ethnographic data and economic history. He names four principles on which an economy could be based: market principle, redistribution, reciprocity, and householding. The market principle implies buying and selling of goods and services and is based on the interplay of supply and demand. This is what most of economic theory considers the economy, and what dominates the industrialized world. The other principles have governed human societies for most of their existence, and probably still regulate most of the economic activity on this planet. Reciprocity is exchange in which the giver either does not expect anything at all in return (generalized reciprocity), or expects some return, sometime in the future (balanced reciprocity). An example of the former variety would be economic relations within an extended family, a village or a clan. Mutual help, sharing of food, etc. are included in reciprocity, and the two sub-classes often coexist. Certain favors are not expected to be returned, while others are; the key is that there is no exact calculation of value. A gift is exchanged for a reciprocal gift, but there is no

61

CHAPTER 7

exact equivalence. The affirmation of relationships (of kinship, friendship, or mutual respect), or of mutual obligation, is the value gained from the exchange. Redistribution involves movement of products from individual and collective producers to some center, which then redistributes the products and sends them back to localities. Redistribution occurs when a tribe leader collects food and other products from all, and then redistributes them according to need, influence, and other considerations. This type of economy is only possible when most people accept the need for one central figure or a group to figure out the redistribution mechanisms; it may not be confused with direct violence of one group over another as in cases of conquest and cast domination. Ancient Egypt and the Soviet Union would be examples of such economies. In developed capitalist economies, taxes and public services will probably be the closest relatives of the redistribution type of economy. There is no need to mention that the tax-based sector of economy has significantly grown since the times of Adam Smith. The principle of householding applies to families that produce everything for their own consumption. Polanyi seems to include this principle into one of the above later in his career. Indeed, the economic relations within a family closely resemble the generalized reciprocity described above. Economic anthropologists have done some interesting work since Polanyi, 7 and I do not intend to survey the field in this chapter. I just find the fundamental intuition they share remarkable and very useful in educational theory. Richard Wilk has summarized it as follows: economic anthropologists are interested in people because they are both rational and cultural, because they pursue both money and morality. 8 A convincing answer to my question about student motivation must treat students as rational beings who will work if it makes sense for them to work. Instead of the somewhat archaic term archaic economy, I will call these nonmarket economies relational, because the key feature of such systems is that the economy is submerged, or integrated into the larger sphere of social relations. (Marcel Mauss describes it as total social phenomena 9) We can see islands of relational economies in most contemporary societies, even in industrial and postindustrial countries. There are many instances of reciprocal cooperation outside of the market. Neighbors often form de-facto cooperatives that involve mutual obligations. In working class and poor neighborhoods, people still rely on relatives, friends and neighbors for essential services like babysitting, moving, car repair, security, marital counseling, entertainment, information exchange, etc. Teenagers almost universally form groups not devoid of economic function. Members of such cliques, gangs, and loosely organized groups of friends depend on each other to provide and receive extensive educational services, psychological and career counseling, entertainment, and security. A group of friends can expect to help each other move and take each other to the airport, or counsel each other on financial and romantic matters, but carefully avoid keeping track of who owes whom how much in terms of the performed labor. Most forms of friendship involve the exchange of certain services; or, rather, friendship circles are insurance and service cooperatives.
62

THE ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCHOOLING

In non-western societies, even those who superficially embraced market economic models, the sphere of relational economies may be greater on the order of magnitude. For example, in my native Russia, mutual obligations of kinship and friendship very often outweighed purely monetary motives. One of the toughest challenges of anti-corruption efforts has to do with the network of non-economic obligations that are stronger than the rule of law or strictly economic considerations. Moreover, all economic transactions among family and friends will have the relational component. A simple transaction such as selling and buying a car will always have the relational left-over: one of the parties has to come out as having made a favor to the other. Nothing strictly symmetrical can happen within the sphere of an economy colored by personal relations. One common feature of relational economies is that the act of providing service to others both implies reciprocity, and avoids any exact stipulations on timing or quantity of the reciprocal service. We invest in our friends more as an act of insurance against future unforeseen needs. I want to emphasize as strongly as I can the non-market orientation of the relational economies. However, one should not forget that these are still economic phenomena. When my family asks neighbors to take in our cat for a couple of weeks, both sides are perfectly aware of the economic condition of such an agreement. We are indebted, and there is an expectation of a returned favor. However, we are both aware of the fact that the debt may never be returned, or returned in entirely different form. When the neighbors do us a favor, we create a bond that no market theory can explain or measure, because it bypasses monetary exchange altogether. It is not my intension to idealize the relational sphere of economy. It could be just as exploitative and corrupt as the market sphere. It certainly cannot replace the market, on which we rely now for most goods and services. A Regulated market economy is remarkably efficient and flexible in organizing large portions of contemporary society. However, it is not the only and not the universal economic mechanism. Moreover, a society totally devoid of relational economies is hardly the ideal. Thus I establish two facts: relational economies still exist, and their mechanisms are very different from market economies. The Economic Anthropology of Schooling Economically speaking, regular American public schools are much closer to the tribes of the Pacific described by Malinowski than to the farms, firms, and factories located nearby. Their economic relations are embedded in other social relations. For a variety of reasons, schools have not yet developed into true market economies, which does not mean that they cannot improve the types of economies they do have. The motivation that moves mass schooling is based on a relational economy where mutual obligations, communal commitments, delicate balances of customary work, rituals of identity and power blend into one social structure. A successful school is an economic system where schoolwork is an integral part of social relations, and the bulk of social relations is integrated into the functioning of the school as an organization. In other words, the secret of the remarkable
63

CHAPTER 7

performance of an average school is in its ability to link the social practices of children and adolescents with the formal practices of teaching, learning, and administration. As with any economic relations, students here have direct interest in remaining at school. In the crudest terms, students exchange the labor of their schoolwork for the opportunity to enjoy social relations with peers and adults. Kids will do the chore of schoolwork if and only if they receive something in return; this does not have to be a material or tangible something. This is a common feature of all economic behaviors; there is no reason why it should not apply to schools. Teachers and school administrators use both reciprocity and redistribution principles. Reciprocity is most commonly used in a single classroom; the mechanisms of redistribution are more prevalent for a whole school. Let me give some examples to illustrate how these two principles may work. Reciprocity is more often used in direct relationships between a teacher and a student. Most teachers realize that the formal authority of a teacher is not nearly enough to maintain order in classroom, let alone to ensure even moderate learning. It is much easier to exercise teacher authority in conservative, cohesive social environments, where teachers can draw directly on the entire adult communitys authority over the children. Such arrangements are less and less common, simply because communities diversify. They drop many exclusionary practices, and lose cultural cohesiveness. Teachers thus engage in an ancient game of mutual favors: they do favors for students, while students implicitly agree to repay with good behavior and reasonable effort in schoolwork. The services teachers provide could be very diverse; they simply depend on what students may want, and what a teacher can offer. Sometimes students just want personal attention, sometimes tokens of respect and affection. Little kids want hugs; older kids need a sympathetic ear. They might be interested in what teachers know and what teachers can do. Teachers lend them influence, connections, advice, or recognition. Teachers can give out praise, candy and stickers. Teachers can teach how to play a new game or tell them something new about an athletic hero. Teachers can add or take away recess time and take students on field trips. Teachers may have information children need, or can keep secrets; teachers can make jokes or relax some academic requirements. In short, a child and adolescent may want a million small and big things from an adult. The trick is not so much to figure out what they want and what teachers have, but to initiate the exchange. In other words, having the merchandise does not automatically guarantee a deal. Not unlike adult relational economies, the economy of school relations will work only when it is well oiled with personal trust. The principle of redistribution comes into play when educators capitalize on their central position within the schools social organization. An example of a redistributive economic relationship in school is a school prom. Students may want to attend the prom for their own reasons, which has nothing to do with adults. An American prom is a sacred ritual, a major rite of passage. Nevertheless, students recognize the need for organization, space, security, finance, etc. In other words, in order to obtain the good of attending a prom, they need the mediating and
64

THE ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCHOOLING

regulating role of the schools adult authorities. The arrangement is not unlike those between the laity and sacerdotal institutions: the control over the sacred functions requires that lay people affirm priestly authority. In a certain sense, students exchange services, but adults are needed to regulate the exchange. Again, teachers and administrators need to insinuate themselves personally into the event of the prom, so that the mediating services they provide will be associated with specific persons rather that with a faceless institutions. Such an association creates a relationship of mutual obligation, which can be later turned into good behavior and schoolwork efforts. Students contribute their labor of school learning to teachers much like Ancient Egyptians used to build tombs for their pharaohs. It was senseless in a strictly utilitarian sense, but economically a necessary part of the society. School learning appears to be quite senseless and unproductive, but in the best case scenario, it makes symbolic and economic sense. The pharaohs needed the god-like authority to distribute food and goods effectively. Students will only invest in collective teacher authority if it is used to stimulate an effective exchange of services among students. Of course, this logic applies not only to proms, but also to other events of school life, such as homecomings, track meets and theater productions. Administrative Production Student labor can also be considered within an economic framework Rhoda Halperin calls administrative production. She describes a village of Chan Kom in the Yucatan peninsula, where every male was required to perform fagina labor as a public service without remuneration. 10 Fagina is simply uncompensated labor or community service work. Performance of this service was required to maintain residence and status, including rights to communal land. Halperin cites an earlier study of the village which noticed that the most public spirited do more than others. She comments: The measure of public spiritedness was directly proportional to a citizens tolerance for servility, and willingness to perform fagina became a litmus test indicating loyalty to the comissario, who functions as a patron to his loyal village clients. 11 Of course, comissarios regulated fagina and ultimately found a way of using it for their own benefit. The whole relationship was based on the monopoly on land which allowed the elites to control labor. Students work in schools is not unlike the administratively regulated fagina. Each student is obliged to work several hours each day, and the measure of his or her dedication is proportional to his or her loyalty to adult authorities. A combination of purely administrative sanctions (such as detentions, reprimand, etc.) and an ideological pressure (the stay in school propaganda) is used to maintain labor availability. Yet, as it is in the Mexican village, in the American school, the success of fagina depends on whether the educators found a way of controlling the resource of social engagement schools provide to students. Obviously, in small, rural communities, schools control much of the social interaction among students. The schools there effectively control the cultural life of the community through athletic events, and much other entertainment output.
65

CHAPTER 7

In addition, schools can relatively easily control parents by the threat of creating a negative image of the family should students refuse to cooperate. Where schools can control the social status at least to some degree, their authority tends to be secure. The same mechanism cannot work in an urban setting, simply because schools do not control as many social resources. Students have plenty of opportunities to socialize outside of school; parents communities are fragmented, and not dependent on schools to maintain social status. Quite often, racial and class divides separate teachers from students and parents, which makes loyalty to school authorities socially unacceptable. In such circumstances, student work becomes closer to forced Gulag-like labor than to the patriarchal fagina. Consider a school that many would call failing. The classes are unruly, student and teacher absenteeism is high. No one seems to be learning; teachers spend most of their time establishing a semblance of order in the classrooms. The school principal spends most of her time doing crowd control. Police officers have an office on the premises. From the point of view of economic anthropology, this may be a case of a failing relational economy. For most students, doing schoolwork and following the rules does not bring any status gains or recognition from the people they care about mosttheir peers. In order to maintain memberships in peer groups, students need to sabotage schoolwork and school rules. *** The failing school is a relational economy in trouble. Just like market economies may experience cyclical crises, or long-term decline, relational economies also may function well or poorly. And their vibrancy depends on many things, including the larger socio-economic context they operate in, government regulation and support, and the availability of resources. Any school reform that ignores the reality of student labor within the relational economies of schooling can be successful only by accident. Thoughtful school improvement requires a careful tuning of the relational economies.
NOTES
1 2

4 5

6 7

Gary S. Becker, Human Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1968). Bronislaw Malinowski Argonauts of the Western Pacific; an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: G. Routledge, 1922). Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies, 200. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 43. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 46. See, for example, Susana Narotzky, New directions in economic anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 1997). Richard R. Wilk, Economies and cultures: foundations of economic anthropology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), xi.

66

THE ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCHOOLING

9

10

11

Marcel Mauss, The gift; forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1954). Rhoda Halperin, Economies Across Cultures: Toward a Comparative Science of the Economy, (New York: St.Martins Press, 1988), 120. Halperin, 120.

67

CHAPTER 8.

CHAYANOVS RULE

All Children Can Learn. So Why Dont They? Mass schooling is the result of the progression of educational arrangements described in Chapter 1. It has been a challenge to all societies that have attempted it. One challenge indicator is the curious history of school reform: it seems that national school systems resist improvements after mass schooling itself is achieved. In other words, it is relatively easy to get most children behind desks, but it is exceedingly difficult to make them work hard. The achievement levels seem to hit a ceiling and move very slowly or not at all after that. Yet most industrialized and middle-income countries stubbornly continue to implement one school reform after another. Why are societies around the globe so dissatisfied with their educational systems? In part, this is explained by the genesis of mass schooling. Universal education has come around as an extension of the privileges of elite schooling to a much wider population. In this respect, education is similar to leisure, entertainment, health care, consumer goods, and living conditions. All of these good things were embraced by the many, in generally the same way as they were used by the few. The mass consumer is not all that different from the elite consumer of past epochs. It is different with schooling; its conversion from a privilege to a widely available benefit did not come about smoothly. The difference is very simple: the elite schools did not have serious problems with motivation, because schooling was a way to maintain or to obtain high social status. It only had great appeal because most people did not have access to it; in other words, it was a positional good. Mass schooling could no longer plausibly offer guaranteed social mobility as an incentive. Hence it looks the same, but is clearly is not the same as classical schooling. This chapter will focus on the specific kind of relational economy that dominates mass schooling. Before I can make suggestions on how it can be improved or replaced, we need to understand what its limitations really are. Underperformance One of the most striking features of contemporary public schooling is the vast underperformance of students; it is not limited to failing schools. The constant waves of school reform are fuelled not by partisan politics, as some may suggest, but by the easily observable fact that most students could do much better in schools. The conclusion is evident from two facts: (1) In some schools (for example, the elite private ones, or those in wealthy public districts) students perform at a much higher level than in regular public schools and immeasurably higher than in failing schools and (2) there is no plausible psychological explanation of the performance differences between students in the best and worst schools. Indeed, almost all kids are capable of learning at much higher levels than

69

CHAPTER 8

they do now; therefore, there must be significant room for improvement for public schools. I find this syllogism unassailable. School learning contains significant reserves associated with low levels of effort applied by most students. For example, in 2000, only 16% of 4th graders spent more than an hour a day on homework, while only 23% spent less than two hours a day watching television. 1 The academic value of homework has been vigorously challenged by Alfie Kohn 2 and Harris Cooper, 3 among others. I am not defending homework as it exists now; my aim is simply to show that students are far from using their time fully. Additionally, 24% of teachers report that student disruptive behavior interferes with teaching to great or moderate extent; 44% of all teachers report that student misbehavior does the same thing. 4 These are indirect indicators of the low intensity of student labor. There is no good empirical measure of on-task/off-task ratios of school days, but it clearly varies widely between one and zero, depending on school quality. In other words, the productivity of the schooling sector can be improved mainly by raising the level of student effort and extending factual working hours (not necessarily the stated classroom hours). The acknowledgment of underperformance is the true driver of school reform efforts, for most people dislike unexplained inefficiencies. They suspect that students are lazy and teachers are inept, at taxpayers expense. This seems a perfectly rational conclusion, because in no other sphere of economic or political life are such large discrepancies between the best and the average tolerated. Indeed, car manufacturing workers work with about the same productivity anywhere in the industrialized world; drivers license bureaus operate in about the same mode in any city. Either market mechanisms or public pressure ensure similar levels of performance. This is not the case with students and schools: some provide an intensive college prep curriculum and assign hours of homework every day, while others fail to get students to pass basic proficiency tests. The public is simply tired of observing millions of students performing poorly, while other students perform so well. The other possible explanation of underperformance has to do with theories of class and race superioritytheories much more commonly found in teacher lounges than in educational literature. Middle class students perform better than their lower class peers regardless of per-student expenditures, student-teacher ratios, teacher salaries, etc. 5 (despite a popular belief to the contrary). Family background and the class/race make-up of a school make significant differences. Such theories are easy to dismiss, if only because no evidence exists to support them. Yet dismissal does not win an argument, and an alternative explanation is needed. One more explanation uses the notion of resistance, which gives a political meaning to students refusals to learn. While resistance theories describe real phenomena, they can hardly explain the massive underperformance by students from the lower and middle classes who may benefit from better educational outcomes. It also has difficulties explaining why it is that those students who resist

70

CHAYANOVS RULE

choose self-defeating strategies that go against their own economic and political interest. If most teachers are not absurdly inept, if genetics and resistance do not account for low performance, why do so many students perform so poorly? I consider the persistent underperformance by students a problem of labor intensity. It is my contention that most students do not work academically to the fullest extent of their ability, and that there is a strong force that compels them to limit their effort expenditure, and therefore, to underperform academically. Chayanovs Rule Alexander V. Chayanov was a Russian economist and rural sociologist killed in Stalins purges around 1938. He authored a theory of peasant economies which was quite influential in Western economic anthropology since the translation of his major work 6 in 1966. Marshall Sahlins successfully used this theory in Stone Age Economics, where he introduced Chayanovs rule: In the community of domestic producing groups, the greater the relative working capacity of the household the less its members work. 7 Peasant societies have certain levels of standard consumption determined by what a family with the lowest worker/consumer ratio could attain. In other words, a peasant family will work harder if they have many small children to feed, but when these children grow up and begin to participate in production, the economic activity of the household will taper off, even though the opportunity for creating and accumulating more wealth will be unused. There are intrinsic limits to economic growth that have to do with the social and political pressures of an egalitarian society, but also with what Chayanov calls the equilibrium between drudgery and utility. The latter is best explained by Durrenberger and Tannenbaum as the balance between what people would like to have versus the difficulty of the labor entailed in achieving these consumption goals. 8 Where ones own labor is the only source of ones wealth, there will always be a level at which more work defies the purpose, since it detracts from enjoying the wealth, and thus becomes self-defeating. It is an especially powerful deterrent where work itself does not have much intrinsic joy (the drudgery of farming, for example). One of the major attractions of Chayanovs theory, as well as of the whole field of economic anthropology, is its ability to explain behaviors that look irrational from the standard economic point of view. I use the spirit of this approach (but not its letter) to explain why so many students apply so little effort in classrooms. Students are compelled to attend schools, and schooling may have economic benefits. Therefore, the most obvious reasoning would be for students to work as much as they can to maximize the benefits against what is, essentially the sunk cost of compulsory attendance. They dont follow this logic, and we need to understand why. contemporary school reform is an attempt to intensify the learning labor of students. Since no major educational discoveries have been introduced in the last century, the productivity of learning labor cannot be raised significantly. In
71

CHAPTER 8

contrast with the rapidly developed technologies of manufacturing, learning still involves large quantities of frustratingly ineffective manual labor. In my opinion, the thrust of the school reform efforts of the past 30 years was directed at making student labor more intensive and more extensive, not more effective. It is no longer a matter of choosing between more experiential and more traditional forms of learning for the methods matter less than most educational scholars are willing to admit. Rather, the idea is to increase on-task time. From an economic point of view, learning labor is a form of taxation, not unlike the methods widely used in pre-industrial societies. Examples of labor taxation include the mobilization of free labor for building roads, pyramids, the Great Wall of China, etc. modern Communist economies have used labor taxation extensively, however, in capitalist industrial societies monetary taxation is the norm. One notable exception is the learning labor of students. They are asked to perform very extensive work, ostensibly for their own benefit. Yet the method of extraction (compulsory education) and the method of remuneration (social approval, credentials, etc.) clearly place the labor of learning in the category of taxation. Schools are the institution designed to extract labor from students. As with any other form of taxation, learning labor benefits the society at large. One important difference is this: other labor taxes deposit value in concrete physical objects, such as roads, bridges or temples. In the case of learning labor, the depository of value (skills and knowledge) is the student herself. Hardly anyone will dispute that the total sum of all skills and knowledge deposited in individual students and workers is a public good, yet it is a special public good, stashed away in millions of pieces which are controlled, to a certain extent, by individuals. It is important to remember that individuals cannot render the value of their education beneficial to them without entering into the labor market. Education is a public good that is stored by individuals, yet it can only become true value in public space. If education benefited only students as individuals, the institution of compulsory education would never have arisen. Learning labor also benefits individual students differentially; that is, more intensive labor produces greater economic rewards in the future. Working as hard as one can is the most obvious choice, and anything else appears to be irrational. Faced with the obvious fact that many students, if not most, clearly do not work at maximum capacity, educational theorists speculate about the students immaturity, or the pressure of poor learning conditions, or the political background of schooling. Yet all these explanations lack plausibility. Surely, even the cognitive abilities of first-graders allow them to make a perfectly rational choice. Surely, even in poor schools students could apply much more effort to learning. Surely, all students understand the self-defeating side of political resistance to education. My claim is that a powerful economic and social mechanism insures students underperformance, a mechanism similar to that described by Chayanov and Sahlins. Many schools are enclaves of non-capitalist economies, in which students make rational choices, even if their rationality is different from ours.

72

CHAYANOVS RULE

West Side Junior High Let us now examine the case of West Side Junior High School. It has the customary rate of labor (CRL), a traditional understanding of how much work a student owes to a teacher. The rate is not a matter of individual preference, but is rather an unspoken social contract. The rate includes not only the number of written assignments, or the amount of homework, but, importantly, the ratio of ontask/off-task time in classroom. The more goofing around is going on, the less actual on-task time, the lower the CRL. The CRL is differentiated according to subject and how well a student wants to do in a class. For example, a passable grade in math may not imply the same amount of work as an A in art class. So we are dealing here with a number of interrelated rates. A sudden increase of the rate in what has been a traditionally less labor-intensive class may have a ripple effect on the overall average rate. For example, if a music teacher is able to extract five hours of homework a week, plus 90% on-task time in classroom, this may trigger unreasonably high expectations from the Math or English teachers, because their status demands having rates of labor higher than that in music class. The CRL is also differentiated by ability. Everyone is perfectly aware of differences in individual students ability to perform quality work. The CRL is roughly determined by how much work a less able but diligent student can perform to achieve a high grade in the class. The higher ability students will reduce their own labor expenditures to maintain the CRL, even if that means they are not operating at full capacity. Any teachers attempts to increase the CRL will be met with active or passive resistance. The arsenal of methods is wide and flexible: from the refusal to do homework to disciplinary disruptions, from signs of disrespect to administrative pressures. But students also discourage each other from upgrading their effort. The mechanism is quite simple here: each individual contribution of labor is part of the collective contribution to keep teachers relatively happy and grades relatively high. So it is commonly expected that everyone will contribute something. Everyone has a stake at maintaining the CRL. Below is a sample of school members and their basic strategies with respect to the customary labor rate. Meet Joe, a popular and successful science teacher. Like a Melanesian Big Man, 9 he has achieved high social status by a skilful use of generosity in the context of reciprocity. He has bestowed a number of favors, gifts, and privileges on many students. He visibly spends more time preparing entertaining lessons than anyone else, thus reducing the drudgery factor for students. He helps with advice, lends an attentive ear, cares about students personal lives, gets them out of trouble, and negotiates conflicts. Joe applies for grants, and brings additional resources to the science department. He has a number of student followers involved in the science club, whose successes have been covered in a local paper. These and other activities have gradually created a sense of obligation, converted to high regard. Students do not remember any more what specific favor each of them received from Joe; rather, they perceive his status in a holistic manner, which
73

CHAPTER 8

is the ultimate aim of the Melanesian Big Man as well: conversion of generosity into authority. In other words, the system of his power is gradually transforming from the big-man model to that of a feudal lord. The student contribution of labor in his classes is the highest in the entire school; it is more than just a generic labor tax, but takes on the meaning of a personal tribute to Joe. The higher rates of labor allow Joe look good in the school principals eyes, because of the higher tests scores he is able to produce. Consequently, he has more influence on the school administration, and can help many students, which, in turn, upholds his status as an influential teacher. What has begun as a reciprocity relation is transforming into redistribution: students contribute to Joes power, while he is obliged to generously redistribute the power he accumulates. Joe is not interested in upping the average CRL, because that would make his specially negotiated higher rate more difficult to maintain, and would therefore degrade his status among other teachers and among students. He may or may not be conscious of his own interest. (As an aside, most studies of best teaching practices ignore the fact that a school building cannot be full of Joes. The Big Men compete for influence, and their status depends on the lower status of others. A good teacher owes his or her existence, in part, to the existence of bad teachers.) Sara is an unpopular Social Studies teacher in her third year at the school. Students contribute the amount of labor that is minimally necessary to avoid open conflict with the school principal. This is not because of lack of skills, but because the students have to reduce their labor expenditures somewhere. In effect, they compensate working more for Joe by working less for Sara. Her classes are very often disrupted, so that students can be entertained instead of working, and thus greatly reduce the drudgery component. Almost no one does homework. Sara cannot fail entire classes, since this would reflect on her teaching performance, but neither can she seek help in classroom management, since it would further add to her reputation as a poor disciplinarian. The only way for her to peacefully coexist with her students is to collect labor at a much reduced rate, while giving grade distribution that look normal. To justify the normal grade curve, she has to expect some work to be done for a grade, but it is ridiculously easy to make a grade in her class. She would like to raise the CLR for her own class, but has no stake in raising the average for the whole school. If students start working hard elsewhere, this may put further pressure on her already shaky position. Our next character is Steve, the troublemaker student. He performs an important task of diluting labor intensity on behalf of the entire student body. Steve creates an occasional classroom disruption thus testing the limits of allowable labor reduction. He is the bargaining representative for other students as well as a parttime entertainer. Only because of his efforts is the flexible boundary of minimum acceptable labor made visible. Steve is like a craftsman in rural societies who is freed from regular labor because he performs a specialized sort of work. Steves contribution involves personal risk, and high stress levels. However, his rationale is similar to that of Joe and other Big Men: contributing generously to the common good will pay off in the form of a higher social status. He gets a kind of respect

74

CHAYANOVS RULE

from other students. Of course, Steve has no stake in changing the CLR, since a higher rate might simply interfere with his job, to the point of his extinction. Now Meet Sally the good student. She is a disciplined, hard working student; not among the class geniuses, but knows how to make an A. Her performance is the gold standard for determining the CRL. She firmly believes that she must be able to make an A in every class, with reasonable effort. She is the chief enforcer of the rate, for if an assignment appears to be too difficult, or the amount of work too great to handle, she directly challenges the offending teacher. Her mom is influential in the PTA, and any attempts to change the CRL will be met with parental resistance as well. Sally dreads the changing of the CRL, because it would immediately jeopardize her grades, and, in Sallys mind, her whole life. our final character is Jessica. She is, by consensus, the smartest kid in class. She flips through all textbooks in the first week of classes and never touches them again, and yet gets an A every time she wants to. She is almost always bored in classes, and prefers to read books or do something else. Jessica would like to have more challenging classes, and thus may personally be interested in raising the CRL. However, she also has to consider the huge disincentives to such a move. If she is already making good grades, her more intensive effort will be perceived as a threat to everyone else. So, she might be ostracized, lose friends, and perhaps even be reproached by teachers. In this respect, she acts just like the peasants Chayanov has studied. The benefits obtained from applying more effort are simply not worth the labor put into such an attempt. Westside School is one of the many variations of school economies. Some of them are based on different principles, and may allow for free competition among students, and involve no customary rate of labor. However, in a majority of cases, learning labor as an essentially individual activity must be regulated by relationships among students and teachers. It is very difficult to imagine an ideal school where a student is free to exercise her abilities at maximum extent, and a teacher is allowed to challenge those abilities to the fullest. People who are in daily contact naturally find a way of coordinating their efforts. The relational economies come to play where the capitalist, market-based economy cannot effectively penetrate. I want to emphasize that there are certain powerful mechanisms driving down the CRL. The relational economies of mass schooling have morphed into their own economic class, which has a family resemblance to the so-called domestic mode of production (DMP), which is characteristic of stateless societies. According to Sahlins and Chayanov, DMP is inherently underproductive; its labor and natural resources are underused. Mass schooling has the same essential problem: its labor resources are underused, although for different reasons. DMP suffers from the lack of incentive to produce surplus product. Mass schooling similarly lacks incentives for students to perform, unless students can cross the separation threshold, a level of achievement at which they can forgo immediate social approval for success later in life. This happens in DMP as well, when a rich peasant forgoes social approval and his own leisure and risks retaliation from his neighbors, but still decides to

75

CHAPTER 8

accumulate wealth beyond the customary level. However, these exceptions will remain exceptions, and cannot be made the norm. Mass schooling is qualitatively different from all other major industries, even though it greatly contributes to the market economy. An equivalent of such a niche economy could be the slave labor sector of the American economy before the Civil War, or volunteerism in contemporary United States. A case could be made that any developed society possesses a mixed economy, where the market connects and influences almost everything, but certain segments of the economy do not operate under the markets rules. For example, extensive labor expenditures are constantly allocated to maintaining households and rearing children. Much of such work certainly does not fall into the wage labor category. Most economists would agree that capitalist society simply means that capitalism is a dominant mode of production. Can mass schooling as a mode of production be changed? It cannot. No drastic intensification of learning labor can occur, because of the workings of relational economies. School reform must be viewed more in terms of economic development in third world countries. Just as the direct imposition of market principles in precapitalistic societies may be unproductive, the arbitrary increase of learning labor cannot happen because of the economic logic embedded in school communities. No school reform can convert essentially egalitarian societies into competitive ones; not without eliminating the school itself. Yet in trying to change the CRL at Westside School, one would be well advised to take the relational economy into consideration. For example, Joe must be persuaded to share his influence with Sara and other teachers, so that the teachers are treated as a cast rather than individual Big Men, competing for the same limited allocation of power. The job of a parttime entertainer must be taken away from Steve, which means that teachers and administrators must provide his portion of entertainment and break up the routine of the school day. Steve must be helped to find a new role and new status (the school theatre?). The school must develop a form of locally-acceptable ideology legitimizing somehow the increase in learning labor input in terms of the communal good, not individual achievement. And finally, school authorities must come up with a large list of services students would want, and make sure that teachers control access to those services. Such improvements will be discussed in more detail in Part IV. It has also been suggested that strong leadership can change a school, sometimes dramatically. This is also consistent with Sahlins approach. The chiefly authority is the force that corrects deficiencies in the DMP. Marshall Sahlins shows that it is not surplus product that creates chieftainship, as Engels and other Marxists have suggested. 10 In the historic process, however, the relation has been at least mutual, and in the functioning of primitive society it is rather the only way around. Leadership continually generates economic surplus. 11 In other words, it was not technical progress and production surpluses that created inequality and class structure. Rather, the inequality generated more effort, and created surpluses, which then resulted in technical progress. A strong, charismatic school leader can

76

CHAYANOVS RULE

claim more power than people are willing to give him, and break down the network of conspiracy to keep CRL down. The role of leadership in mobilizing labor is not in doubt. What is in doubt is the availability of thousands of charismatic leaders to change every single underperforming school. Strong institutional reforms may stabilize and even moderately increase the overall CRL in education. However, accountability reforms are a different matter. If the functioning of schools depends on the sort of relational economies I have described, accountability pressures may have a destructive rather than constructive impact on the nations schools. Attempts to intensify both student and teacher labor through accountability measures may lead to more instability within relational school economies. The accountability pressure undermines the traditional side of relational economies. Communal labor is regulated by traditionally accepted levels, and an increase is always resisted and resentednot because of the absolute growth of work time, but because it contradicts the logic of communal labor. If relational economies are eroded and destroyed, systems run by direct threat of force will replace themthe sort of schools that have full-time armed police officers, metal detectors, random locker searches, and so on. In economic terms, this would be a slide from communal labor to forced labor, from a village to prison camp. The Limits of Mass Schooling One natural limit to the development of human civilization is how much we can learn; specifically, how many people can learn a certain amount of knowledge before fully entering economic, political, and cultural life. There are also absolute limits for all useable resources. For example, this planet has only a certain amount of petroleum, and no technology can extend its exploitation beyond what is available. Of course, there are ways to get energy from other sources, and the efficiency of oil use can be increased many times. However, we can already clearly see the end to available fossil fuels. Is there such a natural limit to childhood as a resource? Can human ability to learn ever be exhausted? Right, now, it does not seem to be a realistic possibility. We certainly underutilize the capacity for learning for most of the population, even in the most educated of societies. The demand for education from economic and cultural spheres is also not particularly high; it is certainly manageable. The dire predictions of the Nation at Risk report turned out to be false, for there is no direct link between the nations math test scores and its GDP growth rate. However, in the distant future, one can see a possibility that the resource of childhood can be completely exhausted. The time of learning outside the productive spheres cannot be longer than the lifetime of an individual. The growth of childhood can come at the expense of the productive period in ones life. As childhood increases and productive time shrinks, there will be a point when further growth of childhood is no longer justifiable by more intensive productivity levels (I mean both economic and cultural productivity). Again, this is only a very distant

77

CHAPTER 8

possibility, and many factors may come into play to delay or prevent such an overextended childhood from happening. If the limits of childhood as a resource are distant, the limits of mass schooling as a social technology are much closer, just over the horizon. Humans can design new and better ways of exploiting childhood, yet one must understand that the currently dominant technology has its intrinsic limits. In other words, any given type of technology creates its own limits. Just as the steam engine can never have efficiency over a few percent, mass schooling cannot teach every child at the level achieved in elitist classic schools. From the point of view of developmental and educational psychology, indeed, almost every child can learn at the highest levels. However, from the point of view of mass schooling as a given social technology, it is impossible. Consider the most famous formula in physics: E=mc2. A small quantity of matter potentially contains huge energy. However, when we burn oil, or even split or fuse atoms in a nuclear reaction, we are only able to extract a miniscule percent of the potentially available energy. Similarly, despite the fact that all children can and deserve to learn at the highest levels, our existing technology does not allow to use that potential fully. Relational economies of mass schooling cannot produce the levels of work engagement generated by a market economy, just like feudal and slave-owning societies could never match the efficiency of capitalist labor. American imagery of productive work is ruled by images of factory workers at conveyer belt and software engineers working late at night. Such levels of effort are unachievable in a mass school setting. Mass schooling can also never produce the same levels of academic achievement as the elitist classic schools, whose model energizes the imagination of both compassionate conservatives and compassionate liberals. Let me clarify that the glaring school funding inequalities must be eliminated; I wholeheartedly agree on this with my liberal friends. However, I want to ask, whats next? It is very important to understand that material equality will not produce an equality of educational achievements. Let us assume that this particular battle is won, and all public schools will receive equal material and human resources. No doubt, some schools still will be a lot more successful than others, and the success divide will be drawn mainly along the social class lines. Compulsory schooling has a much bigger problem than the contemporary reformers of both the Left and the Right appreciate. Long-term prospects of mass schooling are unsustainable. Compulsory schooling has two essential, intrinsic, and unfixable problems. It relies on the highly unmotivated labor of young conscripts. It is remarkably inefficient, and must remain so because of the economic conditions in which students operate. Simply put, they lack incentives. Employers also lack the incentives to make sure learning is efficient, because they are not paying for the enormous value of an educated workforce. A large chunk of our GDP does not enter into national statistics, as school students perform countless hours of arduous and unpaid work. Like any other subsidized resource, the unpaid labor of students creates market deformations, and encourages waste. Employers keep encouraging tougher standards and the longer duration of education, because even if school
78

CHAYANOVS RULE

reform returns are negligible, they will still benefit by having a bit more educated workforce. Ideologically and politically, the position of limited rights in which we place students is also untenable. Despite the newest scientific findings about the adolescent brain, the eventual emancipation of youth seems inevitable. Moreover, school learning will have to be included in the free labor market. Eventually, we will have to pay kids to study, and respect their wishes when they find better employment. *** The curious economy of mass schooling created its own problems. It ensures the vast underperformance of the main contributors to educationthe students themselves. In certain segments of the population, underperformance takes on the extreme form of school failure. While upper class students work really long hours and often apply much effort, most others simply do not try very hard. The problem I describe as lack of economic motivation, other people understood differently. The next part of the book considers some of their most important, and mistaken, solutions.
NOTES
1

7 8

10

11

Digest of Educational Statistics, 2007, National Center for Educational Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/ programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_148.asp. Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Da Capo Press, 2006). Harris Cooper, The Battle over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents (Corwin Press, 2001). Teacher Survey on Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools, National Center for Educational Statistics, 1991, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/91091/ Eric A. Hanushek Assessing the Effects of School Resources on Student Performance: An Update, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 19/2 (1997): 141164. Alexander V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Illinois: Richard Irwin, 1966). Marshall D. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Aldine-Atherton: Chicago, 1972), 87. E. Paul Durrenberger and Nicola Tannenbaum Chayanov and Theory in Economic Anthropology, Theory in Economic Anthropology, ed. Jean Ensminger (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2002), 137154: 141. Marshall Sahlins, Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5 (1963): 285303. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, originally published in 1884. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm Sahlins, 140.

79

PART III. THE CRITIQUE OF SOLUTIONS

CHAPTER 9.

JOHN DEWEY: A CASE OF EDUCATIONAL UTOPIANISM

John Dewey has produced the most plausible solution to the mass schooling problem. Unfortunately, his solution is inadequate because he could never overcome non-economic thinking about education. I am building a case for economic solutions for education, and this chapter is a critique of Deweys solution, which treats learning motivation as a pedagogical, not an economic, problem. Non-Economic Thinking Dewey linked the emergence of formal schooling to the widening the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of adults. Learning by direct sharing in the pursuit of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the case of the less advanced occupations. 1 He was wrong on this; from the point of view of the training required, hunting and some forms of gathering seem to be occupations as advanced as brain surgery. It takes as long to train an expert hunter as it does to train a brain surgeon. For example, Walker at al. report: Hunting return rate curves peak in the early 30s for the Hiwi (Kaplan et al., 2000), 40 for the Machiguenga and Piro (Gurven & Kaplan, n.d.), early or mid-40s to mid-50s for the Etolo (Dwyer, 1983), 3545 for the Gidra (Ohtsuka, 1989), 4550 for the Hadza (Marlowe, 2000) and 3742 for the Ache (this study). That some extractive gathering activities, such as mongongo nut processing (Bock, 1995, 2001), Gidjingali shellfish collecting (Meehan, 1982), and Hadza (Blurton Jones & Marlowe, 2001) and Hiwi root digging (Kaplan et al., 2000), have return rate schedules with similar shapes as hunting curves. This probably indicates that success is based on learned skills rather than strength. 2 Hunting-gathering, agricultural, and industrial societies all have complex and simple occupations. The emergence of schooling as an institution is not a result of human work becoming more complex, but of the division of labor, which created teaching and learning as specialized kinds of work. In other words, the amount of training required for most complex occupations remains the same; schooling is an attempt to increase the number of people to be trained by creating specialized trainers and thus freeing producers from spending significant time on training the young. In evolutionary terms, there is always a conflict between transmitters and receivers of social learning. 3 Transmission of skills, a.k.a. teaching, is costly, and does not benefit the transmitter directly. At the same time, teaching is genetically advantageous for the group and it is easy to see how the willingness and aptitude to teach are selected for. However, as Silby shows, if transmission is costly, selection on receiver genes is always stronger than selection on transmitter genes4 In other words, there is a shortage of teacher genes in any given population. The division of labor logic leads to an obvious solution where one adult will teach many children,
83

CHAPTER 9

as a way of solving the natural conflict between receiver and transmitter. Schooling is a one-to-many relation, while apprenticeship is a one-to-one relation, which makes the former much more efficient. The speculation about the beginning of schooling is an example, typical for Dewey, of non-economic thinking about education. He treats education as mainly a technological problem, where the task of progress is straightforward. We simply need to replace old kinds of education with a better teaching technology; we just need to be smarter about it. Childrens wishes and interests are very important to Dewey, but their economic reasoning is invisible to him. Deweys non-economic position all but ignores the material interests of students and adults and how they shape the institution of schooling. Unfortunately, his authority has reinforced non-economic thinking in education; for the vast majority of theorists, the educational world is always exempt from economic thinking. Even when education is considered in economic terms, the actual behavior of learners seems to be excluded from analysis, and only the results of schooling are of any economic importance. Deweys Solution Though Dewey was wrong about the reasons behind the emergence of schooling, he was right about the consequences of this event: Much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less adequate to reproduce its spirit. 5 What Dewey recognized as the natural and essential consequence of schooling he also hoped to overcome in with new education. This connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of interest in education. 6 Dewey wanted to overcome the distance between what students do for learning and what adults do for real. However, he certainly did not want children to labor in the economic sense of the word, because of his long-term standing against the vocationalism. To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving, construction in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc., which carry over these fundamental human concerns into school resources, have a merely bread and butter value is to miss their point. If the mass of mankind has usually found in its industrial occupations nothing but evils which had to be endured for the sake of maintaining existence, the fault is not in the occupations, but in the conditions under which they are carried on. The continually increasing importance of economic factors in contemporary life makes it the more needed that education should reveal their scientific content and their social value. For in schools, occupations are not carried on for pecuniary gain but for their own content. Freed from extraneous associations and from the pressure of wage-earning, they supply modes of experience which are intrinsically valuable; they are truly liberalizing in quality. 7

84

JOHN DEWEY: A CASE OF EDUCATIONAL UTOPIANISM

This is perhaps one of the most puzzling passages in Democracy and Education. Just before it, Dewey states that active occupations educational significance consists in the fact that they may typify social situations. Mens fundamental common concerns center about food, shelter, clothing, household furnishings, and the appliances connected with production, exchange, and consumption. 8 He wants students to experience active occupations because through them, they would gain exposure to the economic dimension of life. On the very next page, he condemns the wretched economic conditions under which most human work is conducted. He considers class distinctions something temporary and avoidable; moreover, he also finds is possible to say that the necessity to work can be removed from the economic definition of work. Deweys economic ideas were utopian at best and non-existent at worst. According to James Farr, he never read or understood Marx although he clearly distanced himself from Marxists who were his contemporaries. 9 Significant knowledge of classic economic theory (Smith and Ricardo in particular) is also not evident in his writings. However, Dewey shares with Marx a problem rather common to great thinkers: the depth of his critique of existing conditions is matched by the high degree of utopianism in his proposed solutions. Deweys ideas of the Great Community are as vexing as they are vague: Theideal of a community presentsactual phases of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and disturbing elements, and are contemplated as having attained their limit of development. Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy 10 This sounds rather similar to Marxs wishful thinking about the post-capitalistic economic order where people will simply consciously work for the benefit of all, without economic necessity, alienation and exploitation. In Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey more or less endorses social-democratic ideals of socialized economy. Neither Marx nor Dewey had a good grasp on what would motivate people to work in these societies. Both visions include unfounded expectations of such change in human nature and/or in social conditions that would make boundaries between work and leisure obsolete. The result of Deweys social utopianism is educational utopianism. In the last two or three decades, economic utopianism has been almost universally discredited, but its educational variety has had much stronger staying power. Deweys inability to consider education in economic terms led to a weakness in his theory of learning motivation. He wanted to link learning with the abstract, idealized kind of work, which never existed and perhaps will never exist. Dewey had never been able to consider learning in terms of labor, with all its wretched conditions, and its firm positioning in the world of necessity. Deweys view of the

85

CHAPTER 9

future of education was curiously uncritical, void of any understanding of educations limitations and mechanisms. To give a bare bones simplification, Deweys solution to educational ills was that schooling should begin with the present interests of a pupil, and then, through active occupations, lead to mastering the curriculum. I must say that Dewey correctly identified the problem of the wastebasket economy of schooling: an aimless activity is rarely motivating. Here is an example of his thinking, restated in other writings: The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy for the evils attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously spoken of, is not to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but by reforming the notion of mind and its training. Discovery of typical modes of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried through without reflection and use of judgment to select material of observation and recollection, is the remedy. 11 Translation: find an activity that meets two criteria: (1) it should interest children, in either sense of the word interest, and (2) it should provide an opportunity to learn what we want them to learn. Herein lays the problem with Deweys solution. Let me make it clear, I question not the feasibility of the solution, but the implied scale of its application. The total sum of childs activities, both play and useful occupations cannot generate the interest sufficient to cover school curriculum, however reformed and redefined. Let me remind, Dewey clearly saw that The subject matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical with the formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc. 12 One assumption central to Deweys solution is that there is a way to hitch school curriculum to the authentic interests of a child. This is the weak link of the entire theory, and here is why. I will begin with an acknowledgement that such a hitching is possible, and occurs all the time. Let us call it the interest transfer: everyone who has ever taught knows that engaging students in something that interests them can lead to their willingness to study something beyond the immediately interesting thing. Dewey did not have to prove the feasibility of interest transfer. However, he did not understand why such transfer occurs, and consequently failed to see the limits of it. Children engage in an activity that interests them, and in which they need an adult to help. Then the same adult asks them for a return of favor: Now the fun is over, and you must do something for me. The transfer of interest requires a necessary linking elementthe teacher and his authority. The sources of teacher authority can vary: from general social authority of adults over children to the authority of influence that leads to the transfer of interest. However, the interest in activity does

86

JOHN DEWEY: A CASE OF EDUCATIONAL UTOPIANISM

not just grow into an interest in another, uninteresting activity, even when those are similar. Let us consider one of the active occupations listed by Dewey, and his scenario about how it should be used: Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time. It affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place farming and horticulture have had in the history of the race and which they occupy in present social organization. Carried on in an environment educationally controlled, they are means for making a study of the facts of growth, the chemistry of soil, the role of light, air, and moisture, injurious and helpful animal life, etc. There is nothing in the elementary study of botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in connection with caring for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject matter belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then belong to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations with the facts of soil, animal life, and human relations. As students grow mature, they will perceive problems of interest which may be pursued for the sake of discovery, independent of the original direct interest in gardeningproblems connected with the germination and nutrition of plants, the reproduction of fruits, etc., thus making a transition to deliberate intellectual investigations. 13 Let us assume for a moment that certain children have a genuine interest in gardening, because they will be able to enjoy the fruit of their labor, or because they just got fascinated by the project (both of which fall under Deweys broad notion of interest). However, one can garden successfully without the knowledge of the chemistry of soil, or the role of light, etc. An adult, professional gardener will be interested in such matters if he is seeking to increase output out of economic necessity, and if his input of time into studying soil chemistry is likely to be compensated by increased production and greater economic return. But why should children be interested in soil chemistry? Dewey links the notion of interest with the end result of an activity: Interest measuresor rather isthe depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one in moving one to act for its realization. 14 But the end result of gardening does not necessarily require the knowledge of soil chemistry, therefore the extent of interest for gardening is unlikely to bring about an interest in understanding soil chemistry. Rather, the opposite is more likely: a study of soil chemistry is likely to be perceived as a distraction from the fun of gardening. Bring up soil chemistry, and children will immediately recognize that gardening was just a pretext to deliver a lesson. And because childrens gardening is insulated from the demands of the market, they have no incentive to invest time in the study of soil chemistry. They are not competing with other gardeners, after all. There is no magic transfer of interest. What happens is that a teacher who is helpful in providing the opportunity to garden acquires a certain amount of relational capital, which later allows her to use it by compelling students to study soil chemistry. 15 Let us call this the mediated transfer of interest. Genuine interest
87

CHAPTER 9

in an activity is transformed into an interest in doing something the teacher wants. In the more traditional authoritarian modes of education, teacher authority has a direct force (the threat of expulsion, physical force, delegated parent of government authority, etc.). In progressive education, it is authority derived from first giving students what they want, and then collecting a debt in the form of compliance. These are not trivial differences; however, it is important to understand that Deweys solution does not remove the educational reliance on authority; it simply changes its sources. And teacher authority, like any other authority is never boundless. It varies greatly depending on the social conditions of schooling. A White teacher in an allBlack classroom is almost inevitably at a disadvantage, because she cannot tap into communal authority over the children. Many Black communities mistrust and resist White authority in general and that of the White-dominated public schools in particular. So, the teacher in this situation is left with two mutually exclusive sources of authority: one is the political authority of the state, in the form of school disciplinary policies, laws, the police, and security guards. The other is that which comes from building up her relational capital, a stock of good will, by giving students what they want: interesting activities, meaningful conversations, honest relationships. Yet she is also competing with the other powerful interests that children havemost importantly, economic ones. And, in many cases, there is just not enough relational capital to overcome those economic and political interests that do not coincide with classroom learning. Personal relationships are often not enough. In other words, my objection against Deweys transfer of interest is not that it is impossible. Rather, my claim is that it is insufficient. One can do all these wonderful things with turning gardening into a chemistry lesson, but only with middle and upper class children who are already economically motivated to work hard at school. In lower-class and minority neighborhoods, progressive education is hit-and-miss; and where it is successful, it depends on convincing children that upward social mobility is a realistic outcome. My second objection is this: let us assume that the teachers ultimate goal is not really to train gardeners, but to deliver a lesson on soil gardening. Considerations of simple efficiency will dictate that getting to it through the gardening routine is very lengthy and inefficient. Although it may spike childrens interest for some time, this interest may or may not transfer to the study of soil chemistry. It will for sure waste a lot of valuable instructional time, because the time spent on sowing the seeds, watering them, etc. is time taken away from studying soil chemistry. So, teachers will naturally select the old didactic approach, and tell children to read a book on soil chemistry. After all, books are nothing but a way to learn faster than did ones ancestors; they allow one to skip the gardening, and go directly to soil chemistry. It would be absurd to think that children in their school years will be able to re-discover the entire world of human knowledge again, through their own experimentation. So, Progressive education methods that focus on childs interest cannot apply to all or even most of the curriculum. They are the teasers, the spice

88

JOHN DEWEY: A CASE OF EDUCATIONAL UTOPIANISM

interspersing the lessons, not the main driving force for learning, even in the most progressive of classrooms. My intent is to avoid dwelling on the historical record of Progressive education, mainly because it has been discussed at length. 16 True Deweyans will always maintain that his ideas were never widely or consistently applied to education, and was has been tried is either a result of misunderstanding, or was not successful because of the resistance of conservative or traditional education, or the educational system itself. This is all probably true, but the argument reminds me of a typical Marxist lament about how no one has really tried Marxism properly: not the Russians or Eastern Europeans, not the Chinese, and not the Cubans. The question is, if all these people failed to implement it properly, wasnt there something wrong with the original idea? The same can be asked of Dewey. Just like Marx, he impresses with the depth of insight and the force of criticism to the point that the most obvious, glaring mistakes remain unnoticed, and bad practical results are always someone elses fault. Just as Dewey kept complaining about how his followers misused his ideas, Marx famously said All I know is that I am not a Marxist. 17 One thing is clear, Progressive education ideas do well in upper class public and private schools; in lower and middle class settings almost always goes wrong. Deweys solution is not a good one not because someone misunderstood or perverted it, but because it is utopian. The reason that his solution was not widely adopted is that it does not work. Does Democracy Need Schooling? Dewey professed almost religious faith in education. Robert Westbrook, for instance, believes that for Dewey, the school replaced the church in the 1980s as the key institution responsible for saving souls for a democracy. 18 If noneconomism is one side of his utopian thinking, faith in education as social salvation represents the other side of the same. This faith is grounded in the assumption that the world of education is qualitatively different from the rest of the social world. It is not bound by economic interest, so that children are expected to work for free. It is also not contaminated by human vices, and we can change people to be more altruistic, or more democratic. In Chapter 7 of Democracy and Education, Dewey lays out his concept of a democratic education. He both agrees with and dismisses as superficial Thomas Jeffersons and Horace Manns notions that democracy needs educated voters to function properly. To that, he adds the idea that a democracy depends on the widening of the area of shared concern. He means, more or less, increased exposure of democratic citizens to other individuals outside of their immediate social environment. This is what we would now describe as the exposure to diversity.

89

CHAPTER 9

The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort. On the contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the command of science over natural energy. But after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. 19 The last sentence in the above quote is not supported in any way. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. The unprecedented revolution in mass communications has addressed Deweys concerns for the broader community of interest much better than public schooling could ever hope to do. Both cultural unity and exposure to diversity are today accomplished through the mass media. Let us compare the mass media and public schooling with respect to their serving to strengthen a democratic, pluralistic society. However, first we need to agree on the criteria for such a comparison. How should we decide whether the education of a democratic citizen is best accomplished through organized schooling and a common curriculum, or through the lightly regulated mass media? Dewey explores the educational properties of various environments in Chapter 2 of Democracy and Education: from any environment, to social environment, on to the school as a special environment. Schools for him are social environments that are controlled and regulated with respect to their educational function. But why should such an environment be regulated in the first place? After all, much of learning happens in unregulated social environments; language acquisition is the prime example. There are two kinds of learning: one is better done in natural social environment, while the other requires schooling. If that is true, to which category does the education of a democratic citizen belong? According to Dewey, there are three reasons for organizing schools as a social environment. The first reason for doing so is to concentrate on fundamentals, to make it simpler for children to learn gradually; this is Deweys version of scaffolding. The second is to eliminate all that is trivial and perverse. And the third, again, is exposure to diversity in the wide sense of the wordto take children beyond their immediate social environment. How do these apply to the education of a democratic citizen? The first one is the essence of education as I understand it. Indeed, schools are nothing without curriculum, and curriculum is simply knowledge organized for learning: the most important stuff is selected, and then organized in sequences from the simple to the more complex. However, does being a democratic citizen involve complex understanding or specialized skills? Probably not; a bar to democratic participation cannot be set so high that it eliminates the undereducated and the ill-informed. A citizen of a democratic society is most markedly not a profession; it does not imply having special narrow expertise that other people do not have. To the contrary, it is the most broadly conceived universal human expertise. There is nothing about democracy that cannot be absorbed from ones social environment. Even basic literacy, which used to be a paramount concern for
90

JOHN DEWEY: A CASE OF EDUCATIONAL UTOPIANISM

democracies in the past, is no longer necessary to participate in the democratic process. In the TV-dominated world of mass communications, one can be illiterate but still well-informed. Indias political experience with its many illiterate citizens should not be ignored. One can also add that the history of public schooling in democratic countries offer little evidence that schooling actually helps to promote or sustain democracy. Germany, on the verge of the Third Reich, was arguably the most educated democratic society in the world. Whatever children learn about democracy is more likely to come from the media, and from their own participatory experiences. Schools remain remarkably undemocratic institutions, and do not encourage participation. Deweys second reason for organizing school as a social environment made sense when schools were a large part of childrens social worlds. This is not the case anymore; media and internet-assisted social networks are now the primary social environments, and controlling them for purity is simply impossible. That is, even if we agree on what constitutes the trivial and the perverse. There are many reasons why schools should not get into the business of cultural censorship, but this is a moot point simply because such censorship is no longer possible. But even in the pre-mass media world, attempts to control schools social environments have consistently failed. Schools have always housed the largely uncontrollable peer cultures, and only somewhat controlled curriculum-delivery factories. Show me a single school without the trivial and the perverse, and I will gladly concede my point. But on One condition: the school should include the lunch room and the locker rooms, bathrooms and hallways. Dewey overestimated the degree to which schools communal life can be controlled by adults. Children and adolescents managed to create their own cultural enclaves within every schoolenclaves which are fiercely independent from adult interference. The third and the final raison dtre for school as a specially organized social environment, is the exposure to a broader, more diverse social world. Dewey is right that it is essential for a democratic citizen to understand different points of view, born of different social and cultural circumstances. In pluralism-conscious, mature democracies, this requirement is more important than ever. However, it is not clear why this function of the social environment should be controlled to be educative. In fact, the opposite is true: the unregulated or only slightly regulated mass media have been exposing children and adolescents to much diversity, and deserve much credit for fostering tolerance and appreciation of diversity. Schools efforts at multicultural education are largely ineffective precisely because they construct human diversity as curriculum. One may dispute the factual accuracy of the last statement, and it is probably impossible to verify empirically. Still, the rationale for organizing a social environment in order to expose children to the diversity of human society seems to be weak and somewhat self-contradictory. It is freely available through the media, and does not need to be limited according to some curricular principle. An officially organized, selected diversity curriculum actually limits diversity. Deweys concept of democratic education through public schooling only makes sense to those who share his assumptions about schools as engines of social
91

CHAPTER 9

progress. Only if schools are to improve the society, to ensure its progress, will the specially constructed social environment be, at least theoretically, useful for democracy. Of course, Deweys ideas of democracy are utopian in the first place, hence the utopian concept of a democratic education. My critique of Deweys utopianism has two purposes: to show the limitations of the Progressive education movement and to alleviate fears about the demise of democracy if and when public schooling is radically altered. In the next chapter, I will provide further critiques of Progressivism, this time focusing on Deweys followers.
NOTES
1 2

4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16

17

18

19

John Dewey, Democracy and Education. (Macmillian: Toronto, Ontario, 1966), 8. Robert Walker, Kim Hill, Hillard Kaplan & Garnett McMillan. Age dependency in hunting ability among the Ache of Eastern Paraguay. Journal of Human Evolution 42 (2002): 639657, 639. R. M. Sibly, Evolutionary biology of skill and information transfer, in eds. H. O. Box & K. R. Gibson Mammalian social learning: Comparative and ecological perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 5771. Sibly, 69. Dewey, 8. Dewey, 135. Dewey, 200. Dewey, 199. James Farr, Engels, Dewey and the Reception of Marxism in America, in eds. Engels After Marx, Terrell Carver and Manfred B. Steger (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 282. J.J. Stuhr, Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987), 389. Dewey, 132. Dewey, 182. Dewey, 200. Dewey, 130. See Chapter 8 of Alexander M. Sidorkin, Learning Relations: Impure Education, Deschooled Schools, and Dialogue with Evil (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). See, for example, David F Labaree, The Ed Schools Romance with Progressivism, in Brookings Papers on Education Policy, ed. Diane Ravitch (Brookings Institution Press, 2004): 89130. Engels to C. Schmidt In Berlin, London, August 5, 1890, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htm. Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, (Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press, 1992), 184. Westbrook agrees with Robert Crunden on this point. Dewey, 200.

92

CHAPTER 10.

A CASE AGAINST INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

A significant body of research in psychology demonstrates how extrinsic rewards undermine the intrinsic motivation of students. The conceptual weakness of the notion of intrinsic motivation makes the research findings at least suspect, and certainly excessively generalized. The research is often used to argue against compensating students for their academic work. It has contributed to the expansion of false beliefs about the possibility of a significant increase in intrinsic learning motivation. Utopian thinking, predictably, has had an effect opposite to its intentionnamely, the strengthening of administrative and legal coercion in education. Research Shows Alfie Kohn offers an exhaustive and authoritative review of the findings of research in Punished by Rewards. 1 Although 15 years old, the book remains an effective summary of the entire field of learning motivation research. His account is consistent with other reviews. 2 In a classic 1971 experiment, 3 Edward Deci asked college students to work on a puzzle. Some were offered money; others were not. When left alone, supposedly to wait for the next phase, those who got paid were significantly less likely to continue to play with the puzzle than those who did not get paid. The difference was at first insignificant, but became stronger in subsequent studies. Virtually at the same time, Mark Lepper experimented with Head Start preschoolers, who were given Magic Markers to play with. Some were given a reward for drawing, while others were not. A week or two weeks later, those who received the reward were less interested in the markers that those who did not, and were also less interested in them than they were before the rewards were introduced. 4 A number of other studies followed, producing numerous results, mostly consistent with the original ones. Simplifying a little, I will reduce these results to three points: Extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic motivation 5 Extrinsic rewards change short-term behavior, but they do not lead to lasting change. As soon as the rewards are withdrawn, desired behavior also stops. Rewards negatively affect performance. People who are rewarded do less well on intellectual tasks; they are less creative, and tend to chose simpler, less challenging tasks. These findings would remain one of the many curiosities produced by psychologists, if they were not used to inform debates in educational policy. Any time some sort of a reward for learning is suggested, critics inevitably cite these research studies. For example, here is how Barry Schwartz responds to the recent plan in New York City to offer cash rewards to students for attending schools and doing well on the exams:
93

CHAPTER 10

But it is plausible that when students get paid to go to class and show up for tests, they will be even less interested in the work than they would be if no incentives were present. If that happens, the incentive system will make the learning problem worse in the long run, even if it improves achievement in the short rununless were prepared to follow these children through life, giving them a pat on the head, or an M&M or a check every time they learn something new. 6 All attempts to treat school learning as productive work that deserves compensation meet resistance backed up by research containing one or more of the three claims above. Lets take a critical look at these findings. Fallacy 1: Abundant Curiosity Kohn, like Dewey, assumes that students are already abundantly endowed with intrinsic motivation to learn, and we just fail to channel this motivation properly. Of course, if this is true, finding #1 would lead a reasonable teacher to stop giving any sorts of extrinsic rewards, because they would only diminish an existing pool of intrinsic motivation. However, such an assumption is not based on any evidence or any strong argument; there is no sign of a large, pre-existing motivation to master K-12 curriculum, whether in its currently existing or somehow revised form. Therefore, where no motivation exists in the first place, extrinsic rewards will produce total gain in motivation, even if they are less effective than intrinsic motivation. To Kohns credit, he understands the objection above; that he avoids answering it is a pity. many educational writers have lamented the loss of curiosity among children and attributed it to schooling. Indeed, little children enter school doors excited and eager to learn, only to become bored and frustrated a few years later. The facts are indisputable, but the authors succumb to the most trivial logical fallacy, assuming correlation indicates causation. It is very likely students change their attitude towards learning simply because they grow up. A very simple evolutionary argument puts a lot of doubt into the abundant curiosity assumption. Indiscriminate curiosity is beneficial to a young animal that has to learn about its environment, both natural and social. However, the drive to learn is a vast physiological expense, and it would detract from an adult animals ability to perform the more important tasks of reproduction, nourishment, and danger avoidance. Thus, the adult animal naturally becomes more discriminate in its learning, and less curious; it develops preferences and focuses its attention on specific things it finds interesting. Curriculum is a human way of focusing learning on specific things at the expense of other, perhaps more interesting things; it is an attempt to counter the natural narrowing and waning of curiosity. Dewey contributed to the myth of abundant curiosity: Now, keeping in mind these fourfold intereststhe interest in conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in an artistic expressionwe might say they are natural resources, the uninvested capital upon

94

A CASE AGAINST INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child. 7 I do not wish to dispute the existence of these natural resources, but the extent of the resources can and should be disputed. In his time, Dewey may have been allowed to overestimate these reserves, but after 100+ years of Progressive experiments in education we have a better sense of just how much curiosity is available to us for use in education. The image of the boundlessly curious child is a more of an ethical ideal than a result of observation. Short of allowing that there is inexhaustible willingness to learn anything adults think necessary, the claim about damage done by extrinsic reward does not look warranted. While extrinsic motivation may dampen preexisting intrinsic motivation, it cannot damage what does not already exist. Extrinsically motivated desired activity is better than no desired activity at all. Fallacy 2: Intrinsic Motivation Can Be Easily Manufactured Kohns book is so full of good research analysis and insightful argument, that the following makes one cringe: It is often possible to devise creative, interesting ways of doing things that are of themselves quite dull. A friend of mine managed the mind-numbing memorization anatomy required in medical school by inventing elaborate fables in which different parts and systems of the body played starring roles. 8 This is an example of the faith in making all learning interesting, which is not unlike an alchemists belief in transmutation of common metals into gold. To sustain the legend, there is always a friend who has done just that, but never a definite proof. Consider, for example, an assessment made by Mark Lepper, the previously mentioned pioneer of intrinsic motivation research: Do these sorts of instructionally incidental embellishments actually enhance students interest in the activity itself? Somewhat surprisingly, there is little empirical evidence available to answer this question. 9 Tellingly, Kohn spends an entire second half of the book suggesting instructional embellishments to increase intrinsic motivation. Some of these are inspiring, some are banal, and most seem to be targeted at children who are already motivated to study. However, the very fact of the overwhelming concern for creating more intrinsic motivation contradicts the initial claim that there is plenty of it to go around. If innate curiosity would indeed be naturally plentiful, no need for instructional embellishments should ever arise. Even if intrinsic motivation can be induced, it does not mean that such a task does not have limitations. If we make the entire curriculum relevant and interesting to students, it will cease to be a curriculum, and will be indistinguishable from entertainment. Entertainment has one purpose: to make its contents intrinsically motivating to consume. It does not have the role of selecting and organizing such content for purposes other than keeping a consumers attention. To say that certain content has educational value is the same as to say that it is pre-selected on the grounds of usefulness as defined by others, and not on the basis of intrinsic appeal. While many a Progressive believed children could select their own curriculum,
95

CHAPTER 10

they actually assumed it would be selected according to certain rules. Dewey, for example, believed we could select curriculum by directing the childs activities, or giving them exercise along certain lines. 10 Whatever the method, curriculum without any criteria other than learners interest ceases to be curriculum. Although hybrids do exist, entertainment and education pull in opposite directions. None of the edutainment ventures have been clearly successful either commercially or educationally. The market-driven and very creative computer game industry has not been able to produce games that are both educational and entertaining. Rather, computer games turn out to be either educational or entertaining. While it is possible to induce intrinsic motivation, on a large scale it is an impossible task because of the limitations outlined above. Fallacy 3: A is not B, Therefore A is Better Another interesting assumption of researchers is that rewards for learning should be, at some point, taken away, and the desired behavior should still continue on its own. Kohn writes: ...it is most important to avoid rewarding people for engaging in an activity or behavior that we would like them to find intrinsically motivating Extrinsic motivators are most dangerous when offered for something we want children to want to do. 11 Barry Schwartz has the same concern for the future: what if students always expect a reward for learning something they are not otherwise inclined to learn? This is an example of educational exceptionalism, rooted in a sharp distinction between the world of learning and the world of working. A company that stops paying its employees is not surprised if employees stop working. Why should it work differently for children is rarely explained, although the assumption is quite clear: Kohn and many others believe that children should want to learn, and the merit of extrinsic rewards can only be measured by how much they can help this desire to happen. In a workplace, rewards are to cause certain behavior; in schools, they are to generate certain better motivation for behavior. Such a striking difference in approach is hard to justify. One can see how intrinsic motivation proponents offer a tautological argument: Extrinsic motivation is bad because it does not lead to intrinsic motivation and any motivation should lead to intrinsic motivation, because the latter is good. In other words, intrinsic motivation is good because extrinsic is bad. To be intrinsically motivated means to work for free. We try to convince children that their work is good for them and intrinsically interesting. However the huge amount of effort, and the scale of manipulations required to drive these two ideas home are the signs of falsity, not of veracity. That our success rate is quite abysmal speaks of the same. Interestingly, Kohn explicitly compares extrinsic rewards used in schools with merit pay systems used at workplaces. Both do not work, he observes (he does not include the significant bonuses common in the finance industry). However, Kohn ignores the fact that students do not get paid at all; he never implies salaries for adults should be discarded. That would clearly be utopian thinking, which even the Communists abandoned at least half a century ago. Employees who feel underpaid
96

A CASE AGAINST INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

perceive merit pay as a dishonest attempt to wring more productivity out of them without fair compensation. People who feel fairly compensated perceive merit pay as a management fad, and apply a reasonable effort without merit pay. Merit pay and school rewards have in common their position outside of normal labor market relationship; they are merely attempts to get more labor at a discount by substituting real money with trinkets, or giving small sums disproportionate to the value generated by the extra effort. Both are just not strong enough to create any real change in labor productivity. Token economies are systems of behavior modification based on rewarding positive behavior with tokens that can be exchanged for various material goods or privileges. They were very popular some thirty years ago, but interest among educational researchers has been declining. 12 After initial interest in the 1950s and 60s, the token economy idea remained mostly in the field of special education, as have some other behaviorist innovations. I cannot find any statistics, but anecdotal evidence suggests that token programs are still widely used in many schools, especially at the elementary and junior high levels. Lack of proven effectiveness has never been an obstacle to the use of an educational method. Kazdin and Bootzin wrote one of the first comprehensive evaluations of this phenomenon as early as 1972. 13 Since that time, their verdict has not been significantly challenged. Twenty years later, Kohn essentially reiterated the same charge against the token economies: The fact is that extrinsic motivators do not alter the attitudes that underlie our behaviors. They do not create an enduring commitment to a set of values or to learning; they merely, and temporarily, change what we do. He also wrote that extrinsic rewards turn learning from an end into a means. 14 The economic problem with tokens is that they are not real money. For the school market economies to work, tokens have to be exchangeable for real money, and student labor would need to be compensated at a market-determined level. The economic value of tokens is incredibly low, considering the expenditure of labor that goes into obtaining them. Students, who are forced to look at their own labor in terms of the market economy, quickly realize that tokens are a tremendous ripoff. My son, for example, had to read half a dozen books in elementary school in order to get a free small pizza, a less than $5 value. My daughter could receive a pack of chips in high school if she had near-perfect attendance for a year or a semester. Any child knows perfectly well that walking someones dog or delivering newspapers is a much more lucrative job than the most advanced token program. Tokens as a currency have little value, because they are created in the realm of symbolism rather than economics. Token economies do not work not because they are economies, but because they are token. Fallacy 4: Intrinsic Motivation Can Be Extended to Everything finding #3 (rewards negatively affect performance) is not so surprising. People do better if they are under the impression that they do it for their own interest and enjoinment. However, to assume that people can do everything at the top of their form is unrealistic. It would be the same as to ask a person to love everyone he
97

CHAPTER 10

meets with the same passion as he loves his special person. But love and friendship are exclusive relationships: we are close to some people because we are not as close to everyone we know. Similarly, a person will perform better at some tasks that she perceives to be her choice, in part because she will not do as well on other tasks. A persons likes and dislikes are selective, which creates and sustains the individual self. The hope to convert all kids into followers of the Love of Knowledge religion is simply utopian, because such a conversion would obliterate their individuality. Just as some kids make being a good student, or being interested in learning a part of their identity, others identify with other traits to the exclusion of these. Students who are invited to play with puzzles for free in Decis experiment are asked to volunteer their time. As is the case with many laboratory experiments, the social context of the experiment is thought of as irrelevant. But it is not; the activity itself is motivated by notions of altruism, of helping science, of boredom, of doing a favor to Dr. Deci, of hope to get some useful contacts, of curiosity, and perhaps by dozens more considerations. A silence about rewards triggers powerful mechanisms of self-justification: I am not getting paid therefore this must be interesting; otherwise I am a dupe. Such a motive is no less extrinsic than the desire for money. Those subjects who are promised money calculate that other payoff is probably going to be minimal. One paid to do something rents his body and his mind to the employer; it is in his interest to apply less effort and thus perform less well. Paying someone means freeing one from obligation; it means using different currency; it is a signal that social approval wont be forthcoming. The logic of the gift in the relational economy can be stronger than the logic of markets; this does not negate that both are somewhat less than intrinsic. What psychologists did in their experiments is silly: why try to give incentives for behavior that does not need incentives? Since No one does that in the real world, the researchers surprise is hard to understand. Of course, all peoplenot just children will understand the message of a cash reward: if an activity involves rewards, it must not be that interesting on its own merit. However, its not just that; the researchers misunderstood the laws of human reciprocity and what they called intrinsic motivation. In the case of the magic markers, a similar critique applies. I dont believe kids are born with innate interest in magic markers. Instead, they learn the difference between bad desires and good desires. Perhaps kids react to subtle clues about good desires when magic markers are introduced in the classroom. One is supposed to be interested in them; desires for the markers are approved by the teacher, otherwise, why bring them to class in the first place? They cannot avoid seeing older kids drawing. But when some of the kids are given trinkets for playing with magic markers, a not-so-subtle cue is that markers should not be desired on their own merit. The teachers actions again speak louder than words: do not be interested in markers unless I give you a trinket. Do the kids lose intrinsic motive or simply do what is expected of them, in both cases? Even when left alone, children respond to social approval; they internalize adults expectations; isnt that what makes things interesting in the first place?
98

A CASE AGAINST INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

The Motive as a Story The problem is deeper than the flawed conceptual distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Let us consider the difference between motive and action. The former is by necessity a linguistic and social phenomenon; the latter may or may not be such. Motive is, ultimately, a story about action to which we have access only through language, and it is a story told to someone else. The reason that a person does a certain thing is that which the person who does the action says it to be. We may or may not believe the actors version, and provide an alternative story which is what prosecutors or therapists like to do. However, there is no access to motive without language. Moreover, when a prosecutor or a therapist helps to find a true motive, what does that mean? In judicial proceedings, establishing a plausible motive contributes to the proof of guilt, but it does not make a veracity claim. The claim is limited to plausibility. When a therapist reveals a true motive that has been previously repressed, she is simply convincing the patient to accept a different, better story about his actions. 15 The story of why is always contested and censured; those who receive the message of the motive allow and disallow certain motives to be named; the community establishes the rules for such communication. The following point is important for my argument: What Kohn and other psychologists write about learning motivation is also a part of the process of censorship. They describe learning motivation in a strikingly judgmental manner: intrinsic motivation is good and honorable while extrinsic motivation is base and utilitarian. Psychological research prescribes more than it describes. A psychologist, in a very literal sense, creates motives by describing them, since the motive is a story, and psychologists retell stories. The distinction between a motive and an action is a specific case of the more general distinction between sign and reality. B.F. Skinner makes the mistake of obliterating any differences between the two; in his view, language is just another form of behavior. However, Motivation is different from outward action; this distinction is unavoidable in a social world. Neither law nor ethics are conceivable without differentiating between the intent and the content of human actions. Kohn makes another error by assuming a direct causality: motivation causes behavior. Therefore, his logic goes, if we ensure the good kind of motivation, it will result in the increase of desired behavior. He overestimates the independence and importance of motivation with respect to action. Kohn is making an ontological assumption about the existence of motive and action: the motives existence is privileged over that of the action; it pertains to a deeper, more truthful, description of the action than an empirical description would be. The cause must precede the effect, but motive both precedes and follows the action. We know what we want to do, in part, because we have done it before. The motive is a result of previous and current behavior. Motivation can be as easily described as a consequence of action as its cause. We tell a story about our past or future action, and the result and outcome of this action determines what story we tell. For example, I played longer with the puzzle because it was interested in it. Or, I know
99

CHAPTER 10

I was interested in the puzzle, because I played longer with it? This is a classic case of causal attribution: individuals act first, and attribute some good causes to the actions later. Can There Be Intrinsic Motivation? Pierre Bourdieu attacks the notion of intrinsic motivation in his essay Is a disinterested act possible? The answer is this: All apparently disinterested actions must conceal intentions to maximize a certain kind of profit. In introducing the notion of symbolic capital (and symbolic profit), we in some way radicalize the questioning of the nave version: the most holy actionsasceticism or the most extreme devotion may always be suspect (historically they have been, through certain extreme forms of rigorism) of being inspired by search for the symbolic profit of saintliness, or celebrity, etc. 16 The concept of the disinterested or intrinsically motivated learner is exactly that, a reflection of a certain form of symbolic capital. Just like saintliness, or honor, intrinsic motivation is a social good, and it is no more intrinsic than money. A student of certain class must be interested in learning for learnings sake. This adds to her status and helps maintain important relationships with others. Dewey expressed a similar idea: Children are interested in the world of things mainly in its connection with people, as a background and medium of human concerns. 17 But let us follow Bourdieu a little further: In fact, there exist social universes in which the search for strictly economic profit can be discouraged by explicit norms or tacit injunctions. The behaviors of honor in aristocratic or pre-capitalist societies have at their origin an economy of symbolic goods based on collective repression of interest and, more broadly, the truth of production and circulation, which tends to produce disinterested habitus, anti-economic habitus, disposed to repress interests, in the narrow sense of the term (that is, the pursuit of economic profits), especially in domestic relations. 18 Extrinsic motivation in learning has certainly been repressed through a variety of cultural mechanisms, including psychological research. Paradoxically, we are witnessing an era of the expansion and erosion of one particular habitus, the habitus of disinterested learning. The dramatic expansion of compulsory education over the last 100 years has created two problems for this habitus. The first is the clash with the culture of the lower classes, which were traditionally not a part of it. The indifferent person,writes Bourdieu,does not see why they are playing, its all the same to them; they are in a position of Buridans ass, not making a distinction. 19 Despite efforts to change this social fact, many lower class children still refuse to see the rules of the game, where intrinsic learning motivation is a valuable asset. Of course, they refuse to see what they cannot benefit form. The second problem is that the value of the symbolic capital is eroding, and the habitus
100

A CASE AGAINST INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

of disinterested learning is eroding with it. The Human Capital theory argument (more education means higher earnings) destroys the disinterested learning ideal. You cannot argue that learning is a joy in itself, and, by the way, it will make you rich. Those two messages are contradictory, and each weakens the other. The spread of a purely monetary argument for education is the evidence of capitalist habitus encroaching on the pre-capitalist world of education. What is happening to the field of education is similar to the decay of aristocratic society. In a well-constituted society of honor, La Rochefoucaulds analyses are incorrect; they apply to societies of honor which are already in crisis , and where the values of honor crumble as monetary exchanges, and through them the spirit of calculation, are generalized; this process goes hand in hand with the objective possibility of calculating (the work and value of a man begin to be evaluated in monetary terms, which is unthinkable). 20 Similarly, the very possibility of calculating the return on educational investment in monetary terms tends to signify, but also to enhance, the decay of the intrinsic motivation habitus. There cannot be true intrinsic motivation, if it is understood without using the idea of symbolic gain. The Consequences Most people have difficulty comprehending even the possibility that there might never be enough motivation to sustain universal schooling for 13 years. As Bourdieu puts it, Between agents and the social world there is a relationship of infraconscious, infralinguistic complicity: in their practice agents constantly engage in theses which are not posed as such. 21 The real thesis is that kids should go to school and learn without demanding any compensation. However the stated thesis is that all kids are curious and that extrinsic rewards are only harming their innate thirst for knowledge. The habitus of schooling rests on the denial of certain truths: specifically on denial of the shortage of intrinsic motivation. The production of intrinsic motivation depends entirely on such denial: If we stop believing that all kids want to learn, we will undermine whatever limited amounts of intrinsic motivation do exist. This is why it is so difficult to argue against the position that there is a prevalence of intrinsic motivation: society has a stake in maintaining the myth. Yet no amount of denial will be able to manufacture the needed quantities and duration of motivation, considering that the economy is becoming increasingly knowledge-based. We depend on a large proportion of the population having school-learned skills, and our demand does not seem likely to subside. Education is experiencing a classic case of labor shortage. It is finally becoming like any other part of the economy: if we do not have enough volunteers to do demanding and boring jobs, we find ways of compensating someone for doing such jobs. Yet as long as the myth holds, educators blindly believe the myth, instead of experimenting with various forms of compensation. Learning motivation does not have a pedagogical solution today; it is an economic problem.
101

CHAPTER 10

The assumption about the primacy of intrinsic motivation is not a harmless mistake. As happens with many utopian solutions, once this assumption fails, brutal force fills the void. The system of Compulsory education has been expanding under the utterly unrealistic assumptions that all children can be made interested in learning. When this does not happen, we blame teachers, parents, families, policymakers, tests, teacher preparation institutions, politicians, and everyone else. However, to maintain a semblance of order and to show some achievement, schools have no choice but to introduce stricter rules and bring more police and administrative enforcement into school buildings. This is the case, in part, because society is not ready to accept what it should accept: schooling has expanded to such a degree that it can no longer be sustained by the limited resources of intrinsic motivation. Economic solutions can stabilize and improve schooling in the short run, and replace it with a better system for the organization of education in the long run.
NOTES
1 2

5 6

8 9

10 11 12

13

14

15

16

Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards (New York: Plenum Press, 1993). See, for example a brief history in Mihaly Csiszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura, The Dynamics of Intrinsic Motivation: A Study of Adolescents, in Research on Motivation in Education, Volume 3, Goals and Cognitions, in eds. Carole Ames and Russel Ames (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989): 4569. Another source is a more recent Roland Bnabou and Jean Tirole, Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation, Review of Economic Studies 70 (3), 489520, also available at http://www.cepr.org.uk/ meets/wkcn/3/3514/papers/TiroleBenabou.pdf. Edward L. Deci, Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18/1 (1971): 105115. Mark R. Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbet, Undermining Childrens Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward; A Test of Overjustification Hypothesis, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28 (1973): 129137. Kohn, 71. Barry Schwartz, Money for Nothing, New York Times, July 2, 2007, available at http://www. nytimes.com/2007/07/02/opinion/02schwartz.html. John Dewey, The School and Society. The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 4748. Kohn, 8788. Mark R Lepper and Melinda Hodell, Intrinsic motivation in the classroom, in Carole Ames and Russel Ames, editors, Research on Motivation in Education, Volume 3, Goals and Cognitions (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), 95. Dewey, 37. Kohn, 87. ERIC database produces 28 entries for Token Economy published between 1995 and 2002, down from 57 published between 1985 and 1991, and 79 between 1975 and 1981. A.E. Kazdin and R.R. Bootzin, The Token Economy: An Evaluative Review, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 5 (1972): 343372. Alfi Kohn, Rewards versus Learning: A Response to Paul Chance, Phi Delta Kappan, 74 (1993): 784785. See the argument in the Prelude of this book and in V.N.Voloinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, Translated by I.R.Titunik (NY: Academic Press, 1976), 78. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 86.

102

A CASE AGAINST INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

17 18 19 20 21

Dewey, 48. Bourdieu, 86. Bourdieu, 77. Bourdieu, 87. Bourdieu, 80.

103

CHAPTER 11.

IS SCHOOLING A CONSUMER GOOD? A CASE AGAINST VOUCHERS

school choice theory includes, but is not limited to, the theory of school vouchers. It depends on the assumption that K-12 education is a consumer good or service. The assumption is erroneous, because schooling is also a form of labor students perform for the benefit of society. Consequently, schools cannot benefit from competition the same way other industries can. However, public schools current monopoly is also indefensible, and alternative ways of creating an educational market should be considered. School Choice Theory Julian R. Betts offers a clear and succinct articulation of the economic theory of school choice. He suggests that education, like any other good or service, is most efficiently distributed through competitive markets. Such markets become Pareto efficient, a condition unattainable for centrally planned markets. It is described as follows: no party could be made better off without making another party worse off. He continues: The genius of decentralized markets is that no resources go wasted because suppliers listen closely to the needs of consumers, in this case parents. 1 The market forces inefficient suppliers to either become more efficient, or go out of business. Betts acknowledges that efficiency does not necessarily create just or equitable conditions. In response, a form of public subsidy such as vouchers, may redistribute resources to benefit the less affluent, so both efficiency and equity are achieved. The second challenge to the educational markets is the heterogeneity of student needs. Not every family has the same educational needs. Again, Betts is confident that this challenge can be met by allowing the market to split into a series of small markets. In any case, some competition is going to be better than no competition. The opponents of school choice theory doubt that markets are capable of meeting the two challenges; they also concerned that deregulation may lower the quality of educational services, and erode the wall separating religion and the state. However, opponents share the proponents assumption that education is a crucial consumer good; the two groups merely disagree on the most efficient and just way of distributing it. Here is how the founder of school choice theory, Milton Friedman, puts it: Here [in education], as in other fields, competitive enterprise is likely to be more efficient in meeting consumer demand than either nationalized enterprises or enterprises run to serve other purposes. 2 It is important to note the explicit equating of education to a consumer good or service; in fact the whole theory of school choice rests on this assumption. I challenge the assumption. Education may not be described as a consumption of goods or services, and school learning may not be described as a form of consumption, without running into irresolvable logical contradictions. This is not only a critique of school choice theory, but also of opposition to the theory. The
105

CHAPTER 11

entire debate is irresolvable because of the false assumption in question. I offer three arguments against the assumption that schooling is a good or service: K-12 education is compulsory; it involves a significant labor component; and its returns are not linked to price. Schooling as (Not Really) Consumption What makes a certain thing a consumer good, and what makes a particular type of activity consumption? First, a consumer must want the good or service; free will seems to be an unalienable feature of consumption, at least in a market environment. Involuntary consumption can exist as a physical act, but not as an act performed by an economic agent. For a market economy to work, consumers need to be able to exercise their will to consume, which creates demand. To say that children want schooling would be an exaggeration to an extreme degree. One may easily show that some students want some schooling some of the time; it is impossible to show that the education delivered to all students is in response to a specific demand. However, Each single act of purchasing a good or a service must meet a specific desire to consume. We may deem a students choice of not desiring schooling unwise; however, this does not change the economic fact that in many cases, the demand for schooling is simply not there. There are other bad consumer choices, such as smoking, buying lottery tickets, not buying enough green vegetables, or not putting aside enough savings. In none of these cases do we ignore the existence or nonexistence of demand. In the case of students, society does not dare acknowledge this reality. We implausibly insist that, deep down, all students would want to learn, if only we made schools a little better. It is often argued that school-aged children need education even though they may not want it. Parents are said to be making the informed consumer choice on behalf of their children, much like they would purchase toys, clothes, diapers, etc. Undoubtedly, some consumer choices maybe made by parents on behalf of their children. However, the specific kind of choice associated with obtaining K-12 education is not a true choice, in that it does not warrant allowing parents to exercise it. Parents of school aged children are no more consumers of education than the children themselves. Some parents may not wish their children to complete high school. Our culture and legal system may call such choice unwise, inappropriate, or illegal; we ostracize such parents, and look down on them, but the fact is, many make the unpopular choice. The claim that all parents want their children to be schooled to the same extent is as untenable as the one that all students want the same; it is simply impossible to support this claim empirically. Moreover, there is no evidence that school-aged children are cognitively incapable of understanding of value of education. It is not cognitive ability, but vaguely defined maturity that is an issue. So, students are said to be incapable of making educational decisions because they are immature. The proof of their immaturity is their unwillingness to go to school. The decision to stop schooling
106

IS SCHOOLING A CONSUMER GOOD?

becomes an impossible one to make. The immaturity claim is restricted to children and mentally disabled individuals, but in the case of the mentally disabled, the courts determine the denial of certain rights based on evidence. Students lose their rights to chose by virtue of belonging to an age group. Judgment upon a choosers competence must precede the judgment of the desirability of a choice; otherwise the very notion of choice is meaningless. Parents must not make educational choices for their children, unless children are shown to be incompetent. The very fact that parents have the right to override their childrens choices in education makes the institution look like a sophisticated form of coercion rather than a consumer market. It is not really the parents, but the State that makes the greatest number of educational choices on behalf of childrenalbeit through delegating its authority to parents. In effect, the practice of a delegated choice creates an absurd situation: children may not drop out of schools because their parents should choose for them not to drop out, and parents may not make the decision because they would be affecting someone else (children). Parents who allow their children to drop out of school may be found guilty of negligence, either legally or ethically. Therefore, from a practical point of view, neither party has true freedom to choose. Again, one can easily demonstrate that some children and some parents desire schooling very much, and are ready to pay a high price for good schooling. Can this be the proof that schooling in general satisfies a human need? Of course not, since any number of goods may arise desire in some, and leave others indifferent. For example, just because a part of the population desires to own and use skateboards does not make skateboarding a universal desire. The state may decide that skateboarding is indeed the expression of noblest virtue and is also good for the economy and force all people buy skateboards. In such a case, the same activity (buying a skateboard) maybe interpreted as consumption, if performed by the sports enthusiasts, and as a form of taxation if performed by those of us who are less cool. There is no consistently and universally expressed desire for education; therefore universal schooling may not be considered a form of consumption. The second criterion for consumption is that it benefits the consumer. Let us assume two people have met, and they perform some act together. How do we know if any service has taken place? We should probably find out if the joint activity has benefited one person more than the other. In a market economy, the direction in which money flows is usually the opposite of the direction in which benefits flow. When I sit down and stare at a mirror and a barber cuts my hair, we both understand that the joint activity benefits me more than the barber; which is why I pay the barber, but he does not pay me. In this case, I am a consumer, because I benefit from the activity more than the barber. Now, the barber may also derive some benefit from the activity, such as the entertainment value of having a chat with me; however, on balance, I have benefited much more than he has. Only later, when money changes hands, is the imbalance restored. Would serving in the Army be considered a service provided to a soldier? While there are some benefits the soldier derives from serving, which are mainly educational, it is clear that the soldier is the provider of the service, and the Army is its consumer. For recruitment and morale boosting purposes, the Army may state
107

CHAPTER 11

the opposite, but most people understand that this is just rhetoric. In some other cases, the distinction is less than clear. For example, a young person entering an unpaid internship is somewhere between receiving and providing service; or, rather, he trades his service for services provided to him, and this exchange of services takes place outside of a monetary exchange. In most cases, however, it is quite clear who provides a service to whom. students obviously contribute much to the total collective activity of schooling. But who is providing a service to whom? Is it the state that provides a service to a child, or the child that does service for the state? Just because we always assume the former, does not make it true. The Benefits of schooling are not as unquestionable as conventional wisdom and economic theory let us believe; these benefits are systematically overestimated, while the cost of schooling is underestimated. A more detailed analysis of this methodological error will be provided in the next chapter. I wont claim to provide here a definitive proof that schooling benefits society more than it benefits students. However, no one has presented proof to the contrary either; all claims to that effect remind me of the Army recruiters exaggerations. At the very least, one should see that schooling consists of two opposite streams of services. Even if students consume education to some degree, the public also consumes their services. Students produce knowledge and skills, which then are sold as a part of their labor to employees, at a very significant discount. Therefore, schooling cannot be presented as merely a consumer good; what students do in schools is also a form of labor. And this labor is not as trivial as my entertaining the barber; schooling requires 13 years of hard, increasingly skilled, and unpaid work. It is fairly easy to show that the ratio of service-to-student and service-bystudent components varies dramatically in schools, depending on the social class of the school community. K-12 education, all by itself, delivers a student to the bottom of the labor market; its value depends almost entirely on whether it has been used to obtain a college or professional degree. Considering that only about 1/3 of all Americans manage to get a college degree, the value of a high school diploma fluctuates widely: from negative (forgone income and meager future earnings) to significant positive value (if used to obtain higher education, especially graduate and professional degrees). In other words, for some students and parents, schooling is a consumer good, while for others it is more like taxation in the form of required labor. Note that the argument here is similar to that about desire: schooling may be desirable for some, and not for others. Similarly, it benefits some, while not benefiting others. These two distinctions largely overlap, although they do not have to be identical: people may want schooling, but not benefit from it, or they may not want schooling, but still benefit from it. I am not in a position here to defend rational choice theory. Rather, my position is closer to the bounded rationality approach. 3 It would be safe to assume that in a great majority of cases, people want what benefits them, because they are more or less rational economic agents who can calculate probable benefits and likely losses.

108

IS SCHOOLING A CONSUMER GOOD?

Why Vouchers and Other School Choice Schemes Wont Work We have established that schooling is not a consumer good or service if it is compulsory and universal, because neither the desire for nor the benefits of schooling are universal. How does this affect school choice theory? Voucher schemes only work to the extent that consumers perceive schooling as beneficial and desirable. Markets are demanding on producers, but they also require extra effort from consumers. If the desire to obtain the good is not there in the first place, where will the desire to choose a better good come from? While the upper and middle classes will partake in the efficiencies of the newly created markets, lower classes are not likely to do so. Imagine living in a Trotskyite society, where you are required to participate in the labor army, which is really a form of labor tax. In addition, you are presented with a choice of which workplace you may report to for the unpaid and compulsory work. The only rational choice would be to select the least demanding workplace, not the one where you have to work the hardest and where your labor is used most efficiently. That is exactly how the American underclass will react to school choicenot because of any imagined cultural or moral deficiencies, but because schooling is not a consumer good or service to them; it is a labor service they provide to society without receiving much in return. In most cases, they will simply choose the neighborhood school that is close to them, and where their children feel comfortable and are treated well. Such a choice will have little to do with seeking demanding, rigorous education. The claim that the poor may not want an education may appear prejudiced. However, I am not offering another iteration of the cultural deficit model. Poor people show weaker demand for education not for cultural reasons, but because of economic conditions. Since returns from schooling are variable, one would be wise to estimate ones chances of getting higher returns. If you calculate that the work you do may also benefit you, and the harder you work the higher the benefit, you may chose a more demanding labor army to join. But such a decision will depend on the perceived ratio of benefits to labor expenditure. The benefits should not be merely minimally present, but should also be perceived as considerable and free of substantial risk. Because the game is fixed for the poor (substandard schooling and low levels of social capital), the odds of getting any return on investment in school labor can also vary: from one in one for the upper class, to one in ten thousand for the lower class. If those were two lotteries, would you be surprised if the first one sold much better than the second? Problems with Public Schooling Just because education is so vital to the contemporary economy does not mean we can continue taxing the poor indefinitely. It also does not mean we should round them up in Trotskyite labor armies. There are serious problems with the existing public schooling arrangement; these problems wont be solved by improving what is fundamentally a flawed system. Some of these problems are correctly identified
109

CHAPTER 11

by School Choice theory: government has no need or right to establish a monopoly on schooling. It has an interest in equalizing access to education and in improving its quality, but no business running the schools themselves. Such a monopoly is expensive, inefficient and infringes on personal liberty. However, another problem of public schooling has been entirely missed by voucher theorists as well as by their opponents. Lower class students cannot demonstrate sufficient effort, and cannot provide efficient labor, because of certain economic conditions not because of immaturity, prejudice, moral failings, or unequal school funding. We need to recognize that when it comes to education, the wealthy and the poor participate in two completely different economic systems. They look somewhat similar, but one is a consumer market while the other is a labor tax. This fact, and not a culture of poverty, or the bell curve, or other exotic theories explain the dramatic and persistent gap in educational achievement. Just as Latin American haciendas, K-12 education has been dependent on cheap labor. Cheap labor (or, in this instance, free labor) is a terrible gift for any industry, because it makes the industry utterly inattentive to how the labor is being used. It stifles innovation and encourages the waste of labor resources. All the energy of a hacienda-centered economy is used to keep labor abundant and cheap by any means available. 4 The same happened to public schooling: over the years, students saw increasing legal pressure to attend schools and extensive curtailing of their personal and property rights. From a separate court system to folk-tales about the adolescent brain, attempts to force students into schools take on the urgency of a national obsession. As Latin American economic history shows, such attempts are ultimately misguided. Cheap labor cannot make an industry efficient in the long-run; only competition for scarce labor breeds innovation and encourages sustainable growth. Presenting schooling as a universally desired consumer good is a reflection of an ideal, not of reality. That is what we wish would happen, and when it does not, we look for someone to blame. We either think that people who do not want schooling are deficient, or we think that schools are deficient because some people do not want them. Both of the explanations can be marginally correct, but one does not have to look hard to see that the assumption is farfetched to begin with. If we abandon the utterly unrealistic expectations that all children will like school some day, we can move forward to other solutions.
NOTES
1

Julian R. Betts, School Choice as a Remedy for Americas Public Schools: Promising Theories Sail into the Empirical Fog. (Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the National Academy of Education, Boulder, CO, 10/21/2006), 4. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1982), 91. Herbert Simon, A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice, Models of Man, Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting (New York: Wiley, 1957). D. Aikman, All-American Front, (Doubleday & Co., 1940), 4557.

110

CHAPTER 12.

HUMAN CAPITAL: A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

The Human Capital theory (HKT) rests on one mesmerizing empirical fact: more education generally means higher lifetime income. The theory considers education to be a kind of investment, the costs of which are recouped by higher future earnings, at a profit. The theory is very influential among both economists and educational policymakers. The only serious glitch is that the theory does not explain compulsory schooling. As P. Oreopoulos aptly puts it, viewing education as an investment suggests compulsory schooling laws should not exist, since the laws place constraints on individuals already optimizing. 1 In this chapter, I explain the paradox by providing a conceptual critique of HKT. Most importantly, HKT greatly underestimates the true cost of schooling to students. I also outline the implications of considering school learning a form of labor. The very term of human capital is a case of mistaken identity, for students work in schools may not be considered an investment. Among several critiques of HKT, I will briefly discuss two that are most conspicuous. First is screening theory, which maintains that schooling is just an expensive screening mechanism that sorts more able from less able students. A sophisticated analysis of the empirical evidence 2 demonstrates that this is not true, and formal education does add to the productive capacity of an individual. Schooling may have a screening component, but it also creates significant value for society as well as for the individual student. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that such an incredibly expensive screening mechanism would be so universally present in all economically successful societies. The availability of less expensive screening tools, such as testing, makes the screening theory of schooling implausible. The second major critique is the view presented by Bowles and Gintis. 3 According to these two authors, schooling raises earnings not because it makes people smarter, but because it creates incentive-enhancing preferences; that is, schooling makes us more obedient. But even if this is so, obedience can certainly be considered a kind of skill, and therefore, included in the notion of human capital. A more generous reading of obedience maybe interpreted as a sign of higher social intelligence, an ability to get along with others. Therefore, what Bowles and Gintis critique is ultimately compatible with HKT. One may suppose that schooling makes students both more capable and more socially adept. HKT seems unassailable: years and decades go by and no one seems to be able to find a hole in its logic. The theory in question fits so well with contemporary societys educational ethics; one has to wonder if its unassailability has more to do with social mores than with the theorys own strength. A Conceptual Critique of HKT The very idea of compulsory investment is somewhat troubling: investment implies choice of not only where, but also whether to invest. Any restriction of
111

CHAPTER 12

such choices limits efficient allocation. Mandatory investment takes on the qualities of taxation. Although payment of some taxes may be described as private investment, it would be a huge theoretical stretch to the point of rendering such description meaningless. Gary Becker, a major theorist of HKT, understands the problem even if it does not trouble him nearly enough. He demonstrates that compulsory education laws increases investment in human capital, but then wonders: Since the purpose of a minimum standard is to offset the effects of poverty and niggardliness, appropriate subsidies could in principle achieve the same result without compulsion. The effectiveness of voluntary investment in human capital is often underrated because subsidies to human capital usually cover, at best, only a portion of earnings forgone. If they cover all costs, including those foregone, almost all children, I am confident, would continue in school through the age desired. 4 This short passage contains an implicit but radical proposal: governments should pay students to attend school. No more than an aside, the suggestion is remarkable, because it questions compulsory education. However, it remained marginal to the HKT because it contradicted Beckers own overall framework. Viewing education as a form of investment paints a picture of education that is much too rosy to allow serious reform. The HKT makes schooling look so attractive to students that any compulsion becomes very easy to justify. If the investment is so profitable, and some people are less than enthusiastic about it, well, something must be wrong with those people. Therefore, compulsion can be justified. Both G. Becker and T. Schultz, fathers of the modern HKT, rightly argued against viewing education as consumption. Some people buy into both the school choice theory and the HKT, not realizing that they do not agree on one fundamental fact: schooling is a consumer good for the former and it is investment for the latter. Both are mistaken, but let us return to HKT. Schultz simply and clearly writes, the costs of schooling are incurred deliberately to acquire a productive stock, embodied in human beings, that provides future services. 5 Indeed, while a portion of education may be described as consumption, the whole cannot be reduced to the consumption component without ignoring the growing economic impact of schooling. Such a change of focus by HK theorists was justified; it helped to remove public educational expenditures from the category of current consumption, and demonstrate their economic effectiveness. Treating education as public investment makes much sense, especially at the early stages of a national education systems development. However, the HK theorists may have taken this logic too far by treating school learning as a form of private investment. The logical move Becker makes in this regard is puzzling: Instead of assuming that time can be allocated only between market labor force activity and nonmarket consumption activity, I now introduce a third category, investment in human capital [...] Each person produces his own human capital by using some of his time and goods to attend school, receive on-the-job training, etc. 6
112

HUMAN CAPITAL

If a theorist has two potentially applicable categories, and the first one does not fit, he should try the second available category before introducing a third one. In fact, neither Becker, nor any other HK theorist ever explained why what students do in school cannot be described as labor. For whatever reasons, no one explicitly considers students own input in education to be labor. However, even if one accepts the basic premises of HKT, students own work is implicitly included in the cost of human capital. Indeed, if people invest in themselves, what exactly do they invest? Aside from some insignificant (for elementary and secondary education) direct costs, the lions share of this investment is students own efforts. It is not just lost time, for learning can only happen when a student expends some energy, exercises her mind and body, and makes a deliberate effort. Any purposeful, effortful activity outside of leisure should be considered labor, especially if it has direct economic consequences. Using some of his time, as Becker puts it, is a euphemism for working. There is no need for the third category, because there are no demonstrable differences between creating ones own human capital and working. The methodology Becker and everyone after him use in estimating the costs of schooling contains an erroneous assumption. They calculate the private cost of schooling on the basis of forgone earnings. In other words, the cost of education to a student is a case of opportunity cost, or what the student would have earned if she were not attending school. Empirically, Becker considers several methods, which estimate either actual earnings of students from part-time jobs, or income of dropouts, or incomes of high-school graduates in the workforce, extrapolated to college students and high school students. 7 In all cases, unskilled low-end labor is, in effect, used as a baseline, because students do not yet have the education and experience typically associated with higher earnings. This does seem reasonable, if school learning is not presented as labor. Yet if it is, the whole methodology becomes vulnerable. The notion of opportunity cost applies to any asset that can be allocated in more than one way. For example, one can use barley to produce beer or bread; one can use corn to produce animal feed or ethanol fuel. Only when the initial commodity is the same, the logic of opportunity cost applies. Yet if one has two different commodities to begin with, it is impossible to calculate opportunity cost without converting them first into equivalents. A corn grower can only estimate the opportunity cost of not growing barley if he has a clear monetary representation of its production costs and sale prices. Most importantly, he needs to make the assumption that his labor will be the same, or similar, to that of growing corn. The homogeneity (actual identity or comparability) of the initially invested asset is a clear logical assumption of the concept of opportunity cost. However, in schooling, we begin with two different initial commodities: the labor of a low-skilled worker cannot be easily equated with the labor of a student in the same way that the labor of corn grower can be equated to the labor of a barley grower. Just because the same person can perform different kinds of labor does not mean any labor she performs is of the same value. The Value of one kind of labor cannot be calculated through the value of another significantly different
113

CHAPTER 12

kind, without exposure of both to the labor market. Wages are determined through the valuation mechanisms of the labor market and the general equilibrium of labor supply and demand. Of course, labor markets are somewhat different from commodity or capital markets, and are subject to numerous constraints. 8 Yet as a matter of principle, the value of labor estimates cannot stray too far from the actual wages actually received. The cost of a high school students labor is not exposed to the market at the time of work, which does not make it low or nonexistent. The root of HKTs error is this: a high school student does not receive a payment for taking calculus in the several years after graduation. Yet she receives it in the form of a differential between her wages and those of a classmate who dropped out of school without ever taking calculus. That market test is the only true measure of the value of her labor as a student. HKT assumes that a worker is compensated for labor actually provided at the time of employment, not for labor previously required of the worker when she was a student. I am not sure how such an assumption can be defended. If my employer requires me to produce a tool in order to get a job, I will assume that time spend producing the tool is a part of labor sold to the employer, even though I am not compensated for it until later. The workers brain and body are the tools that first require construction, mainly at the workers expense. Can one call this investment? Being paid later may be a form of simple (interest-free) savings, but not an investment. Beckers treatment of school learning as a private investment is also puzzling because going to school has so little in common with what is normally called investment. Investment, in general, is a purchase of an asset or a good that is not consumed, but used in production, at a profit to the investor. A profit-generating asset of any kind should provide larger output than input. Let us now describe this as a relationship between investment and labor. If I invest in a machine, it will make my work more efficient; it will reduce my labor input relative to the output of production. A machine that creates more work for the same output is useless. Similarly, if I invest in stocks, I should receive more money than I have paid, thus also effectively reducing my labor relative to consumption. On a very basic level, investment can be described as a way of working less by acquiring an instrument that makes labor more efficient. Yet work skills, or what Marx called labor power, are not such an instrument. Labor power does not reduce labor input; in fact, it does the opposite. It is well established that human capital is an illiquid asset, 9 but what does that really mean? In order to sell a doctors skills, one has to apply the more sophisticated labor of a doctor. To get the doctors skills out of her body she must apply more (better quality) labor than if selling, say, a lettuce harvesters skill. Sure, the doctor is paid more than a harvester, but it is not because the former has more of some mysterious substance; it is because she provides more (or better) labor. To convert labor power (or HK) into money, one has to work; the more labor potential one has, the harder one has to labor to use it. In fact, the very notion of labor power (or HK) is a mere abstraction that does not exist outside of the actual process of labor. This is why working rarely feels like spending capital. If this argument seems tautological, it is, but the blame rests with HKT rather than with me.
114

HUMAN CAPITAL

The notion of investment implies that one spends less than one receives at the end, unless investment fails. But how does one determine what a student spends in terms of her labor expenditure? The only way of determining this is to measure wages when the accumulated labor power actually reaches the labor market. The student earns what she earns, and one must assume that this is what learning calculus is worth. There is no investment, no capital, only labor compensated now or later. Opportunity cost is applicable to investment, because investors can actually allocate capital differently, thus producing different rates of return. Student labor cannot be allocated elsewhere, because if a student chooses to work rather than study, her labor will be significantly different, and worth significantly less than the labor of learning. Becker assumes that the nature of student work in school is irrelevant; that there is no difference between learning calculus and flipping burgers. He estimates the value of the former by the opportunity cost derived from the latter. No wonder he comes up with an 18% rate of return on high school. 10 Later estimates show private returns in the wider range of 4-16%, 11 yet they are all based on versions of the Mincerian equation, 12 which takes the difference in wages created by years of schooling, and deducts costs, including forgone earnings, which are, essentially, the wages of an unskilled worker. Instead, the rate of return on schooling should be assumed to be constant at zero. If the rate of return on schooling appears to be at a certain level, all that this indicates is that student labor is undervalued with respect with future labor. Lifetime income is the true reflection of a workers productivity as measured by the labor market. Long-term exposure to the market is a much better indicator of labor valuation than any short-term exposure. The Absence of a pay check in the first 13-30 years of ones work life describes only the nature of the social arrangements for the labor marked as schooling. A simple consideration of commonly known facts would help: the first thirteen years of education will place a worker almost at the very bottom of the social pyramid. Moreover, a high school graduates income has effectively dropped in the last thirty years. Or as the Bureau of the Census gently presents it: Real wages rose only for persons with education beyond high school 13 The persons with just a high school education can enjoy an average annual income of $18,737, just shy of the federal poverty level for a family of four. 14 At the same time, the number of high school graduates has increased significantly. It is hard to imagine that all the knowledge and skills actually diminished in economic value. The statistic demonstrates only that much of this value simply becomes public value, although it may reside in the individual. It shows that there is a robust mechanism of extracting the value of education from individuals without fair compensation. Clearly, as some of Beckers other ideas, HKT is an analogy that went too far. He tries to explain a wide range of behaviors in terms of the market economy; discrimination, crime and punishment, family relations, addiction, and so on. 15 These highly creative and imaginative descriptions suffer from unduly stretched analogies. It is amusing to think that criminals are rational, and that the police

115

CHAPTER 12

strive to maximize profits. It is equally amusing to think that students invest in their own skills, and then cash in on higher wages. Students are paid nothing for their work while at school. How much, if at all, should they be compensated? The answer has nothing to do with the actual value they produce, but everything with the incentives to work efficiently. Every pay check is but an imperfect reflection of the labor market at work. Every pay check is a mixture of compensations for previous, current, and, sometimes, future labor. Yet wages at any point must perform a signaling function, telling workers how much effort to allocate toward some specific kind of activity. The Consequences of the Error The consequences of the methodological error that is fundamental to HKT are significant. By severely underestimating the private costs of schooling, the theory provides justification for compulsory schooling. If the cost is very low, and returns are very high, only irrational people will refuse to invest; therefore, society is justified in compelling them. At the same time, compulsory schooling is the very mechanism that makes the private cost of schooling appear significantly lower than it actually is. Such a view creates a number of distortions, and is the root cause of the many failings of K-12 education. Not the least of them is inadequate effort on the part of most students. Even Nobel Prize winners are sometimes confused by appearances; so are K-12 students. Where Becker overestimated the value of education to students, students tend to underestimate it, for the same reasons. Because they are not being paid right away, students assume that they are not getting paid at all. The whole arrangement of schooling manifests itself to student as unpaid, compulsory labor. Viewing school learning as labor removes a mystery from the question of compulsory education laws. Compulsory laws exist because primary and secondary school does not appear to be such a good deal for most students. It has little to do with immaturity or lack of rationality students or their parents may or may not exhibit. Paradoxically, the HKT-induced illusions can also go in the opposite direction, leading some students to overestimate the benefits of schooling. The brain gain hypothesis by Boucher, Stark, and Taylor posits that in some developing countries, students study very hard, because they hope to immigrate to the West. They usually significantly overestimate their chances of immigration, but as a result of their false hopes, the economy of their native country benefits from elevated levels of education. People without the false lure of emigration tend to under-invest in human capital: If there are positive education spillovers then, in the absence of any prospect of migration, the optimal level of human capital that individuals choose to form falls short of the socially optimal level of human capital. The probability of migration can be used as a policy tool to nudge the level of human capital investment towards the socially optimal level of investment. 16

116

HUMAN CAPITAL

The premise of this thesis is that individual benefits from human capital accumulation do not justify the work and monetary expenditures associated with education. What is more, the thesis is backed up by empirical evidence. The study was done in India, however the same mechanism works in the industrialized world. The propaganda of HKT leads at least some of the students to overestimate the returns on investment in education. The promise of upwards social mobility is as false as it is useful. Just as psychologists tend to prescribe rather than describe, economists do the same thing. The HKT is also a mechanism for maintaining the myth of the usefulness of schooling for every student. Shifting the Focus to Labor Shifting attention to the labor of students allows research to focus on factors that make labor more or less efficient; specifically, on incentives. Dealing with education requires the recognition of a fundamental contradiction: education is an essential public investment, but its cost is much higher than we are used to believing. Part of this cost is covered by regular taxes, while another substantial cost is covered by the uncompensated, compulsory labor of students; that is, by the labor taxation of students. This hidden cost of education must be acknowledged, for it creates all the problems. Most importantly, it creates the disincentives for student labor. Many K-12 students appear to lack incentives for school learning, because they operate largely outside of the labor market for a very long time. Thirteen years of unpaid labor make one less interested in working at and for school. Delayed income is less attractive than immediate income in general. In the case of a K-12 student, the lengthy delay in payment is exacerbated by the significant risk of not being compensated at all. In middle and upper class families, the risk of school labor is significantly reduced, because family resources and parental example act as quasi-guarantors. For lower class students, the unpaid labor of schooling becomes more of a gamble: there is no guarantee that it will be compensated at all. Staying in school longer compounds risk, because it increases the amount of contributed labor more than it increases the chances of reaching the top of the occupational pyramid. Student labor is a major tax collected by governments and invested in public education, along with traditional tax revenues. Student labor is thus a form of public subsidy to employers, who obtain such labor at the publics expense in two ways: the direct cost of schooling is subsidized by taxpayers, and the labor of students is subsidized by the students themselves (not without using the publicly funded coercion apparatus). So far, there is nothing ethically or economically wrong with the description; public subsidies in this case may be appropriate. Yet the institution of compulsory schooling also lowers the quality of labor, because student labor lacks incentives, is not responsive to market demands, and is wasteful. Lowering the quality of labor is wrong, and should be addressed. As Becker notes, A school can be defined as an institution specializing in the production of training, as distinct from a firm that offers training in conjunction
117

CHAPTER 12

with the production of goods. 17 The Emergence of mass schooling can be viewed as a consequence of the further division of labor, where schools emerged as specialized firms. Unlike other firms, however, schools have never paid their workers; they had to resort to cultural, ideological, and legal pressures to force students to work. We have many historical precedents of the coexistence of bound labor with sophisticated market economies. American slavery is the most notorious, but not the only example. In general, bound labor is an attempt to obtain labor at a discount, using some means of extra-economic coercion, especially where labor supply is constrained, and wage labor is too expensive to be practical.
NOTES
1

6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13

14

15

16

17

Philip Oreopoulos, Do Dropouts Drop Out Too Soon? International Evidence From Changes in School Leaving Laws, Wharton Applied Economics Seminars and Workshops (2003) http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/Acrobat/Oreopoulos_AEW_paper_1_12_05.pdf, 26. D.R. Winkler, Screening Models and Education, in Economics of Education: Research and Studies, ed. G. Psacharopoulos (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987): 287290. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Does Schooling Raise Earnings by Making People Smarter? Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, in eds. K. Arrow, S. Bowles and S. Durlauf (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000): 118136. Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, New York: Columbia University Press (1975), 128. Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), 31. Becker, 63. Becker, 248251. See, for example, Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990):75119. Becker, 77. Becker, 201. Mark Gradstein, Moshe Justman, and Volker Meier, The Political Economy of Education: Implications for Growth and Inequality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 32. J. Mincer, Schooling, Earnings, and Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). Bureau of the Census, More Education Means Higher Career Earnings, http://www.census.gov /apsd/www/statbrief/sb94_17.pdf, 2. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The 2004 HHS Poverty Guidelines, http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/04poverty.shtml. See, for example, a collection by Beckers students and followers: eds. Mariano Tomasi and Kathrin Ierulli, The New Economics of Human Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Steve Boucher, Stark J. Oded, Edward Taylor, A Gain with a Drain? Evidence from Rural Mexico on the New Economics of the Brain Drain. Discussion Papers on Development Policy, (Bonn: Zentrum fr Entwicklungsforschung [Center for Development Research], 2005), 3 http://www.zef.de/ fileadmin/webfiles/downloads/zef_dp/zef_dp99.pdf Becker, 37.

118

CHAPTER 13.

THE SOVIET ECONOMY: A CASE AGAINST ACCOUNTABILITY

The Era of Excellence is a period of educational reforms in the United States that extends from 1980 until today; in all likelihood, it will extend into the future. The name applies to a generation of educational policies intended to enhance student learning. 1 The triumph of what Gert Biesta calls the managerial accountability of the audit society 2 is almost overwhelming. In this chapter, I use Michel Foucaults general framework to report on an important innovation in the political economy of power, and to show how these attempts at accountability are not likely to succeed. This is not a case of Foucault scholarship; my intentions are limited to the use of his concepts for explaining how accountability reform is another unpromising solution to the problem of learning motivation. Roots The aims of the current reform movement continue a long tradition of educational reforms. The same set of social issues, connected to urban poverty, unemployment, and the breakdown of the family, moved reformers of the 19th century. The same concern for an educated work force motivated the Sputnik era reformers. 3 The No Child Left Behind act signed by President G.W. Bush in January of 2002, promised a new era in education. Yet its key points were familiar: Accountability, local control and flexibility, new options for parents, and record funding for what works. 4 The broad bipartisan support in Congress indicates that the Era of Excellence will extend well into this century. The Era of Excellence is interesting in its methods, but not in its ideological content. The methods may or may not be new, but their systematic application and synergy are worth examining. Joseph Murphy breaks the Era of Excellence into three sub-periods, according to the dominant reform strategy: the Intensification era (1980-1987), the Restructuring era (1986-1995), and the Reformation era (1992 to present). The progression is from using the government as a traditional vehicle of reform, to more and more decentralization in the form of site-based management and school choice. Topdown reform is gradually replaced with well, another, much more powerful version of top-down reform, which has the outward appearance of a bottom-up reform. What one may call self-reforming seems to be the evolutionary trend of the Era of Excellence. Self-reforming is closely related to the family of quality improvement methodologies developed by global industry. Total Quality Management or TQM is associated with ideas of W. Edwards Deming (19001993), although he did not use or like the term. 5 Deming worked in Japan in the 1950s and is credited for the remarkable progress in quality control the Japanese industry had made after the World War II. In the 1980s, his ideas became popular in the United States. The U.S. Federal government became concerned with the quality of American products, and in 1987 it established the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, 6 named after Reagans Secretary of Commerce, who was
119

CHAPTER 13

killed in an accident. Finally, there is the International Standards Organization, 7 which administers the so-called ISO-9000 series of quality standards. The differences between these various systems of quality control management are significant, but their family resemblance is unmistakable. For simplicity, I will use TQM as a generic term for all quality control methodologies listed above. I want to emphasize the self-regulating aspect of these systems. Essentially, an organization devises its own set of goals, operational practices, and methods of quality control, and then shows to a third party how it carries out these procedures. Modern quality control is an exercise in meticulous, pre-planned self-policing. Even more importantly, it is an exercise in designing the self-policing procedures. A sizeable body of writing in organization theory examines quality control methods within Foucaults theory of power relations. 8 Sewell and Wilkinson 9 point out that the TQM is an extension of Foucaults Panopticon. It looks like workers get more control over their own work and the organization. In fact, the means of control become less visible, and power more precisely distributed. Surveillance substitutes hierarchy and bureaucracy. Sewell even quotes empirical studies demonstrating that autonomy can coexist with tight control. 10 Indeed, there is something in TQM that reminds one of Foucaults notion of discipline as a technology of domination: the meticulous self-control, the rationing of small doses of punishment, the impersonal character of submission. TQM first made inroads in higher, and now in K-12 education. Higher education accreditation procedures rely more and more on TQM-type methodologies. The Baldrige framework, which is defined as a self-assessment framework in education is one of the biggest buzzwords in todays schools, and is actively promoted by several state governments. The relation to business practices is very straightforward an unapologetic. For instance, if you want to write to the Baldrige initiative in Education, you have to put C/o National Alliance of Business in the address. 11 I do not want to make the list of examples and connections longer than necessary; it is sufficient to show that the Era of Excellence is inspired by the TQM and similar business practices. The connection itself is neither ethically nor theoretically suspicious. I simply want to point out that Era of Excellence reforms are just a case of a larger historical trend, and reflect changes occurring in wider society. Empowerment The key evolutionary trend of educational reform is toward delegating responsibility to states, school districts, and individual schools, in connection with certain procedural controls. The reformers will not or cannot tell schools what to do; they simply provide standards, give or promise funds, and let the educators figure out their own course of actions. On matters of structural and organizational change, districts and schools are more and more often left alone to decide what is best. In theory, such an arrangement should produce widespread enthusiasm among educational practitioners, which somehow is not happening.

120

THE SOVIET ECONOMY

Educational theorists have argued for years that in educational reform, a cookiecutter approach does not work. John Goodlad, Theodor Sizer, Deborah Meier, and other educational authorities finally broke through to policymakers with the idea that each school is an individual social organism, and the same policy or technique may not work in all schools. I doubt that these three would like to claim credit for the victory of self-reform, although their influence seems likely. The underlying idea here is a belief that teachers and administrators will better know the context, will be more flexible, and finally, will be more motivated to implement the programs they themselves author. I would like to share such a belief; however one is forced to face the reality of self-reform. Individualized, locally-controlled reform is not necessarily democratic or liberating. The debate about educational reform now seems to concentrate on forms of accountability (standardized tests versus more authentic forms of accountability). Yet, I venture to predict that even locally controlled forms of accountability, like those proposed by Deborah Meier, 12 will not diminish the perverse domination of self-reform. The theorists of educational reform may have missed the dangers of Foucaults Panopticon. The U.S. Federal government has developed its own ambitious Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program. 13 It requires a school reform to be comprehensive, which means involving the entire school. Schools are referred to dozens of reform models to choose from; some based on theoretical assumptions that are entirely opposite to others. Among the models offered is the strictly behaviorist Direct Instruction approach, and the constructivist Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound. 14 In other words, the United States Department of Education directly tells us that the content of reform is irrelevant; only the process and result of reform count. This is a paradoxical development, which is worthy of a close examination. Schools and school districts are increasingly asked to reform themselves, by designing their own reform models and procedures of quality control. They are not told exactly what to do; instead, they are expected to find that out on their own. Although significant research has been done to assess the effectiveness of different comprehensive reform models, its results are inconclusive due to the relatively short existence of most models. 15 This shift toward self-reform may make one somewhat optimistic about the effectiveness of educational theory. After decades of sustained effort, and dozens of high-profile books, interviews, and public debates, the idea of school uniqueness has become more acceptable. Of course, one can be more cynical and argue that it was not so much the leaders of educational thought, but the influence of industry and its quality improvement techniques, that made the difference. Who gets credit for self-reforming ideology is not that important anyway; perhaps Goodlad and Deming share important philosophical assumptions about the nature of organizations. Right now, the tendency is to allow schools to figure out how exactly they want to change, and to provide evidence of improvement. Thus, the combination of self-reform and accountability more or less defines the landscape of K-12 educational reform. Yet, as Elizabeth Ellsworth once famously put it, why doesnt this feel empowering? 16 The short answer is that an important component of self-reform is empowermenta disciplinary technique based on delegating
121

CHAPTER 13

authority down the hierarchy without changing the nature of that authority. In addition to empowerment, I describe two more closely related technologies, ritual writing and the perpetuation of change. Here is how empowerment works. In 1997, the Ohio General Assembly required the creation of a state-wide performance accountability system; hardly an unusual demand in the Era of Excellence. In response, the State Department of Education required all school districts to develop continuing improvement plans (CIP). To facilitate this process, the Department offered a well-designed, webbased interactive tool called iCIP, for interactive Continuing Improvement Plan. Anyone used to be able to try it out online, 17 but now, one needs log-in credentials. The tool works like a wizard, which takes you step-by-step through a certain process, while providing help along the way. First, you create the districts Beliefs, Vision and Mission. The next big step is entering the district events calendar (there is also an address book). Then there is the library of the districts documents. Finally, you will see the State Performance Standards page. Very conveniently, your districts test data is already collected and presented to you in comparison with state averages. Where your district lags behind (for example, in the 6th grade mathematics) the numbers will be highlighted in red. However, on the next page you will be asked to identify your goals and priority areas. If you are tempted to say that 6th grade mathematics will be your priority area, because it was highlighted in red, well, you said it yourself, no one was forcing you. You are not forced to choose anything; you are only asked to be logical and think through what you are going to do. Of course, the State did not create these things to make us laugh; this business of self-reform is dead-serious. Once sold on the idea of empowering local educational agencies, state governments will go to great lengths to make sure that principals and teachers are properly and efficiently empowered, whether they want it or not. We are witnessing an instance of the old confusion of choice with freedom. Empowerment relies on the ability of individuals and groups of people to choose. However, the circumstances and limitations of the choice make those who choose less free in their future abilities to choose. In a sense, this is true for all choices; almost every choice reduces future choices. True empowerment enlarges the scope of possible choices, and should not be too closely tied with an opportunity to choose. Empowerment is an act of choice that limits subsequent choices. It is an act of choice that acquires great significance as such, regardless of the content and consequences of choice. There exists a whole range of manipulative technologies that can produce any needed results through the careful organization of group choices. I have had an opportunity to witness a school restructuring process, where teachers went through a whole year of seminars, group activities and exercises in order to develop their own vision of restructuring. At every step of the process, they were asked to think, to write down their preferences, to reflect on their own personal experiences and beliefs. Never once did the university collaborators force the teachers to do something they did not want to do. It appeared that the very logic of this collective

122

THE SOVIET ECONOMY

thinking process dictated the next step. Large sheets of paper and colored markers brought into a meeting room, more often than not, set a stage for empowerment. The result of this long process was a multi-page framework: no better or worse than any other, with some changes to scheduling and governance, with a new system of incentives for good students, etc. The crucial difference is that the teachers felt some authorship over this document. In the past, when governments prescribed exactly what to do, teachers could blame the government if the reform went wrong. The forcibly empowered teachers and administrators are only given a multitude of standards, but are free to decide which specific model of reform to undertake. Therefore, if anything goes wrong, they have no one to blame but themselves. They are put in a situation of perpetual guilt. But you decided on all this yourselves!became a leitmotif of their new relationship with authorities. Empowerment brings individual conscience into a relationship of power. Instead of ineffective ways of coercion through purely administrative means, we can now shame teachers into active obedience. The idea of the Panopticon, from the beginning, relies on some sort of autonomy granted to the individual. According to Foucault, the prisoner does not know whether he is being watched, therefore, he gets in the habit of watching himself: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment: but he must be sure that he may always be so. 18 It takes an autonomous decision-maker to make a good Panopticon prisoner. Yet now, the prisoner gets to design the Panopticon for himself. The ghost of J. Bentham, the inventor of the original Panopticon, would now like every prison, factory, and school to get busy designing the blueprints for their own, custom-built Panopticons. Besides having to watch oneself, the new Panopticon creates the added benefit of a sense of community among the prisoners. The collective body of prisoners becomes the guard; each individual remains a prisoner. Standardized panopticons are out; individually designed ones are in. The community exerts a certain peer pressure, and therefore makes the experience of being watched almost omnipresent. The prisoners can no longer conspire against the authorities, because authority belongs to all other prisoners. Why would anyone want such a thing? For three primary reasons: so that each Panopticon fits to specific circumstances; so that it is flexible and being constantly perfected; and so that the inmates consider it their own. Ritual Writing Another key instrument of the new Panopticon is the ritual writing. I have mentioned it already, but it deserves special attention. Again, all Ohio school districts are asked to write their Mission, Vision, and Belief statements. These three together constitute the Core Values. Of course, there is help available at each of these steps. For example, Vision is the school districts picture of its future. A well defined vision would identify the broad areas of knowledge, skills, and understandings which students should be able to demonstrate. But Beliefs are the principles and ideas that govern the districts decisions and actions. So, if you work for the Adams County/Ohio Valley Local, your core values should be
123

CHAPTER 13

different from the people working for Allen East Local. If you are not quite sure what beliefs people can have, there are three examples offered: (1) All children deserve an equal opportunity for education. (2) All schools in our District should be safe for students and teachers. (3) Strong proficiency scores enable students to be successful. Ritual writing is of a very special kind. The act of writing in general is not a manifestation of human agency; in a certain sense, it is human agency. In literacydominated societies, writing and the idea of the authentic self have been intricately connected. The authentic self implies significant differences among individuals; and writing is one of several ways to produce and document such difference. The authentic self implies that human beings have inner depth, 19 and writing provides access to this depth. I am different from you because I have my own unique thoughts, which I can express. These thoughts acquire significance, permanence, and special presence when they are written down. Modern democratic agency is very hard to imagine without the authentic self. We are all expected to use our own heads when we act; blind conformism and obedience are not worthy of a democratic citizen. Hence, we all go through a process of developing more or less unique authentic personalities. But no one is born with an authentic self. Therefore, we speak and then write in order to produce difference. The Creation of a text makes sense only when it records something new and different. In Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges tells a story of a writer who rewrites Don Quixote. He goes through numerous changes, and editions, and at the end comes up with a text that is exactly like that written by Cervantes. The paradox that Borges exploits does not arise from the fact that it is impossible to rewrite another Don Quixote, but from the fact that it is useless. One does not write a text when it already exists. The originality of a new text is the essential characteristic of writing that distinguishes it from copying. Such an understanding of writing is relatively new in Western civilization. Copying and authorial writing did not appear substantially different for centuries. A large middle ground between these two practices was filled with compilations and commentaries throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet modern European writing is intimately connected to the idea of authorship. Ancient forms of writing did not need an author in our contemporary sense of the word; the author was accidental, unimportant, or conveyed the divine Truth rather that his own authentic self (e.g. Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.). Only the modern writer, especially the fiction writer, becomes permanently attached to his or her unique texts. The authentic self is partly a product of writing, such as diary writing, just like it is a product of confessions and psychotherapy. The authentic self is a product of certain practices, in which the inner depths of a human personality become manifest and acquire importance. Ritual writing is a technology of power that converts the special relation between the self and its writings into power relations among individuals. When a group of people is required to come up with a statement of values and beliefs, the hope is not that they will produce new and original writing. Reading the vision and mission statements shows just that. Toledo Public Schools, for example, is
124

THE SOVIET ECONOMY

a client-driven organization which exists to enable all students to reach their full potential as productive and contributing members of our global society. In a culturally diverse, urban environment we pursue innovation in teaching and collaboration in decision making to respond to the diverse needs of our stakeholders. We educate in partnership with the whole community to provide the academic and social skills necessary for students to succeed as responsible citizens in the future. 20 In translation, it simply means that Toledo Public Schools is a school district. The text itself is intentionally meaningless; it is not intended to be read for any other purpose except to check that it is there. I bet most of my readers skipped over some parts of this 74 words-long mission statement, precisely because it is not written for reading. The not-for-reading text is a fascinating contemporary phenomenon that deserves serious attention. Let us try another one: Delaware, Ohio city schools have a mission to design lessons, materials, and activities that result in all students learning the knowledge and skills needed to be productive members of our free and democratic society. 21 In translation, it means that the Delaware City Schools is also a school district. It professes 13 beliefs, such as It is the school communitys obligation to engage students in quality work experiences that challenge them to learn more. (Translation: we are a school district; we teach children). In fact, such a text has no use-value. Like a student essay, it serves to generate the process of writing. Vision and mission statements are very thinly concealed learning exercises. There has been much Dilbert-style humor about the mission statements, and I do not wish to contribute further to that genre. Let me just quote the title of a scholarly paper: Business Schools Mission Statements: The Bland Leading the Bland? 22 Most of them are bland, all right, but this is not the point. The quality of the mission statement does not matter, the process of writing does. The act of collective writing, which the State of Ohio requests from its school districts, is not really writing; it is an entirely different phenomenon, with different purposes and different governing rules. I am not implying in any way that ritual writing is not effective just because it is bland. A very thorough compilation of research data by the National Center for Education Statistics shows otherwise: Whether called shared vision, shared beliefs, shared values, or common goals, a clear sense of purpose with participant buy-in is a key ingredient in any successful social organization, including schools. 23 The report acknowledges that what those goals are exactly is not important, as long as they become part of the school fabric and all activities are aimed at achieving them. 24 ritual writing works, but it has nothing to do with the quality or content of the texts produced. What is at work is the process, the ritual of writing. How exactly does it work? Teachers at a junior high school I regularly visit, use think sheet to keep their kids busy during in-class detentions, and to make the experience of detention less

125

CHAPTER 13

enjoyable. The think sheet has a number of questions, and blank spaces a student is required to fill out: What did I do wrong? Who was bothered by what I did? What should I have done instead? , etc. Ironically, teachers are engaged in writing acts in connection with school restructuring that are very similar to the think-sheets. They are asked to brainstorm on the restructuring process. The ideas about restructuring are all theirs. The questions are asked by an outside party, which happens to be a consortium of several universities that received a large federal grant. The difference between a think-sheet and the large sheet of newsprint paper with color markers is minimal. The purpose of such writing is subjugationthe assertion of power. The ritual writing is thus similar to other power rituals, such as reciting the Chairmans sayings, saluting the Fhrer, or toasting the Generalissimo. However, it is different in one very important respect: it involves the self to a much greater extent. Ritual writing is much more invasive than other submission rituals, because it makes the authentic self indistinguishable from ones outward behavior. Ritual writing reaches deep inside ones self in pulls it out in its entirety. When you are asked gently What do you truly believe about education?it becomes a very different sort of story. Your authenticity is at stake precisely because you are not forced to say anything in particular. In fact, there is no audience to exercise pressure on what you say. I dont think a single state department of education has ever challenged, or rejected a mission statement or a restructuring plan for being incorrect. All they want the teachers and administrators to do is to write it down, please. If we believe Charles Taylor, 25 the authentic self can be understood as a defense against domination, a sacred inner space where one can be oneself. Foucault argues that the authentic self is created by such practices as confession, and later, psychotherapy. 26 His understanding of the self is much bleaker: the self is a part of power relations. Having a heightened sense of self may mean better, gentler, more efficient domination. The issue is too large for this book to handle, and both Taylor and Foucault are probably right. Yet the case of ritual writing supports Foucaults views more than Taylors. The self indeed blends with the technologies of coercion; the ritual writing of educational reform is one example of such a blend. The authorship of the texts of ritual writing is unclear; it is supposed to be a product of collaboration. These texts not only lack readers; they also have no author, no personal responsibility, and no individual shame for a job poorly done. They are the realm of the absolute freedom, freedom ad absurdum. For the anonymous writer, the only judge is his or her own conscience. Yet this freedom brings the ultimate subjugation, for one does not know what to resist. When you have nothing to say, you will say nothing that sounds like something. When you said it yourself, you have to believe it. What you say is the reflection of your inner self. Saying meaningless things thus obliterates parts of your very self. The logic of ritual writing is very simple: The self is created by what it writes. If we can force someone to write empty, meaningless text, the connection between the self and the text will not break; rather, the self will change to reflect this empty, meaningless
126

THE SOVIET ECONOMY

writing. By producing empty vision and mission statements, the literate self literally obliterates itself, thus making resistance to the reform efforts very difficult. Authoring the meaningless text is the ultimate form of subjugation, which clears possible resistance out of the way of self-reform. The Perpetuation of Change The third instrument of self-reform is the perpetuation of change. The idea of continuous improvement represents a significant shift in the use of change in power relations. All the reforms of modernity have been envisioned as the final ones. Of course, individual reformers knew that someone would follow them and propose changes, but the intent of a reform was to fix things once and for all. The History of education is, of course, a history of perpetual reform since the beginning of public schooling. However, every new reform presumed certain finality. The progress seemed to be an uneven, discrete process, with changes followed by periods of stability, and then more change. The very notion of reform, and progress in general, implied the opposite of the state of no reform, either in the past, as Ancien Rgime, or in the future, as a golden age of prosperity and harmony. TQM thinking brought with it the notion of permanent improvement and of homogeneous time. This shift from heterogeneous social time to homogeneous time brought to life an altered perception of change. We now do not expect sudden leaps and periods of calm. Reform has collapsed into a steady evolution, an evolution as improvement, but not as the emergence of something new. Natural history has moved in the opposite direction: from the classical Darwinian view of gradual evolution to Goulds theory of the punctuated equilibrium. 27 The social sciences and humanities have always operated under the assumptions of heterogeneous time; the cycles of war and peace, revolution and stability are very difficult to ignore. Yet the gradualist continuous improvement model seems to have penetrated educational theory effortlessly, without any challenges. I would argue that this is a tremendous step backwards in thinking about education and educational organizations; it is not only politically ultraconservative, but also methodologically flawed. While the former is a matter of conviction, the latter is not. Homogeneous time is a deeply flawed concept. Human understanding often fails to penetrate homogeneous objects, because any understanding involves differentiation. If all times are the same, then a possibility of radical change is lost. The continuous improvement concept does a double trick to the idea of change. It makes reform an every-day, routine activity, and by doing so, eliminates reform as such. It lowers expectations, but increases effort by spreading it over long periods of time. Continuous improvement is an innovation in the tool kit of power relations. The Perpetuation of change is at attempt to put all educational change to an end by appropriating the very notion of change. Within the constraints of the self-reforming model, there is no space for imagination, for inventing something genuinely new, for a quantum leap of any sort. Reform itself has become a

127

CHAPTER 13

mechanism of control. Teachers and school administrators are kept in check by being allowed to change their organizations. Perpetual change disallows any change at all. Changes are sliced so thin, and so spread out in time and space, that they lose any accumulating effect. The Era of Excellence reform is not reform at all; it is large-scale maintenance of the existing educational system. In education, we witnessed the strange End of History phenomenon; predicted by Fukuyama 28 for the whole world, it has materialized only in American education. Why Accountability Reforms Wont Work The evolution of power relations in education is somewhat natural, and certainly somewhat effective. Many good things may very well come out of it. Foucault, on many occasions, noted that power cannot be viewed as pure evil; it simply is an evolving function of society. Every page of Discipline and Punish is marked by a paradox; on the one hand, Foucault incessantly shows his disdain for the manipulative technologies of power; on the other hand, he maintains the voice of the objective analyst. My graduate students sometimes confuse his irony with his own voice. He looks for logic, efficiency, and even certain naturalness in the power evolution process. Writing his books was an act of resistance in its own right. Exposing the invisible mechanisms of power makes those mechanisms less effective. Resistance is thus an important component of social ecology, whether it is successful or not. In other words, I am not sure if I wish the efforts of selfreform to fail. However I am convinced that their positive impact is very limited, no matter how sophisticated the power techniques used to implement them become. The reason is very simple: contemporary school reform is entirely missing the source of most school problems: learning motivation. TQM may work if superimposed on market economies; it is less likely to make much difference in the context of non-market bureaucratic organizations such as schools. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, one of the first things he did was establish a highly centralized federal quality police. It was given an unpronounceable Russian abbreviation name Gospriyomka, which means simply the State Inspection. Its officers had the authority to inspect the quality of any merchandise on the premises of any production unit, and deny its release. The Soviet economy had a horrendous production quality problem, and a significant portion of goods were shipped across the vast country only to be discarded as defective on the receiving end. So, his idea was to stop the waste and at least save on transporting junk no one wanted. Of course, it did not work, and could not have worked. Production stalled, because producers had to fix a lot of defective goods; consumers quickly realized that having goods of poor quality was better than having no goods at all. This was one of the last convulsions of the planned economy. It became clear to most that the state had to abandon price controls, privatize most industries, and allow enterprises to compete, so that the inefficient ones would go bankrupt and stop producing junk altogether. Of course, this was easier said than done. In the following fifteen years, the Russian economy
128

THE SOVIET ECONOMY

experienced a tremendous collapse much worse than the one that happened during the American Great Depression. Many of the economic problems still persists, although high oil prices bailed the country out of any immediate danger of total economic collapse. I hope the analogy between Gospriyomka and accountability reforms makes sense. First, both are well-intended, and at some level seem very reasonable. Indeed, who would be against improving the quality of goods and services? Who would object to the need for educational institutions to measure how well they teach and to be held accountable? Who would object to empowering educators to put their own houses in order? The Soviet economy was in such apparent trouble that any means of improvement were welcome. The same could be said about American education: its costs have been rising significantly over the past fifty years, while outcomes remain flat and lag behind other countries. Education is the sick man of the American economy, so lets do something, right? Gospriyomka failed not because it was a bad idea. It failed because it was a good idea applied to a bad economy. When your car is stuck in deep mud, at some point it starts digging itself deeper and deeper. Ironically, the more powerful your car, the deeper hole it digs for itself. If you are travelling in mud that looks like open water more and more, at some point a dinky boat is better than the most powerful 4-wheel drive. This is exactly what happened to the Soviet economy: it did OK for a while, but it was simply not suited for the rigors of a consumptionoriented economy. It could never produce consumer goods of good quality (although it could produce a lot of reasonably good weaponry). The same thing is happening with American education: it was just fine when it was selective, and most people never graduated from high school. However, it got stuck deep mud when most people needed to be at least somewhat educated. American education loses out in global competitions not because it is exceptionally inept, but simply because it has reached the mud pit first. Everyone else in the world is cheerfully speeding towards the same pit; they just dont realize it yet. If you are producing coffeemakers in America, you would be ultimately concerned with people buying or not buying them. From that act of consumption, the motivation to improve and innovate would percolate up to the production process. In the Soviet economy, the act of purchasing a good had no impact on production; you were forced to improve and innovate through purely administrative measuresyour boss would tell you to do it; yelling was the most common form of motivation. Your immediate concern would be to please the boss, not to sell the coffeemaker. No matter how good your workers and your bosses were, a Soviet coffeemaker would always be inferior to a Japanese or an American one. Gorbachev introduced Gospriyomka, which meant that bosses needed to apply even more administrative pressure, because they were being pressured themselves. So you increase the overall administrative stress, but guess what? Your coffeemakers are still bad AND there are fewer of them. Accountability reform is an attempt to apply the methods of a Soviet-style command economy to public schooling. The authors and proponents of these reforms believe that we can increase the productivity of student labor by urging
129

CHAPTER 13

students to be more productive. As someone who has experienced a command economy in real life, I can testify that no amount of demands, higher expectations, appeals to ethical obligations, and motivational speeches will produce higher motivation or increase productivity. Although incessant propaganda may create short-term enthusiasm about a particular educational model, it ultimately fails to motivate workers. Of course, the reforms of the Era of Excellence are much more sophisticated, and use more subtle mechanisms of power. However, the essence of administrative control is the same. Both Democrats and Republicans believe accountability reforms will work, which is a truly unfortunate, albeit easily explainable, fallacy. The captains of the most open market economy in the world cannot see the vitality of other forms of economic motivation. Their reasoning is that students cannot really be paid for their work, therefore, schools fall entirely out of the sphere of the market economy, and students should be expected to work without economic motivators. It is truly amazing that conservatives, with their belief in rational economic choices, would succumb to such dramatically non-economic methods as accountability. This could be partly explained by the fact that the conservatives have very little experience with non-market relational economies, and cannot think in economic terms beyond the narrow market paradigm. *** The reforms of The Era of Excellence use more advanced instruments of power than the Soviet economy ever generated. However, these instruments still operate within the failing economy of mass schooling. This economy remains, essentially, a Soviet-style system, with unmotivated labor and a lack of market-driven feedback. It ignores the actual economic nature of contemporary schools, which are based on relational economies. It also fails to either improve these economies or replace them with something else.
NOTES
1

3 4

7 8

Joseph Murphy, Reforming Americas schools 1980-2000, Journal of Educational Administration 36/5 (1998), 426. Gert J.J.Biesta, Education, Accountability, and The Ethical Demand: Can The Democratic Potential of Accountability Be Regained?, Educational Theory 54/3 (2004): 233250. Michael Katz, School Reform: Past and Present (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). United States Department of Education, No Child Left Behind website, http://nochildleftbehind.gov/ start/welcome/index.html. Peter B. Petersen, Total quality management and the Deming approach to quality management, Journal of Management History 5/8 (1999): 468488. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Baldrige National Quality Program website, http://www.quality.nist.gov/index.html. International Standards Organization, http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage. See a good overview of such research in Marta B. Calas, Past postmodernism? Reflections and tentative directions Academy of Management Review 24/4 (1999): 649671.

130

THE SOVIET ECONOMY

9

10

11 12 13

14

15

16

17

18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25

26 27

28

Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson, Someone to Watch Over Me: Surveillance, Discipline and the Just-In-Time Labor Process, Sociology 26/2 (1992): 271289. Graham Sewell, The discipline of teams: the control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance, Administrative Science Quarterly 43/2 (1998): 397428. Baldridge in Education, http://www.biein.org/default.asp. Deborah Meier, Will standards Save Public Education? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program (CSRD), http://www.ed.gov/programs/ compreform/index.html. NW Regional Educational Laboratory, The Catalogue of School Reform Models, Updated 8/31/01 http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/catalog/search.asp. The National Clearinghouse for Comprehensive School Reform, http://www.goodschools.gwu.edu/ pubs/ib.htm. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Why Doesnt This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy, Harvard Educational Review 59/3 (1989): 297324. Ohio Department of Education, Interactive Continuing Improvement Plan website http://www. ode.state.oh.us/GD/Templates/Pages/ODE/ODEDetail.aspx?page=3&TopicRelationID=1280&Cont entID=13278&Content=44372. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, Second Edition, 1995), 201. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard, 1992). Continuous Improvement Plan 20002001 School Year Through the 2002-2003 School Year. Toledo Public Schools, 2000, 1. Delaware City Schools Continuous Improvement Plan, Draft adopted by Board June 5, 2000, 7. Stuart Davies and Keith Glaister, Business Schools Mission Statements: The Bland Leading the Bland?, Long Range Planning 30/4 (1997): 594604. National Center for Education Statistics, Monitoring School Quality: An Indicators Report, Statistical Analysis Report, December 2000, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001030.pdf , 40. Ibid. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Michel Foucault, Care of the Self the History of Sexuality (Random House, 1988). Stephen Jay Gould, The Pandas Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (W.W. Norton & Company, 1992). Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin, 1992).

131

PART IV. THE SENSIBLE SOLUTION

CHAPTER 14.

RELATIONAL ECONOMY, IMPROVED

The Two Solutions So far I have established just how wrong everyone is: the Progressives and the Conservatives, the psychologists and the economists, Marx and Dewey, Friedman and Becker, Kohn and Deming. Accountability reform wont work, and vouchers will fail. Intrinsic motivation is a dead end, but human capital theory is also mistaken. It is easier to be the critic in the audience than the performer on stage. It is now time for me to take center stage and offer my own solutionsand let others take a turn criticizing them. What are my solutions? I have two: a sensible one and the radical one. They can also be described as short-term and long-term. Fundamentally, they are incompatible, although they can be implemented at the same time, in different segments of the K-12 educational world. The first solution has to do with understanding the nature of the relational economy of a mass school, and trying to improve it. The second solution is to replace mass schooling with a new economic model, based on a real market for the labor of learning, and on a full integration of elementary and secondary education into the market economy. Both solutions deal with the problem of economic motivation for learning labor, or rather, with the lack thereof. The Sensible Solution The description of the Sensible Solution will not take much space here, because it has been extensively covered in another book. 1 I no longer support all of its claims, or all of its premises, but it does outline how far we can go, short of the Radical Solution described in Part IV. The Sensible Solution relies on an understanding of schooling inspired by economic anthropology. Learning in schools is only a part of a much more complicated web of social relationships, and cannot be treated as an isolated activity. Learning may not be improved without improving the workings of the entire relational economy of schools. The aim of such a reform is two-fold: firstly, to increase the customary rate of labor (CRL); that is, to increase student effort. Student labor is different from other forms of productive labor. Its productivity cannot be significantly raised by the two usual means: use of machines and division of labor (specialization). The Productivity of learning is proportional to a students effort. The use of machines only changes the nature of skills and knowledge to be acquired, but does not produce more learning per unit of effort. Similarly, efficiencies achieved by specialization cannot be significant in education, especially in its early years. Specializing on one type of knowledge and skills hurts the applicability of education to a wide variety of occupations and activities. Therefore, creating an increase in student effort is the most significant way to improve schools.

135

CHAPTER 14

The second aim of the reform is to reduce the coercive component of compulsory schooling. The level of coercion in public schooling is unacceptable and contradicts the doctrine of universal human rights. 2 Because of a unique combination of economic and extra-economic coercion, students are a twicesubjugated class. Forced labor is very inefficient, which has become abundantly clear since the introduction of truly mass schooling. At a minimum, we need to reduce or eliminate the extra-economic coercion aspect of schooling. To improve the relational economy of schooling is difficult, but not impossible. Three related things needs to happen: an influx of resources, a transformation of the teaching profession, and a revision of the ideology of mass schooling. Boosting Supply First, schools need to initiate a more robust exchange with students by acquiring more things that students may want. What students want would be exchanged for increased effort in students learning labor. Students require some compensation for their labor. They need something else from school, besides learning, so that the labor of learning can be compensated through a natural exchange. Here is how a coach who is also a History teacher would describe this: They need something from meto be able to play the sport they love. But I also need something from them, which is to show me respect in the classroom (not only at practice) and to maintain their GPA. The unspoken agreement you scratch my back, Ill scratch yours is as old as human kind. That is why coaches often have better relationships with kids, and make better teachers. This is an example of an economy of mutual interest that does not require coercion, but is also free of utopian assumptions about self-motivated learning. The coaches do not have a monopoly on relational capital, however (and not many coaches can play this game sensibly). In fact all good teachers give something to kids in return for sometimes boring schoolwork. Some do it through extracurricular activities; some simply find a way to give students the respect, recognition, and the companionship they need. This is an economic mechanism oiled by interpersonal relations, but powered by mutual interest. Unfortunately, many teachers simply do not have much to give, partly because of the schools structure, partly because they pay no attention to the relational side of things. One common assumption that I want to question is that the learning has to be at the center of an institution like school. Schools have become institutions too specialized to remain viable. For a relational economy to operate properly, it needs a variety of goods and services. For example, in a tribal village, some men hunt while others expel evil spirits; some women work the fields while others take care of children. This allows for mutual obligations to arise, and for reciprocity to flourish. In good schools, there is a wide variety of services students can receive; from athletics to art, from gossip to recognition. Teachers are there to provide or help provide the services, and demand learning labor in exchange. Schools are for learning, and should concentrate on what they are good for decades of back-to-basics rhetoric have sunk deeply into the public consciousness.
136

RELATIONAL ECONOMY, IMPROVED

However, this may not be such a self-evident truth. We must simply stop thinking of schools as exclusively educational institutions. For adults, it is perfectly acceptable to go to highly specialized economic institutions in the morning, and then enjoy their civic and personal lives later. For kids, who are not paid for their work, such separation is utterly unfeasible. Schools strong orientation to learning has to be diluted by a multitude of other things to do, and by relations outside of learning. One quote may help to explain the economy of a good school. A student from Karakovskys school in Moscow, where I conducted a few interviews several years ago, was asked: What subjects do you dislike? Chemistry- she answered rather quickly. But you still do your chemistry homework, dont you? Why?Well, you see my chemistry teacher is such a great person; if I dont do my homework, she gets upset. 3 This demonstrates the hierarchy of relations that exists in a good school. Parts of learning are inevitably boring. But the young woman I spoke to exchanged the labor of learning for some other very tangible benefits that she received from school. She gets paid for her learning by the quality of communal life she receives at school. We do unpleasant things for our family and our friends, without the expectation of a monetary repayment. We do it because we believe that this is the price we must pay for the continuation of our relations. This is precisely what happens in a good school. Students do things that are unpleasant and, as I have argued, not necessarily beneficial to them, because they like their teachers and their school. Teachers should worry about giving students something they really need, instead of repeating the empty incantations of higher expectations. Becoming a great person does not come easily to a teacher. It requires sustained work as well as access to some resources she can distribute to students, and thus gain the relational capital that can then be exchanged for learning labor. What I find most worrisome is the steady decline of extracurricular activities at school, along with other peripherals of school life, like rituals and celebrations; the extermination of places and periods of time controlled by students. The percent of high school seniors who participate in various school-sponsored extracurricular activities has steadily declined between 1980 and 1992. 4 Schools have become obsessed with increasing on-task time and getting rid of everything noneducational. In a number of states, laws regulate how school funding has to be spent, with a lions share going towards instruction. In an attempt to control overhead costs, these efforts also eliminate most of extra-curricular life. However this strategy is self-defeating, for schools that succumb to back-to-basics reasoning or funding pressures lose the economic foundation of their existence. They stop compensating students for their work, and yet somehow expect more effort. Imagine a school that is more like a neighborhood youth association McLaughlin, Irby and Langman describe in Urban Sanctuaries. 5 It provides a multitude of benefits for young peoplea place to hang out, to make friends, to create and to think, but also, among other things, a place to learn. Learning is something one has to do in order to be able to attendit is work, a form of compensation students have to provide to the organization. Just like school athletes must comply with eligibility rules, so should everyone else. Both the adults and the
137

CHAPTER 14

young leaders of such a school realize that there need to be some other powerful reasons for the students to be there. Such a school will be less educational in the sense I outlined above, but a good place to be. Of course, some things need to be changed to create such schools. These schools would need to be small and personal, and allow for student choice and teacher experimentation with a multitude of non-educational activities. These may very well be more expensive schools. The influx of resources can help schools offer just enough incentives to make themselves attractive communities, so that most students will come and stay out of interest, not out of a sense of duty or fear. In addition to schoolwork, schools must provide a variety of activities in which students are willing to participate voluntarily. Schools ought to become hybrid institutions with features of both schools and community centers. In relational economies, work is often performed without immediate compensation, and mediated by symbolic and personal relationships. Yet it is never unmotivated labor. We need to learn about the actual motivation of students in the social context of their school. If students perform their labor in the context of relationships with each other and with teachers, we can design policies that would encourage such relationships to flourish. Teachers could be encouraged and paid to engage in activities that create positive relational networks with students, and a sense of community at school. Accountability indicators might include the quality of community life. After all, there are sophisticated ways of measuring social capital; 6 why not use it to measure schools performance? Such indicators would include such things as the quality of social networks, norms of trust and reciprocity, etc. One may ask how this is different from Deweys solution. It is different, because Dewey envisioned the same occupations as being both interesting and educational. In my view, these should be kept separate, be clearly distinguished from one another, but be allowed to enter into relationships of exchange. Children should be expected to do something that adults want, in exchange for getting to do something they want. Reinventing the Teacher A tribal chief in a relational economy redistributes resources and doles out justice. He has authority because the tribe recognizes his role as a mediator in the flow of resources and justice. One of the most important components of the Sensible Solution is the strengthening of teacher authority. Remember, students do their school work for the teacher; it is their way of paying tribute to the teacher (see the Prelude). To demand such tribute, the teacher needs authority. Authority is derived from the teachers key position in the distribution system, but also from the symbolic capital he possesses. The value of peer culture and peer interaction should be recognized, and systematic efforts must be made to integrate it with the sphere of academic labor. Most kids get up in the morning and go to school so that they can be around their friends and a few cool adults. Community and fellowship are by far the strongest attractors and the hardest currency schools can offer in exchange for their incessant
138

RELATIONAL ECONOMY, IMPROVED

demands. The single most important motive for school attendance is the opportunity to socialize. Most children and adolescents need and value social contact with their peers. Inexplicably, many schools ignore this most powerful drive, and most find no way of tapping into this need for educational purposes. Teachers must find a way of becoming middlemen in the students peer culture, by providing space, time, and opportunities for peer communication. This is exactly what happens in the various forms of collective education described in the next chapter. Schools need to provide many opportunities for teachers to interact with students outside of the traditional classroom settings. The reform needs to counteract the tendency to cut down on non-academic time during the school day. Rather, non-academic time should be much better organized, and much better funded. One practical reform that comes out of this reasoning is to make American teacher contracts more like the Russian or Chinese. American teachers usually teach about 25 hours a week, and are not obligated to work with kids outside of the classroom (although some do). Russian and Chinese teachers have about 15-18 hours a week of classes, but are expected to conduct a variety of extracurricular activities, to advise and counsel a group of students, and to keep an eye on their students situations outside of school. The idea that the roles of a teacher, of a social worker, of a school counselor, and of a neighborhood club organizer should belong to different people has to be reconsidered. Only by combining several functions in the person of a teacher can we assure that teachers can both receive and dispense services. This merging of different functions is essential for a relational economy to thrive. Improving the relational economy of a school takes into account the fact that in real life, learning motivation depends on the social aspect of schooling. Students who like school because of the social interaction, and who like being around their teachers, generally apply more effort to learning. In fact, good schools already compensate students for their learning efforts. They do so with services provided by the school in its capacity as a community and as a source of entertainment. Expansion of extracurricular activities in exchange for greater academic work can produce better results than tightening control over teaching activities (as the current accountability reform does). Such a reform would require explicit links between receiving services from the school and doing academic work. The contractual relationships between the student and the school should be made explicit and meaningful. Drafted to Learn We get into trouble when someone tries to impose ideologies not compatible with the nature of schooling. While it is difficult for me to come up with an exact description of a good ideology of schooling, one thing is clear: school must be conceived in terms of a communal life. An ideology of schooling cannot closely follow that of the rest of the society, simply because the realities of schooling are
139

CHAPTER 14

dramatically different from those of the workplace, political life, or social life outside of schools. Schools are unique, and should develop an ideology that is also unique. We would need to call schooling what it isa form of national service students provide for their country, not a great gift they receive. The change in public rhetoric is not a trivial matter, for it invests the act of learning with symbolic capital. Instead of explaining to students how those who do well in school will be rich one day, we should appeal to their sense of duty. Just like the military draft is dressed in all sort of discourse about duty, honor, homeland, etc., going to school should be presented in the same way. After all, it would all be true: society as a whole needs educated workers, citizens, and consumers. A contemporary society would cease to function should educational levels drop significantly. If society does not want to pay students for learning (as it should), the next best thing is to ask them nicely to serve. We should explain honestly that each individual student may or may not benefit from school learning, but that society will. Those who agree to serve should get recognition, tangible benefits (for example, guaranteed health benefits tied to school attendance), and some form of collective bargaining. Those who decline to serve as students may be penalized somewhat (with extra taxes, for example), but still afforded a real choice of not going to school; those who are willing to learn later in life must be afforded a real opportunity to do so. And finally, we must encourage school choice, but not for the reasons American conservatives have in mind. Schools should be allowed and encouraged to develop their own identities, so that school choice also becomes an act of choosing a group identity. It would be up to each student to choose a community that fits her inclinations and convictions. The very act of choice creates a motivation to belong, and thus endows the school with a certain amount of relational capital. Of course, this is more practical in secondary education, and with small schools. But a school designed with a relational economy in mind cannot be large anyway; it can only be small so that whatever culture it develops can be sustained and reproduced through face-to-face contact. The Politics Politically, such a reform is a remote possibility, at least in the United States (and probably elsewhere in the industrialized world). Perhaps the failure of accountability reforms will make it possible, if a major political party can formulate such a reform as a plausible alternative. I would try to distance such a reform from Progressive rhetoric and simply point out to the public that kids need to like school, its teachers, and the opportunity to belong to something. Ultimately, the public must accept the thought that enticing children to learn is a legitimate public spending item. One only has to make clear that this would not mean diluting curriculum with easy classes, but rather be a form of compensation for student labor. I can only imagine a new political force of neo-progressives being able to advocate and implement such a reform.
140

RELATIONAL ECONOMY, IMPROVED

The policy of school improvement through accountability has enjoyed remarkable bipartisan support for over two decades. While there is nothing inherently wrong with consensus on a major policy area, it does not seem right in this particular case. It just does not seem healthy to have only one vision of educational reform, for the lack of alternatives rarely speaks of an unopposed policys strength. The Democratic Party lacks a clear agenda not only in education; it is a part of an overall crisis in American Progressivism. However, the crisis may be especially acute in education. Although the majority of educational theorists could be safely classified as Progressives, there is a curious refusal to engage with the defining issue of contemporary K-12 education, the issue that drives the Era of Excellence reforms. Of course, there is no shortage of attempts to define new progressive educational policies. However, most of these attempts do not deal with the real problem. The real problem everyone avoids is that funding public education does not seem to pay off. Hanushek, Rivkin, and Taylor 7 report that expenditures per pupil have been increasing 3.5 percent per year for a hundred years, adjusted for inflation. While there has been a dramatic expansion of K-12 schooling, there is no evidence that the quality of education has improved much. Resources allocated to education do not bring reasonable returns. Moreover, the difference in resources between schools does not seem to explain achievement gaps between students of different classes. The strength of the accountability movement should not surprise anyone. Hanusheks methodology and findings have been challenged, especially with regards to class size issue. 8 However, even if he is wrong somewhat, one would be hard pressed to show clear and overwhelming evidence in favor of pouring more funds into education. Without some control over how money is spent, there would be no point in investing in public education. No responsible policymaker will remove accountability measures and go back to the era of purely quantitative spending increases. Unless, of course, there is a plausible alternative. Paying more to teachers or upgrading school buildings is not going to bring any tangible results, unless there are strings attached. It has always been assumed by just about anyone that learning effectiveness can be significantly improved with good teaching. And indeed, there is good evidence that well-trained teachers contribute to learning achievement. As Linda DarlingHammon reports, following an influential study, measures of teacher preparation and certification are by far the strongest correlates of student achievement in reading and mathematics, both before and after controlling for student poverty and language status. 9 I do not wish to dispute or diminish the importance of this evidence. However, investing large sums of money in teacher education does not seem to be sufficient for solving the problem of learning motivation. Having a better teacher does not always result in better motivation. In addition, the teaching profession is a bucket with a leaky bottom. The turnover rates are very high, 10 and pouring more water into the bucket at a faster rate does not seem to be an economically prudent solution.

141

CHAPTER 14

This is not meant as a criticism of politicians only, simply because it is not a job of a politician to produce theory. The incoherence of both Republican and Democratic educational platforms is an indictment of educational theorists. Critiques of the current accountability reforms abound, and there is no lack of suggestions about alternative forms of assessment. Yet it is my contention that educational theory has not squarely faced the problem of accountability philosophically, and has not done its homework to propose a plausible alternative. We, the educational scholars, simply have not done our homework; and when policy change became inevitable some twenty plus years, ago, we were not ready with a set of ideas that politicians could have used. The testing spree was simply a default position, the best available model of accountability to adapt for policy purposes. It is not important who first realizes first that schooling cannot be improved with traditional means of accountability reforming, improving teacher quality, vouchers, or better funding. *** Contemporary mass schooling can be improved by treating schools as relational economies; by providing opportunities for a better natural exchange of student labor for the goods and services students need. It can be done if teachers and other adults in schools have more resources at their disposal, and can better control the lives of schools as communities. This would require much political will and a new generation of politicians.
NOTES
1

Alexander M. Sidorkin, Learning Relations: Impure Education, Deschooled Schools, and Dialogue with Evil (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: No one shall be held in slavery or servitude. Paradoxically, the same declaration, in Article 26 says: Elementary education shall be compulsory. I see an obvious contradiction here, for compulsory education if it is a form of labor is also servitude.http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm. Alexander M Sidorkin, Razvitie vospitatelnoi sistemy shkoly kak zakonomernyi protsess. [Development of a school as a system: Driving Forces and Contradictions] Kand. diss. (Moscow: Research Institute for Theory and History of Education, 1990). Digest of Educational Statistics, 2004, National Center for Educational Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/ programs/digest/d04_tf.asp, Table 139. M.W., McLaughlin, M.A. Irby, J. Langman, Urban Sanctuaries: Neighborhood Organizations in the Lives and Futures of Inner-city Youth (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1994). Wendy Stone, Measuring social capital: Towards a theoretically informed measurement framework for researching social capital in family and community life, Research Paper No. 24, (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2001) http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/pubs/RP24.pdf. Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin and Lori L. Taylor, Aggregation and the Estimated Effects of School Resources, The Review of Economics and Statistics 78/4 (1996): 611627. See, for example, Alan B. Krueger, Economic Considerations and Class Size, The Economic Journal 113/485: F34 F63.

142

RELATIONAL ECONOMY, IMPROVED

9

10

Linda Darling-Hammond, Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of State Policy Evidence (University of Washington: Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, 1999). Contexts of Elementary and Secondary Education, Indicator 31, 2008. National Center for Educational Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2008/section4/indicator31.asp.

143

CHAPTER 15.

IN THE EVENT OF LEARNING

Despite a continuous rhetoric of educational reform, most developed nations policy makers seem to agree that public schooling is not broken; that it only requires minor modifications. Squeezing more learning out of schools, as conservative thinking goes, is all we can hope and strive for in education. At the opposite end of the political spectrum are liberal and radical critiques of educationthey also deal with issues peripheral to the schools modus operandi. These critiques mostly concentrate on achieving equality in the ways schooling is distributed and on eliminating prejudice from educational practices. Indeed, these are laudable and important objectives; yet they are based on the assumption that equitable and non-prejudiced schools will be just, benevolent, and successful. I disagree with both the conservative and radical critiques. Public schooling has a deeper, potentially more difficult problem than prejudice, inequality, or inefficiency. These first two can, in principle, be resolved given sufficient political will, effort, and time. The last one, I am almost convinced, can also be resolved with careful, systemic improvements along the lines of other Era of Excellence reforms. One can imagine schools that are reasonably equitable, free of race/class/gender prejudice, and able to deliver a much better package of academic learning outcomes. Yet such schools will still be challenged by educational alienation. This, in turn, would affect any long-term solution to the three problems listed above. Let us think one step ahead, and resurrect the ambitions of educational thinking of the early 20th century, with its focus on questions fundamental to our understanding of schooling: What is education? What is its place in society? Why do students learn and why they not learn? Education, in my opinion, needs or will soon need a different kind of reform. In our competing quests for efficiency and justice, we have overlooked the degree to which schoolinduced alienation presents a problem on its own right. As does a symphony, this chapter has four movements. It begins with Marxs notion of alienation, and then shows a form of alienation specific to education. The third movement examines Mikhail Bakhtins treatment of alienation in connection with his theory of participative thinking. And the final movement describes ways of overcoming educational alienation using Bakhtins notion of the eventness of Being. Alienation I focus on Marx here, rather than explore the long philosophical history of alienation, because he was the first to link alienation explicitly to human productive activity. As Arturo Pacheco noted a quarter of a century ago, Marx had very little to say about education, but his philosophical views are of great importance to educational theory. 1 Pachecos suggestions for the use of Marx in education boil down the following: an abandonment of neutrality claims, an examination of oppressive economic relations, and a historical understanding of
145

CHAPTER 15

the role of knowledge in power relations. I would only add to the list one obvious, but little-explored, possibility: an analysis of learning as a form of productive activity, which I attempted in Part II. According to Marx, humans are what they make; the products we create also re-create us. Productive activity is what connects humans to their existence as members of the human kind, to their species-being (Gattungswesen). We literally create ourselves in the process of production: The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created. 2 Now, the way in which humans produce their own essential humanity rightfully belongs in educational discourse. The appeal of Marxs insight is obvious: We can put students activity at the conceptual center of education, instead of concentrating, as we have done traditionally, on what is going on between teachers and students. Concentrating on teaching tends to steer educational theory away from being descriptive and explanatory and toward being prescriptive. In other words, the prescriptive side of educational theory must be firmly planted in an understanding of the limits and the nature of learning as it exists in the context of schooling. Marx believed that the way in which humans create affects them significantly. Therefore, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production produces alienated labor. The nature of alienation lies in a deformed relationship between a worker and the products of his work, productive activity itself, and, ultimately, his species-being. It is easier to explain alienation by pointing at what Marx believes to be its opposite, the non-alienated labor: Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified mans essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another mans essential nature. ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature. 3 The central idea here is that a persons relationship with herself, her human essence, and other people, is fundamentally mediated by her productive activity. Let us ignore the simplistic assumption that alienation is limited to capitalism, or even to material production. Perhaps, as Derrida insists, alienation is a universal human phenomenon. However, one would think that there are better and worse cases of alienation. Let us assume Marx is right about linking alienation to the ways we produce. We would also agree that there are various forms of production, and such forms are substantially different from each other with respect to their
146

IN THE EVENT OF LEARNING

alienating qualities; this is a reason for understanding alienation through production. Where there are options, there is also choice; choice can always use a theory to guide it. In other words, I am here trying to understand how learning fairs with respect to alienation, and if we can do anything to make it less alienating. Alienation in Education In Chapter 3, I showed how students are forced to produce useless objects that cannot enter into the world of social relationships. Whatever they produce is discarded, because the value produced remains locked within the student until she enters adulthood. This creates a specific educational form of alienation, which maybe even more dangerous than that of hired workers in a capitalist enterprise. In most non-educational spheres, people consume the products of their own creation directly, or exchange those products with others through market mechanisms. In some other activities, such as games and other forms of leisure, the process is clearly pleasurable. Thus the process itself becomes a pseudo-product, and is directly consumed by its producers. Consumption and use are the ultimate aims of creation, and the exchange of useful or useable objects, ideas, and services is the basis for all social life. In contrast, students neither consume nor exchange the products of their schoolwork; they rarely derive direct pleasure from the process of filling out work sheets or reading textbooks. Can one really look at ones final exam with the Marxian pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt? Rather, the opposite is true: the things students produce in schools reflect back serious doubts about their creators actual existence. If we create ourselves through producing things, what sort of self can be created by producing useless things? Even the most constructivist teaching methods fail to make a major part of the learning process intrinsically pleasurable. Let us remember that Marx theory of alienation was focused on labor under capitalist conditionslabor that is rewarded with real money. The worker is still alienated, because he does not own the product in the sense that when the product is consumed by others, that consumption does not serve as an opportunity for a human relationship. A student faces an even greater obstacle: her product, by its very design, cannot even be consumed. One can object by saying that this alienation is a superficial and avoidable part of education. Centuries of educational writings are filled with images of students deriving pleasure from the satisfaction of their curiosity; or of students fully integrated into the world of social relations by participating in useful, meaningful, and much needed projects. Long discredited in political thinking, utopianism is alive and well in the educational world. Not only dreamy academics, but also otherwise skeptical governments issue pronouncements to the effect that all children will learn, if only they are exposed to the highest of expectations. Ironically, the psychologically indisputable assertion that most children indeed can learn at high levels is often converted into an entirely absurd sociological assertion that therefore all children will learn in schools. Such a substitution amounts to
147

CHAPTER 15

saying that since all people can exercise and diet, therefore, they will do it; or if all people can obey the speed limit, they will. Schools simply cannot deliver a sufficient amount of pleasure without turning into huge entertainment complexes and losing their educational value. Schools also cannot churn out enough useful community service projects to occupy all kids throughout the year, and still cover any appreciable amount of curriculum. Educational alienation cannot be dismissed as a purely temporary, easily treatable defect. Rather, it is the part of education that defines its essential tension. Many forms of alienation undoubtedly exist in our schools. However, very few observers believe that bored students in elite private schools and their desperate counterparts in urban ghettoes share the same problem. Yet this is exactly my point. Despite a host of other socio-economic and cultural problems facing schools today, there is one central mechanism of alienation that has something to do with both what students are doing and how they are doing it. Learning in schools is associated with a fundamentally unproductive activity, and as such, it brings its own unique forms of educational alienation. Although I believe that education in general, and schooling in particular, have always created alienation, I also believe that it has becomes more prominent today. A natural limit to the development of human civilization is how much we can learn; specifically, how many people can learn a given amount of knowledge before fully entering economic, political, and cultural life. If widely distributed knowledge indeed becomes more and more central to economic and cultural production, the practical question all societies will face is this: how can we keep a bigger proportion of the young population for a longer time, and help them acquire the maximum amount of knowledge? When education was based on the exclusionary, elitist models of classic schooling, such a question was unthinkablereproduction of the economic and political systems relied only on a few well -educated people. When societies only required a few educated individuals, schooling was a privilege, and the problem of keeping kids in school did not exist. With the economy, politics, mass consumption, and mass culture demanding more and more people educated at ever-higher levels, the phenomenon of educational alienation has become more prominent. To their dismay, teachers all over the world realize that long, compulsory schooling does not appeal equally to everyone, as a self-evident value. Let us assume that current educational trends will continue: years of compulsory schooling will increase, the percentage of youth attending school will grow, and expectations of graduates minimal competencies will rise. The threat of expulsion that still allows us to police most schools will be further diminished, so that we will have to come up with a system where kids want to stay in school. Here is where the problem of educational alienation will only grow, unless we think ahead. As productive activity becomes more and more a production of knowledge, education takes on a much larger role. Unlike material things, knowledge completely disappears with the physical death of its bearer; it has to be relearned by each succeeding generation. Of course, various technologies of knowledge selection and recording help, but all books mean nothing if the next generation
148

IN THE EVENT OF LEARNING

refuses to read them. If education alienates students from knowledge, this will defeat the entire project of human civilization, whose growth depends on how much an individual can learn during his or her lifetime and on the ratio of time spent learning to time spent actively producing. Perhaps even more importantly, when schooling took a relatively short time, its alienating properties were more or less successfully overruled by the subsequent productive life of individuals. Today, most people need to unlearn the detached, inconsequential ethos of schoolwork acquired during the long years of schooling, and learn real-life relationships and responsibilities. Yet the longer learning takes, the more difficult it is to unlearn its alienating lessons. Bakhtin: Participative Thinking Let me now include Bakhtin in the conversation, because Marx gives us no solutions to the problem of educational alienation (and if may I add, to the problem of capitalist alienation of labor in general). It will be very difficult to include an even brief outline of Bakhtins entire project here, if there was ever such a thing. Instead, I refer readers to the still definitive volume on Bakhtin by Clark and Holquist. 4 Here, I will deal with only a relatively narrow area of Bakhtins thoughtthe theory of participative thinking. Shortly before his death, Bakhtin told his disciples about two manuscripts hidden in the provincial Russian town of Saransk. The manuscripts circa 1919-1921 were found in a lumber room; they were severely damaged, but survived Stalinism, World War II, and their authors long exile and prolonged forced silence. Both were published posthumously, first in Russian, and then in English as Art and Answerability and Toward a Philosophy of the Act. The latter will help me consider Bakhtins notion of participative thinking as a form of de-alienation, as well as its connection with the notion of the eventness of Being. Bakhtin treats alienation differently than Marx does, and offers solutions that are more tenable. It is a somewhat dense text, both in its original language and in translation, but I ask the reader to bear with me, for Bakhtin is worth the effort. Participative thinking 5 is the thinking of those who know how not to detach their performed act from its product, but rather how to relate both of them to the unitary and unique context of life and seek to determine them in that context as an indivisible unity. 6 In other words, Bakhtin seeks to connect philosophy and life in an actual, concrete human deed, which initially sounds like Marxs 11th thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. 7 More broadly, Bakhtin wants to overcome the separation of any product from the act of making it; to surmount the primary form of alienation known by Homo Faber. The very act of creation involves the parting of the created from the creator, the price of which is a crack in the unity of human existence. This, of course, goes well beyond Marxs critique of the capitalist mode of production. Importantly, Bakhtin does not make a distinction between thinking and doing; to the contrary, he considers every thought to be an act. However, he explicitly
149

CHAPTER 15

distinguishes the content of a thought from the act of the thought. The content of a thought has no ethical dimension; it does not exhaust or even represent the act of the thought. His critique of theoretical thinking in general and of philosophy in particular, is based on this distinction. The content of philosophy, once it is separated from the actual acts of life, becomes mechanical, technical, and can serve either good or evil. Bakhtins suggestion is to consider philosophy as an act in connection with the content of thought. For example, when one thinks of such concepts as dignity, care, or recognition, the act of thinking becomes an ethical endeavor. The concepts themselves, abstracted from the act of thought become lifeless, and ethically neutral. The problem Bakhtin faces is that the difference between actual being, and theoretical, abstract being is difficult, if not impossible, to describe within a theoretical language. In other words, the difference that I have tried to explain in the previous paragraph may be difficult to understand not only because of my (or Bakhtins) ineptness with words, but also because of intrinsic limitations in theoretical language. In the theoretical world, writes Bakhtin, I am unnecessary; I am essentially and fundamentally non-existent in it. The theoretical world is obtained through an essential and fundamental abstraction from the fact of my unique being and from the moral sense of that actas if I did not exist. 8 To the reality of the act, though, individual existence is central, for there is no universal, abstract act; all acts are specific. The reader receives this book in a form already abstracted from the process of my writing it. The only way of resurrecting the book is the readers participative thinking about it, that is, by including it into his or her act. To overcome the limitations of theory, Bakhtin then makes a number of claims about the nature of truth; claims that offer an epistemological apparatus for his ontological construction. He uses two different words to designate truth: istina derives from is, while pravda comes from right, just and true-to. 9 Pravda is not only context-specific and unique, but also embedded in the actual act of a specific person. Istina, to the contrary, is composed of universal moments. Istina can be rational, but pravda is more than rational, it is answerable. Rationality is but a moment of answerability. 10 Bakhtin wants philosophers to be seekers of pravda rather than of istina. A human act (a deed or postupok, an intentional act) is the meeting place of the theoretical world with life, of the universal with the individual. The performed act concentrates, correlates, and resolves within a unitary and unique and, this time, final context both the sense and the fact, the universal and the individual, the real and the ideal, for everything enters into the composition of its answerable motivation. The performed act constitutes a going out once and for all from within possibility as such into what is onceoccurrent. 11 Here is another example of how Bakhtin wanted theory to address his concerns: A theory needs to be brought into communion not with theoretical constructions and conceived life, but with the actually occurring event of
150

IN THE EVENT OF LEARNING

moral beingwith practical reason, and this is answerably accomplished by everyone who cognizes, insofar as he accepts answerability for every integral act of his cognition, that is, insofar as the act of cognition as my deed is included, along with all its content, into the unity of my answerability, in which and by virtue of which I actually liveperform deeds. 12 This is not an appeal to change the content of philosophy; rather, Bakhtin wants to change the act of writing philosophy. The act of philosophy is therefore much more important than the content of philosophical thought, mainly because the act of philosophy has an ethical dimension, while the product (the content of thought) does not. Moreover, Bakhtin does not establish an absolute primacy of act over product; rather, he is arguing for some sort of holistic connection between them. Bakhtins notion of participative thinking applies to philosophy, to thinking, and ultimately, to any other form of human activity. Bakhtin treats the act as a quasitranscendental reality, although the act does not transcend the contingencies of mind and language as much as subsumes them. An answerable act must, in fact, embrace the contingencies of mind and language, for answerability does not allow for hiding behind the universals. His is the ontology of action grounded in the ethics of answerability. A human responsible act is the fundamental reality; all else is derivative. For example, a text separated from the act of writing it is derivative, and cannot be judged by me to be true or untrue as such. Yet it may enter into my act of participative thinking and thus become true or untrue. One of the most prominent features of Bakhtins Philosophy of the Act, which he revisited throughout his later work, is the persistent emphasis of the eventness of Being. His terminology includes event of Being, Being-event, life-event, Being-as-event, Being in its eventness, and Being as event. Bakhtin himself explains the concept thus: The event of being is a phenomenological concept, for being presents itself into a living consciousness as an [ongoing] event, and a living consciousness actually orients itself and lives in it as in an [ongoing] event. 13 The focus on the act, and not just on its results, is predicated by this ontological claim about the primacy of eventness. To be is to progress through a series of events; to be ethical is to participate in these events through action. Only the act as a whole is truly real; it partakes in the singular Being-event. Only the act is alive; it is fully and completely there, it becomes, happens, it is a truly alive participant of eventBeing. 14 What does this add to Marxs concept of alienation? Alienation is not only a function of such social conditions as the mode of production; it is also a matter of ethical consideration for the person who is doing the production. A manual laborer who has to sell his labor in order to survive, or a philosopher who writes about the workers plightboth can exercise their productive activities as answerable acts or as alienating behaviors, the products of which do not belong ethically to their authors. Yes, Marx was right; what we produce and how we produce it makes us who we are. Bakhtin however, changes the same thesis slightly: how we act determines who we are. Alienation is not about relationships between the producer and the products of production; it is a corrosion of the human ability to act, to

151

CHAPTER 15

partake in the eventness of Being. The path from alienation to a participatory act leads through the metanoia of answerability; the first step away from alienation is understanding it. Alienation can be overcome not by changing the rules of ownership over the products, as Marx believed. Rather, alienation is a result of disconnection from the eventness of Being; thus, de-alienation is the rediscovery of eventness. The Act of Learning: Overcoming Alienation What of educational alienation? How do we make sure that making useless things for many years will not ingrain in students souls the attitude of alienation? From the notion of participative thinking, one can infer the possibility of participative working, and participative learning, which is something Bakhtin himself had not done. Let us again retrace Bakhtins reasoning, only applied to participatory doing rather than thinking. In participatory doing, one does not detach, but relates the performed act and its product (the things produced) to the unity and singularity of ones actual life. Students must confront the act of producing useless things in the context of their existence, as responsible, answerable deeds. Learning to learn involves creating meaning for absurd, useless activities. Such is the fate of our civilization that children spend many years engaged in pseudo-work that is the opposite of the production they will be engaged in as adults. This cannot be helped. Yet the absurd alienates when unrecognized; making sense of the absurd brings it to an end. School children should be able to confront the nature of their alienation and overcome it by participating in school life with all its absurdities. How can this be practically achieved? Within the existing organization of schoolingby constructing an eventful school life. My reasoning here is very simple: Making useless things can make sense if it is not the only game in town. It may make sense if there is another, eventful school life that creates the thread of meaningful events in which students can create their identity independently of academic learning. Can academic learning be eventful? The answer to this question is a yes with such extensive caveats, that it really becomes a no. Only small parts of academic learning can be eventful, and only some of the time. If one takes into consideration the extent of a contemporary school curriculum, one must give up the hope that all of it can be woven into participatory, experiential activities. Human life can only contain so many events, and there is just too much stuff we all need to learn. Much knowledge and skill have to come to us through the absurd production of useless things. However, school life can and should become eventful. Schools in their present form suffer from what I call event deficiency, which is actually a consequence of educational alienation. Schools are organizations set up to manage the useless activity of learning. One fact immediately available to all students is the lack of any worldly impact of their learning activities. This form of alienation, described above, creates a peculiar uneventfulness in school life. By uneventfulness, I do not mean boredom, or routine, which certainly are not unique to schools, and are as common in workplaces as in any other social institution. Rather, this is a general impossibility of a genuine event. An event in the sense developed by Bakhtin,
152

IN THE EVENT OF LEARNING

implies co-being and the becoming, the happening of Being. Event deficiency, in turn, makes participative thinking and doing difficult, for there is very little in which to participate. Schools are places of suspended answerability, for students lack the possibility of a genuine act, and therefore they have a hard time connecting the act with the product of the act. The next reform of schooling must first address the fact of event deficiency in school organization, because educational alienation is a threat to organizational stability and effectiveness. A vision of school reform compatible with the philosophy of the act begins with the need to create events in school life. Educators are used to thinking in terms of aims, objectives, plans, curricular units, instructional methods, assessment, feedback, professional training, etc. We need to learn to think about school life in terms of eventness. One crude, manipulative, but now classic example of an event-rich education is the Robbers Cave Experiment by Sherif et al. 15 This experimental study of factors conducive to conflict and cooperation between groups was first released in 1954. Two groups of boys were brought into a summer camp environment. A number of quite simple treatments first created highly competitive and hostile relationships between the groups, and then lead to significant reductions in friction and established a factor of collaboration between the groups. Creating conflict was easy; it required two groups, separated for most of the time, and put in a position of competition over resources. To reduce friction, experimenters created several problems, each requiring joint effort between the groups. The water line was sabotaged, a movie had to be purchased to watch, a truck would not start without a pull, etc. I am not interested here in inter-group relations, although many schools could benefit from thinking about them. The research objectives of the experiment lie outside of this chapters concern. However, the experiment proves a principle: it is possible to introduce eventness into an educational setting, even if this happens without a direct connection to the academic mission of the organization. Although for entirely different purposes, the teachers of the Robbers cave were able to construct a Storyline, and fill kids lives with genuine events. Quite aside from getting along with each other, the unwitting subjects of the experiment had lived their lives as sequences of events, where they could act, and where participative thinking could take root. Even though the students did not really learn anything in terms of academic content, they were able to create a community of participative action; a community that would weather the uneventful flow of a school year, should they go to the same school. Yet another example of eventful education comes from the previously mentioned Vladimir Karakovsky, a school principle from Moscow whom I had interviewed on the subject of planning a school year. Karakovsky says that a school year should be like a good novel, and that he approaches planning it as a writer would. He thinks about How characters are introduced, the situation established, the main conflict stated; which sequence of events will comprise the plot, how each event reveals characters and leads toward resolution of the conflict; what the climax and the resolution will be. Of course, every year key elements
153

CHAPTER 15

from the previous year are repeated (for example, the climactic spring festival changes little from year to year). Karakovskys school lives through cycles not unlike a religious liturgical cycle; all the main events are designed to relive other events from the past (e.g. Passover, Easter, and Hijrah). However, each year is also a sequel to the previous one, with some Storylines continuing, some resolved, and still some others forming. Each years events also occur in the context of the actual life of the school community. Only after the big story is planned, can teachers see how some of the required curriculum can be plotted along the Storyline, and what sort of links the main plot will have with a number of subplots developed in individual classrooms. Major school events take precedent over the strictly academic function of the school. In the end, much of the curriculum has no direct relation with key events of school life: students produce mountains of useless things, as at any other school. Some of the major events (there are about eight of them throughout the year) have limited curricular content, while others, including the main spring festival, do not. The logic to which Karakovsky himself subscribes is roughly this: the life of a school rich in events creates a very strong possibility of developing rich personal relationships among students and teachers. These relationships, in turn, carry over into everyday, routine class interactions, and create the strongest form of learning motivation attainable in a school. The curriculum itself, Karakovsky believes, is not that important, because in the context of a vibrant communal life, the nonacademic side of school subsumes academic learning. In the last example, we can see a promising approach to dealing with educational alienation. I maintain that alienation is difficult to defeat by a frontal attack. No curriculum and no pedagogy, no matter how creative, can undo the tint of uselessness that permeates academic learning. However, an educational institution can and should try to create an eventful life, even if it is based on noneducational foundations. Such eventfulness will allow participative thinking and doing to take hold. Only when academic learning becomes a secondary, unimportant side of school life, will its alienating properties be suppressed and genuine education become possible. The gradual decline of non-academic (extracurricular, social) components of schooling is dangerous and nearsighted. Both conservatives and liberals seem to agree that schools must concentrate on what they do best, namely teaching and learning the basics. The argument for more funding for extracurricular activities is often framed in terms of the well-rounded individual, or other vague ideals. Yet the need for a school community is not frivolous or extraneous to the educational mission of schooling. What I propose is not simply to throw more money at a variety of disconnected extracurricular activities, but a careful, rational construction of the communal life of a school. The Creation of a good school is not unlike nation building; it requires paying attention to culture, constructing a storyline of events, and asking participants to take responsibility for the entire enterprise.

154

IN THE EVENT OF LEARNING

NOTES
1

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

Arturo Pacheco, Marx, Philosophy, and Education in Philosophy of Education 1978: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society (Champaign, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1979): 208220. Karl Marx, Estranged Labour, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/ labour.htm. Karl Marx, Comments on James Mill, lments Dconomie Politique, Collected Works, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm#08. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984). Uchastnoe myshlenie in Russian, anteilnehmendes Denken in German. Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 19. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, http://eserver.org/marx/1845-feuerbach.theses.txt. Bakthin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 9. Bakthin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 94. Bakthin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 29. Bakthin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 29. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 12. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 78. Vadim Liapunov, the translator, traces the term to German Seinsgeschehen, and specifically to Wilhelm Windelbands comment about the need to replace the traditional distinction between being and becoming with that between the thing and the event. .., , http://www.philosophy.ru/library/bahtin/post.html. Muzafer Sherif, O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood, Carolyn W. Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman: University Book Exchange, 1961).

155

CHAPTER 16.

A VEGETATIVE REPRODUCTION OF PRACTICE

It is often assumed that educational reform is the only means of changing educational practices. By reform one often means institutional reforma change in policies and programs. However, what actually does change education practice is a different process that I call the vegetative reproduction of practice. It can be defined as a non-theoretical borrowing of educational practices from one teacher to another, and from one school to another. It is less sexy than a reform, and no politician can ever get credit for it. Very few academics can make a career out of it either. It does not substitute for reform, and usually requires the right kind of institutional environment. Yet this is how education changes, if it does at all. I will use the example of the Just Community approach to illustrate how a vegetative reproduction of practice works, mainly because it is also a promising example of the Sensible Solution outlined in the two previous chapters. Two Stories of the Just Community Here is the official story of the Just Community approach put forward in the authoritative book by Power, Higgins and Kohlberg. 1 Kohlberg developed his cognitive theory of moral development following Piagets model. The theorys key construct is the well-known six stages of moral judgment, representing a progression from pre-conventional, to conventional, to post-conventional, or principled levels of moral reasoning. One of Kohlbergs graduate students, Moshe Blatt, has theorized and demonstrated experimentally that if students are systematically exposed to moral reasoning one stage above their own, they would be positively attracted to that reasoning. 2 Blatts method consisted of classroom discussions about imagined moral dilemmas, similar to those used by Kohlberg in the moral reasoning interviews. Kohlberg understood the limitations of such a method of moral education, and argued that the issues student discuss must be closely related to the real life of students and their schools. Influenced by Durkheims writings, Kohlberg developed the concept of educational democracy: Schools in which everyone has a formally equal voice to make the rules and in which the validity of the rules are judged by their fairness to the interests of all involved. 3 In 1969, Kohlberg went on a trip to an Israeli kibbutz, and studied the practice of collective education there. The trip prompted him to shift from theory to a workable practical approach to moral education. Upon returning from Israel, Kohlberg conducted a pilot project in a womens prison, and then directed two Just Community experiments identified in the book referenced above as the Cluster school, and the Scarsdale Alternative High School. The official story assumes that the JCA practice is a direct result of Kohlbergs theoretical work. It is hard to dispute that the JCA was Kohlbergs brain child hard, but not impossible. I want to argue that there is little connection between Kohlbergs theories and the JCA. Viable educational approaches or methods do not spring from any particular individuals mind. Rather, like cultural practices, they
157

CHAPTER 16

are stable patterns of social behavior, which are directly borrowed by one community from another. First, let me show what happens when someone inappropriately critiques the JCA as an extension of Kohlbergs theories. A good example of such a critique is Sue Ellen Henrys paper in Educational Theory. 4 She begins with pointing at the prominent presence of Kohlbergs theory on the pages of textbooks and in the minds of educational professionals. Then Henry exposes the structural-functional roots of Kohlbergs theories. Specifically, she emphasizes universalism and equilibrium as two major problems of structuralism-functionalism that Kohlberg inherited. For example, Henry acknowledges that on the surface, the Just Community approach does appear to allow a particular community to determine values by which they will live. However, Kohlbergs statements about the goals of the Just Community model suggest a different interpretation. 5 This raises a question central to my purposes here. The life of the first JCA schools is extensively documented in the book Henry critiques. How exactly the real communitys experience is superficial, but whatever Kohlberg happened to think about it is somehow more real or profound. Is there a story that would illustrate that the Just Communities followed Kohlberg in the fallacy of universalism? The students at the Cluster school, for example, debated whether they should all help a victim of theft, or how they would enforce the no-drug policy. Is there any evidence that their thinking was contaminated by structuralism-functionalism the way Kohlbergs thinking was? In another instance, Henry admits that social change is one of the goals of the model in question. However, she reasons, Kohlbergs adherence to a strict focus on a formalist conception of justice as a means of creating universalizability in the individual and consequently in social systems limits the power of this freedom to make change because it prescribes what moral change would look like. 6 In other words, just because Kohlberg was, deep in his heart, a conservative (according to Henry), the students from the Just Community schools will also neglect the need for social change. Again, no factual evidence is offered to support such a claim not because of the authors neglect, I believe, but because such evidence does not exist. It is not among my intentions to defend Kohlbergs theoretical work; I neither want to prove nor disprove Henrys criticism of it. An extensive critique of Kohlbergs work has been done. Carol Gilligans take on Kohlberg 7 is probably more widely read by American college students than his own writings. Characteristically, Gilligan never challenged the Just Community part of his work; she concentrated on the moral development theory. Most other critics (and supporters) tend to ignore the JCA. The ERIC database yields 638 entries containing Kohlberg and only 53 for Just Community. It is not the criticism of Kohlbergs theories that troubles me, but the assumption of a firm, automatic, and significant connection between his theories and the practice he helped to initiate. Here is a revision of the official story: JCA was not the product of Kohlbergs theorizing, but was more a result of his Israel impressions. Furthermore, the early practical experience of the Just Community schools shaped the schools just as much as Kohlbergs theory, because both teachers and consultants have been
158

A VEGETATIVE REPRODUCTION OF PRACTICE

learning from their own successes and failures. Power, Higgins and Kohlberg actually allow for such revisions: Kohlbergs kibbutz visit let him to realize that he would not be able to derive the model for moral education that he sought entirely from his own developmental theory. 8 Yet following this passage is a quote from Kohlbergs paper that acknowledges the need to combine some principles of moral discussion with principles of collective education. However he is not mixing two theories here, or two sets of principles. The practice of collective education is not exactly based on principles or a theory; it is regulated by models observed in other collective education settings or slowly developed through experience. Was Kohlberg truly one of the key authors of the JCA, or simply a medium through which an existing educational tradition of collective education entered America? The latter is much closer to the truth, and here is a very unreliable reason for this belief: I had observed both JCA schools and Russian educational collectives. The major similarities cannot be explained by similar theoretical assumptions, because there was no contact between Russian educators and Kohlberg. However he received the first-hand knowledge of another branch of collective education movement in Israel, and this seemed to shape the JCA. Kohlbergs genius was in recognizing the viability of collective education in American culture. It took some audacity to not get intimidated by the prevailing assumptions about supposed American individualism and Soviet collectivism. Power and Makogon make a claim that could only be understood in the context of their polemics with the feminist critics of Kohlberg: Readers credit Gilligan for recognizing the true worth of the morality of care through listening to womens experience. Yet at the very time that Gilligan was formulating her female derived theory of care and responsibility as an antidote to Kohlbergs theory of justice and rights, Kohlberg and his colleagues were implementing a caring-centered approach to moral education in a just community alternative high school, a few blocks away from Harvard University. 9 The statement, if understood as a denial of Gilligans theoretical originality, makes very little sense. The feminist influence in ethics and moral education theory is hard to overlook. The statement means something else, however. The practice of JCA can be very plausibly explained using the pedagogy of care theory. In fact, I believe the practice of JCA is better described and explained in terms of care than in terms of Kohlbergs original theory. Let us take a more fully developed theory of moral education elaborated by Nel Noddings. 10 The pedagogy of care couldjust as easilyserve as an ideology behind Just Communities. Perhaps, they would be called caring communities, and the tone of discussion would be a little different. Perhaps, students would ponder the nature of caring rather than the nature of justice. But in the end, the practical forms of collective education will not change significantly. The students will still engage in dialogue about issues and occurrences intrinsic to their community; they will build relationships of care and trust among each other, and
159

CHAPTER 16

with their teachers. The last sentence does not pretend to be a summary of Noddings complex theory, because my intentions here do not include proving a point. I just want to challenge the reader to prove the converse: that JCA schools, as described by Power, Higgins and Kohlberg, contradict Noddingss vision of a caring pedagogy. Another deviation from the official story of the JCA is indicated by its authors. They describe a second perspective on democratic schooling, distinct from that of Kohlberg. Ralph Mosher was directing an experiment in democratic schooling at the same time as Kohlberg was consulting the JCA schools. 11 The way Moshers educational community actually operated was very similar to that of the JCA schools, with only minor differences in pace, tone, the role of the consultant, etc. Yet in his view, a democratic educational community is not about moral education. Mosher uses Deweys notion of democracy as a way of living. For him, a democratic community should not concentrate exclusively on moral development, but must be thought about in more holistic terms. Mosher challenges thinking about the JCA as just another narrowly focused program. Power, Higgins and Kohlberg portray this theoretical difference as variations in emphasis and priority. There is much more to this difference, however. Mosher holism, or systemic thinking, is an attempt to comprehend practice, the life of the school, on their own terms first, without imposing a neat explanatory scheme on it. Reading Lawrence Kohlbergs Approach to Moral Education reveals a tremendous mismatch between the moral development/moral education theory and the powerful description of the real-life experiences of just communities. The mismatch is especially revealing when the views of Kohlberg and Mosher are compared. At the end of the book, the authors had to all but admit that the book is not really about moral education. Rather, the JCA is a comprehensive form of school life, the results of which reach well beyond the boundaries of moral education. A Theory of Practice We lack what Donna H. Kerr calls a philosophy of educational practice. 12 A theory of practice aims at improving the practice it describes; it does not describe another theory that may or may not have influenced the practice. We need to read practice similarly to how we read theory; similarly, but not identically. Reading practice is a different art form; it follows different rules, and is based on different assumptions. When we observe patterns in human behavior, our tendency is to examine the assumptions, the beliefs, the reasoningin short, the thinking behind the behavior. This is why a philosopher naturally attempts to understand the JCA practice by reading the texts of its founder and leader. Yet by doing so, we forget that thought resides not only in texts, but in the actions themselves. The patterns of social behavior contain an implicit thought; they are not always rational, but always have a rationale. What we often do not sufficiently appreciate is the limitations that the reality of schooling places on educators practical strategies. For example, the great debate
160

A VEGETATIVE REPRODUCTION OF PRACTICE

on care and justice seems too distant to most teachers not because of their lack of theoretical sophistication. Rather, the debate is irrelevant within the set of limited options of every-day life in schools. The JCA is a form of a possible reality; it exists in past experiences, and in the stories described by Kohlberg and his coauthors. His theories, however, are of entirely different ontological nature; they exist in a different plain of existence. The theories are limitless, while practical forms of life are few. Most educational theorists make the assumption that ideas get implemented in practice, as if the reality of educational practice is infinitely pliable. In fact, the practice of education falls into very few patterns, regardless of the educational theories that may have inspired them. Collective education exists in a variety of different forms, yet in a very important sense, all educational collectives demonstrate similar patterns of discourse, behavior, and ritual. Similarly, traditional schools that rely on adult authority to control detached or oppositional youth peer groupssuch schools will look remarkably similar across cultural and ideological differences. Of course, any two things could said to be similar in one respect and different in another respect. Whether such similarities and differences matter, depends exclusively on the significance that human social practices attach to them. Difference and similarity are in the eye of the beholder, providing that the beholder has to work with others. What then would be the reason for examining the similarities between all collective education communities? What is the practice that would call us to ignore the profound differences in theories, ideologies, and ethical orientations these communities espouse? My argument stems from the following assumption: a school has to function as a social group first; all of its other purposes and functions depend on the type of social organization it possesses. Therefore, the differences between types of social organization are practically much more important than the schools theoretical/ ideological components. In any school, teachers need to ensure a certain level of order, cooperation, safety, etc.; such a level can be achieved in only a limited number of ways. An educational collective such as the JCA is one of the basic types of social organization schemes, while pedagogies of care or justice are not. A limited number of practices can be described with an unlimited number of theories. For now, let us assume, for simplicitys sake, that only two types of social organization are available for implementation in contemporary public schools: the traditional, based on adult authority, and the relational, based on peer authority (such as the JCA). An assessment of the JCA will then include not only the assessment of the benefits and problems of the two types of social organization, but will also contain more of a comparative analysis of the two available models. Making a choice among several options is a task that is very different than assessing one option, regardless of the number and viability of other options. These two forms of assessment have different purposes and different standards. Let us call the two different types of critique the stand-alone critique and the comparative critique. Of course, every stand-alone critique implicitly contains the possibility of another option that stands better against the charges. Yet if we explicitly name all plausible alternatives, the standard of critique changes: one may very well prove
161

CHAPTER 16

that option A is much worse than option B using criteria x, y, and z. It very well may be the case that the option B outperforms A with respect to criteria n, p, and q. Then we have the additional task of proving that x, y, and z are more important than n, p, and q. It is a much higher standard of critique to prove that the alternative really exists, and that it is really better. For example, nuclear energy was severely criticized for its dangers, its unsolved problems such as long-time storage, and the potential catastrophic impacts on the environment. Such a critique often only implied that other sources of energy are better, or that new ones are just around the corner. Yet if one explicitly lists all other sources of energy, their comparison to the nuclear option becomes more complex and more challenging. For example, the issue of carbon dioxide emission that causes the greenhouse effect has to be considered against the risk of potential catastrophe. It is very easy to criticize nuclear power in stand-alone mode; a comparative critique is much more difficult, and requires a different apparatus. JCA practice does not withstand the stand-alone critique, just like anything else in the world. Democracy, capitalism, nuclear energy, marriage, etc.all these things have their adamant critics who merely imply that there are better alternatives. Once the alternatives are explicitly stated and checked for viability, however, the practices in question look more appealing. The JCA also may do very well under a comparative assessment. What is the alternative to self-regulating communities of adolescents? It is, more or less, an authoritarian school relying on adult authority to maintain order, and on coercion to make students learn. Educators learn about forms of school life the same way people learn ways of conducting a wedding, or a new game to be played at a family reunion: they observe how other people do it, and then adapt it to their own circumstances. This is not theoretical knowledge, but practical knowledgethe knowledge absorbed through seeing, experiencing, and bits and pieces of folk wisdom. For example, in the early 1960s, the so-called Communards movement in Russia involved hundreds of thousands of children and adults. Very little has been written in English about this democratic version of collective education, 13 maybe because there is little theory behind the movement. Although its participants created quite a large body of literature in Russian, most of this literature is descriptive, not theoretical. There is consensus among practitioners and theoreticians about how the Communards movement had spread: in almost all known cases (several hundred Communard groups) it was through first-hand witnessing and participation. To start a new group, one would need to import yeastseveral friends who participated in another Communard group. No group was started by someone who was only able to read about the movement. Collective education models spread successfully when they bypass the theory. Perhaps this is a comment on the lack of a good theory, but we may be dealing with something larger here. In my opinion, one of the reasons the JCA has not caught on in the United States is that it was over-theorized from the start, and too closely linked to Kohlberg. Collective education belongs to a class of phenomena Foucault calls the technologies of power (such as discipline, the technology of the self, etc.).
162

A VEGETATIVE REPRODUCTION OF PRACTICE

Following Foucault, we should treat the ideological components of these technologies as reflections, results, or attempts to justify the technology itself, but not as the major cause of it. A philosophical critique of educational practice must certainly include an understanding of theoretical/ideological components of social phenomena, but only on the terms specified by Foucault. Here is an example of this approach. Foucault was asked about the literature on love for boys in Ancient Greece. This extensive literature, he replied, does not prove Greeks loved boys more than others; rather, it shows that Greeks had trouble incorporating the practice into their larger worldview, and produced the literature to justify or limit the practice. 14 Similarly, Kohlbergs theorizing could be interpreted as a sign of difficulty in incorporating the technology of collective education into the American worldview. We definitely cannot assess the potential of collective education by simply reading Kohlberg or Makarenko, 15 or Spiro 16 as theorists. Rather, we need to read them as story-tellers, and gauge the stories they tell against the theories they advance. The result of such critique is not to invent new, nonexistent forms of educational practice. Rather, it is to illuminate the history and the mechanisms of a specific social technology. This may help educators to choose among the available varieties of educational technologies, and to improve on them. Also, importantly, we must warn educators about the dangers of any given technology, and to show them how such dangers can be avoided. Texts of Educational theoryeven their best examplesare filled with recommendations taken out of the context of the holistic, systemic school experience. Let me cite someone I know will not be offended: We educators, teachers, and parents take the job of upbringing too seriously. Schooling should, in reality, just be an excuse for human beings to get together. What we really should do is to give ourselves fully to the children, to catch that simple moment of direct encounter with a child, and just hold on there. 17 The quoted paper belongs to a line of advice that encourages looping just because it will increase opportunity for closer student-teacher relationships. Or, say, advice to force students to confront their prejudices in class discussion, etc. Any single piece of advice we give sounds empty if the systemic characteristics of the school are not taken into consideration. There is no direct connection between a theory and practical advice. A theoretical idea must first pass through the filter of holistic practical forms. It must make sense in the context of practice before it can be converted into advice. Collective Education, Reassessed Now I want to indicate what a proper critique of the JCA may look like. The historical origins of collective education will require a special study. It is perfectly clear though, that this tradition is older than the Soviet or Israeli movements of the 20th century. One is likely to find a graduate evolution of collective education technology throughout the ages, as well as its genetic similarity to religious orders,
163

CHAPTER 16

professional societies, utopian communes, etc. Foucaults analysis of disciplinary techniques is surely relevant here, although collective education is a very special subset of these techniques. It is a technique that substitutes surveillance by peers for surveillance by a central authority. The Jesuit schools, Boy Scouts groups, the Freinet movement in France, and Janusz Korczaks just communities in Poland are all incarnations of the tradition. It is a blessing and a curse for collective education that it was introduced to the United States by Lawrence Kohlberg. It was a blessing because he had the audacity to overcome cultural barriers, and the genius to invent a culturally-appropriate form of collective education, suitable for North American realities. The curse is that collective education has been forever associated with Kohlbergs theory of moral development and moral education, which helps very little in understanding the potential of collective education. The essence of collective education is well described by Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg. They all cite Colemans famous study of American high schools and assert that the springs of behavior are not primarily in the hands of teachers or school administrators, but in the hands of the dominating peer groups that set up particular social climates in these schools. Bronfennbrenner later identified an explicit concern in the Soviet Union for utilizing the peer group as socializing agent. 18 The key to collective education is then a transformed peer group supportive of the educational aims the adults pursue. The collective is a community of children or adolescents that are allied with adult authority. They maintain a clear separation from adults at the level of subculture, but not in the norms and basic values to be enforced. Of course, there are many ways of achieving this result, and the collective can take on many forms. Furthermore, the educational collective is not necessarily benevolent, and can be used for manipulative, ideological purposes; it can harm individual freedom and impair creativity. These negative repercussions of collective education were demonstrated in the Soviet tradition extensively. Yet the same Soviet and Israeli experiences show that the educational collective does not necessarily suppress the individual. The achievements of just communities are impressive: overcoming alienation from schools, much improved discipline and relationships within school communities, students academic success, self-confidence, and civic involvement. What we cannot afford to ignore is the brilliant, ancient, and simple idea: the peer group can become a great player in the educational arena of todaycs large schools. The Lessons Much can be learned from the example of the Just Community Approach. Educational practice can change by accident, independently or even despite the intentions of the people who want it changed. Educational practice has its own inertia, dynamics, and mechanisms of diffusion that are not dependent on educational theory or organizational conditions. Even such a formidable mind as Kohlbergs got caught up in the slow spread of educational practices. If we were to
164

A VEGETATIVE REPRODUCTION OF PRACTICE

implement the Sensible Solution, described in the two previous chapters, reform would be only one of the necessary components. The other would be to sustain the vegetative reproduction of practice. This means, quite simply, providing wellfunded opportunities for educators to travel to successful schools to see what is being done there. Another way governments can help is by funding a teacher-onloan program. Teachers successful in changing their own schools would be lent to other schools to help transfer the practical knowledge of school improvement. A second lesson is that there have been precedents for using transformed peer cultures to reinvigorate the relational economies of schooling. The Sensible Solution is not abstract or theoretical; it can actually be implemented. Of course, it would still require political support and a break with excessive accountability practices. Most importantly, it would require changing peoples minds about the nature of schooling. A basic grasp of how relational economies work is within the reach of anyone, educator or lay person.
NOTES
1

2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9

10

11 12

13

14 15

F. Clark Power, Ann Higgins, and Lawrence Kohlberg, Lawrence Kohlbergs Approach to Moral Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, 11. Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, 25. Sue Ellen Henry, What Happens When We Use Kohlberg? His Troubling Functionalism and the Potential of Pragmatism in Moral Education, Educational Theory 51/3 (2001): 259276. Henry, 270. Henry, 271. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Womens Development (Harvard University Press, 1982). Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, 44. Clark Power and Tatyana A. Makogon, The Just Community Approach to Care, Journal for a Just and Caring Education 2 (1995): 924. Also available at http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/articles/ powerjust.html. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (University of California Press, 1986). Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, 138242. Donna H. Kerr, The Structure of Quality in Teaching in Jonas Soltis (ed.), Philosophy and Education, National Society for the Study of Education, 76th Yearbook, Part 1, (Bloomington, 1980). See for instance, Janet G. Vaillant, Civic Education in a Changing Russia in eds. Ben Eklof, Larry E. Holmes and Vera Kaplan, Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia: Legacies And Prospects (Routledge, 2005); Alexander M. Sidorkin, Authoritarianism and Democracy in Soviet Schools: A tale of John Deweys Ideas and the Woman Who Brought Down the Berlin Wall, East/West Education 19 (1998-2000): 121130; Alexander M. Sidorkin, The Communard Movement in Russia, East/West Education 16/2 (1995): 148159; Stephen T. Kerr, Why Vygotsky? The Role of Theoretical Psychology in Russian Education Reform, (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Seattle, Washington, November 22, 1997), http://faculty.washington.edu/stkerr/whylsv.html. Paul Rabinow, Ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 344. Anton S. Makarenko, The Road to Life: An Epic of Education (Vol. 1), (University Press of the Pacific, 2001).

165

CHAPTER 16
16

Melford E. Spiro, Children of the Kibbutz: A Study in Child Training and Personality (iUniverse.com, April 2000). 17 Alexander M. Sidorkin, The Pedagogy of the Interhuman, Philosophy of Education 1995. (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1995): 412419. 18 Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg, 37.

166

PART V. THE RADICAL SOLUTION

CHAPTER 17.

PAY-TO-LEARN

In part IV of this book I offered the Sensible Solution to education. I now turn to the Radical Solution. It has to do with paying students money for their labor and linking labor market demands to curriculum development. Students should be paid to learn specific things (not just to attend schools), and the monetary incentive should be sufficient to actually motivate youngsters to make an effort. This will create an incentive to learn, but also make learning much more efficient, and less reliant on expensive schooling. Paying students for learning will force those who pay to be more prudent about what they believe should be learned, and may reduce the curriculum. It will also create new role models in adolescent communities: kids who can make money just by using their brains. This will also alter the dynamics of families, give children a modicum of economic independence from parents, and restore some of their political, property, and civil rights. The limitations of the Sensible Solution are easy to see. The Productivity of all non-market relational economies, including mass schooling, can only be improved up to a certain point; it will always be subject to Chayanovs rule. There is a big difference between a thriving relational economy and a dysfunctional one. Marshal Sahlins makes a point that anthropologists tend to study tribal societies that are already in deep decline; they simply get to them too late to understand how well such economies can function. 1 I dont want this to happen to schools: they still do have potential, and can be improved. This is why I devoted considerable space to explaining the Sensible Solution. Nevertheless, the difference between the market and non-market worlds is much greater. Market economies also may or may not work well, and be more or less dysfunctional. Yet no relational economy, no matter how affluent and how well organized, has been able to create the advanced technology associated with industrial production. Similarly, no school systems based on a relational economy can ever modernize learning to a level comparable to the rest of the market-based economy. Schools as we know them will never be able to intensify the learning of labor, or make it significantly more productive. Schooling will become a bottle-neck for economic and technological development sooner or later. Its cost will inevitably increase, and output will stagnate, regardless of our best efforts. It benefits us all to think of a plan B, just in case reformism does not bring significant results. It is possible that the Sensible Solution, even if implemented in the United States, might be too little too late. Some European educational systems appear to be a little healthier, but they might also be closer to the theoretical maximum of productivity. In its present economic form, education will never be able to undergo the kind of revolutionary transformations characteristic of most other major industries. In the U.S., the rapid recent gains in labor productivity are attributed to technical progress in information and communication technology, the flexibility of regulations and the lax immigration policies that allow an influx of skilled workers. 2 Europe, with its more restrictive immigration policies and greater regulations, did not see such a rapid increase in labor productivity, despite
169

CHAPTER 17

experiencing the same advances in information technology. North America cannot indefinitely continue importing its education as a finished product form from the rest of the world and spend the highest portion of GDP on education (7%, tied with South Korea). 3 The combination of these two facts seems to be very troubling. The competition for a skilled work force is becoming more and more global, with demand in middle-income countries rapidly growing. Those are the countries that used to be exporters of skilled workers. It is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario where the current trends in educational reforms produce any significant, let alone radical improvements in the outcomes of schooling. Even its most adamant supporters do not believe a significant change in the productivity of learning may be achieved. Their dreams are limited to catching up with other countries and eliminating the embarrassing achievement gap between rich and poor. The latter goal also seems to be elusive, although No Child Left Behind was explicitly designed to pursue it. 4 If we are able to shorten the time spent on schooling and increase the quality of learning at the same time, even without any savings in the cost of education, it would represent a significant boost to the economy. Precursors There are programs in Mexico and Brazil (PROGRESA and Bolsa Escola, respectively) that pay poor families if their children attend school and go through regular medical check-ups. What is Bolsa Escola? This successful program is based on a very simple premise that if children do not study regularly because they have to work, then they will stop working and go to school if they or their families have the necessary funds. 5 The results are very promising, and some of the recent drops in Mexicos poverty rate can be attributed to PROGRESA. 6 PROGRESA interventions reduced the number of people with income levels below the poverty level by about 10 percent. The depth of poverty is reduced by 30 percent, and the severity index is reduced by 45 percent. 7 Bolsa Escola reports similar successes, and there is growing international interest to such programs, with the World Bank taking notice. 8 A similar scheme can work in the U.S. and other developed countries; first among the poor population, and eventually for everyone. The rationale for these policies is that families are not likely to pull children out of schools if their presence in the schools brings income to the family, which is the same or higher than children can otherwise earn (for example, by working on the family farm). Children in the developed world do not bring much income to their families. However, the same logic applies if we allow that children themselves have economic agency. The investment of time in schooling competes with other ways of spending their time. It competes with leisure, or with other forms of legal or
170

PAY-TO-LEARN

illegal employment. Children, like adults, will react to monetary incentives because money can be spent or invested. If the two programs sound like examples of a good progressive policy, consider that Newt Gingrich has come up with a similar proposal for the American inner cities: Im looking for a foundation that will go into the poorest neighborhoods to pay students to study math and science, someone who will pay more than McDonalds. 9 Gingrich and the two Latin American governments may have different ideologies, but their economic reasoning is the same. Finally, there is the experiment under way in New York City public schools, already mentioned and recently expanded to Washington, D.C. 10 The project is inspired and led by Roland G. Fryer, an economist. 11 Fryers most fundamental assumption seems so true to me, it is a mystery he has to defend it at all: Im troubled by the fact were treating kids as inanimate objects, he says. hey have behavior, too. They respond to incentives, too. 12 Fryer refuses to endorse educational exceptionalism, refuses to treat children differently than adults. The projects short description is this: Under his plan, fourth-grade students will receive up to $25 for a perfect score on each of 10 standardized tests throughout the year. Seventh-grade students will be able to earn twice as much$50 per test, for a total of up to $500. Fourth graders will receive $5 just for taking the test, and seventh graders will get $10. 13 The American Inequality Lab names this Incentivising: An Experiment in NYC Public Schools. 14 The project attracted much media attention, but is still in the experimental stage, and no scholarly publications have come out of it yet. It will be difficult to judge the success of the experiment for some time. However, I am worried about the meager sums involved. If it fails or is less than successful, the critics such as Alfie Kohn will be very quick to say that monetary incentives do not work in education. However, $500 a year in New York City is an inadequate amount. Gingrich is right to require payments above what McDonalds is paying. It seems that what began as an experiment in market incentives turned out more of a token economy. The idea, again, is to create incentive for students to learn, and the money should compete with other sources of income. A New York teenager can probably make $500 in two weeks working in a fast food restaurant, and probably as much in one day selling drugs. To imagine that $500 is going to provide incentives for a year of diligent studying seems a bit unrealistic. It may work in rural Mexico or Brazil, but not in New York City. To really make an impact on student performance, compensation for learning must be competitive with other sources of income a student may have, and compensate for the more demanding, more difficult work of learning as opposed to the labor involved in a simple menial job. The problem here is that of the threshold effect. Can one measure how small incentives work, and then extrapolate the findings into how larger incentives are likely to work? Of course notthe level of incentive has to reach a certain

171

CHAPTER 17

threshold to start working at all. A new incentive is designed to switch attention from one behavior to another; therefore the level of incentive should clearly surpass incentives for competing activities. Peoples behaviors are not infinitely incremental; for example, a student is not likely to gradually reduce his part-time job hours to study a little more. Rather, at some point he will quit the job altogether, and start paying attention to learning. To be convincing, the experiment must start with substantial amounts. This is not, however, how school bureaucracies everywhere operate. Any radical idea will get compromised, watered down, and then proclaimed ineffective. Where Does the Money Come From? In the fiscal year 2006, school districts in the United States spent an average of $9,138 per student. New York States average is almost $15,000, 15 although the Citys expenditures are a little lower, at about $12,000 in the 2004/2005 academic year (the last available year). 16 Public spending on education is approaching the wages of a minimum-wage worker. This closing gap indicates that sometime soon the educational industry will not depend on forcing students to work for free. In other words, it will become cheaper to pay than to force them. If we add to this the cost of retraining high school graduates in colleges and work places, the cost of enforcing school attendance, and the cost of controlling children, we may be spending too much already. Just as the cost of slave labor becomes economically prohibitive and politically untenable, one day the cost of free student labor will as well. In the end, free skilled labor costs less than bound unskilled and unwilling labor. New York City schools are so scared of a backlash to Fryers experiment that they use only privately raised funds to finance it, which probably explains the small amounts of money used in the incentives. But why are they so afraid? What is a better way of spending public money than by directly to those who deliver the results the public wants? It is the middlemen such as schools, teachers, and districts that really need to prove their usefulness, not the students. I wonder what is going to happen if a student is offered $15,000x13 years of public education= $195,000 to master the high school curriculum. That would mean learning all the basic skills, such as reading, writing, math operations; and all the advanced skills, such as analysis, synthesis, problem solving, logical reasoning, advanced comprehension, composition; it also means the verifiable learning of all subjects and the passing of all tests. Of course, the money would be given incrementally, according to the progress a student is making as measured by rigorous testing and performance-based assessment. Now, if a student and her parents would like to get help with learning, they may employ a tutor, or sign a contract with a school-like entity. They would pay this entity a negotiated proportion of the money the student earns by learning. Teachers would get paid a portion of the money earned by the student only when results are demonstrated; teachers would be paid not for attempts to teach, but for actual learning that was proven to occur. Some parents would decide to form a
172

PAY-TO-LEARN

small cooperative school, or to do all the teaching at home and thus keep all the money in the family or save it for college. What the public spends on public schooling adds up to some serious money, comparable to the cost of housing, and many times exceeding the cost of college. The money is already there, and no extra funds are needed. Public education is expensive already, and its costs continue to rise much slower than does achievement. If society agrees to pay all this money to schools for attempting to teach students, why not pay at least as much money directly to the learners and their families, and then let them decide how much and what kind of help with learning children really need? This would create incentives for students to really learn, rather than just attend school. It would accommodate for differences in pacing and learning styles. Moreover, such a direct money transfer will create an incentive to receive the minimal amount of highly specialized, focused help, rather than the one size fits all kind of help contemporary schools provide. Thus, one may expect a gradual reduction in the costs associated with schooling, as the number of schools and teachers will decline. Would New York taxpayers get a better return on a $195,000 investment? Most likely yes, because currently we spend the same amount of money with uncertain results, and all the funds go to service providers rather than to laborers. There is no form of accountability more exact than paying for delivered results. How? Each person can have an education record just like everyone has a tax and social security record. The record will list all the learning units a person has mastered and demonstrated his competence in. One could not get paid twice for learning the same or a very similar unit, and there may be some age restrictions, at least initially. Ideally, this program should have nothing to do with age, or income level, or anything else; every citizen should be entitled to be paid for learning something the public deems worthwhile. Nor should there be any enforceable sequence: if one can demonstrate mastery of nuclear physics without mastering basic math, so be it. We know this would be very difficult to do, and curriculum specialists may suggest a most logical sequence of learning units; but nothing should prevent a person from skipping the steps that are less interesting and/or less lucrative. A network of testing centers would prevent abuse, and make sure the person who is taking the test or a performance-based assessment is who she says she is. They can be as simple as what the ETS 17 maintains for its tests: a computer terminal and someone to check IDs and proctor tests. Passing a test would immediately result in money being transferred to a personal account, minus whatever contractual obligations the student incurred to tutors, consultants, or schools. Such obligations can also be entered into the educational record, or enforced independently. Why do we pay a plumber directly and cannot do the same for workers who make our cars? It is because the car manufacturing is a complex operation requiring thousands of people coordinating their efforts; from ore miners to car
173

CHAPTER 17

salesmen; from researchers to CEOs. Plumbing is as complex a work as any in car manufacturing, but it simply does not require a lot of coordination, or extensive division of labor. So, in most cases, we pay a plumber directly, and avoid middle men altogether. In fact, large multinational corporations in plumbing wont do well, because there is no economic value in large overhead expenses. Of course, the plumber will purchase equipment, or seek the help of a welder or a manual laborer if she needs to. Plumbing is not outside of the division of labor entirely, but its success depends mostly on one laborer. Now, what sort of an industry is education: more like plumbing or more like car manufacturing? Quite naturally, it is more like plumbing. It can be done by one person, with the help of others. It does not require complex logistics, and the coordinated efforts of many narrowly specialized workers. Learning may or may not be more efficient if involves other learners, or service providers such as teachers. The learner is the most important agent in learning; its results depend on her effort almost entirely, and there is no economic reason to impose unwanted services on her. Schooling as an institution with complex organizations evolved when another human being was the only source of knowledge and skills. This required coordinating work among many children and one adult, simply because they needed to be present in the same room at the same time. Yet new information and communication technologies make many of these considerations obsolete. Hundreds of thousands of schools and millions of classrooms all do essentially the same thing, and their success depends on the skills of a teacher and on the kids willingness to learn. They simply dont need the complicated organization schemes of the past. Children will always need specialized, focused, and effective teaching, but only for a fraction of the time we impose it on them now. Someone welltrained has to figure out why a certain child cannot master a specific skill, and suggest another learning strategy. However, we do not need millions of people explaining the same simple concepts to tens of millions of children. I am well aware that the same argument about the near death of teaching was made at the advent of television and that the doomsday prophecies have not come true. The idea of TV schooling failed not because of the limitations of television as a technology, or because there is some magic to face-to-face teaching. If children need real incentives to learn, no technology will make it happen. When children have a reason to seek a teacher, either on TV, or on the Internet, or in person, they will. Early childhood educators may raise the concern that young children do not understand the value of money, and therefore, will not respond to monetary incentives. This may be true, although as I have made clear, claims about childrens immaturity are greatly exaggerated. Children may begin to understand the value of money much sooner if they got to earn and spend it. And even if it is true that little children do not understand money, their parents certainly do, and will apply appropriate non-monetary incentives and emotional encouragement, whether they care about education or not. Some parents may spend childrens money on beer, while others will put it away into a college fund; the law may provide incentives for the latter rather than the former. Regardless of these choices,
174

PAY-TO-LEARN

parents will be more likely to support their young childrens learning. I will explain later that a pay-to-learn reform would least likely affect the early grades. Most young children would continue to attend their neighborhoods elementary schools, albeit under new legal and economic arrangements. We should seriously consider the idea of paying students directly for learning. Perhaps they may not be allowed to cash the money they earn until they reach a certain age, and only with parental consent. Perhaps we can provide tax incentives for them to save their money to pay for higher education. We may begin by targeting poor and minority children first. But, fundamentally, public subsidy for education should flow directly from governments to students. If you think this suggestion is too farfetched, you will want to make sure to read the last two chapters. In each, I present additional ideas that offer alternatives to conventional ways of solving the problem of learning motivation. These ideas may seem even more farfetched than my idea of paying students to learn. Farfetched or not, I believe all the following implications of the Radical Solution make good sense, and will work.
NOTES
1 2

10

11 12

Marshall D. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972). Ben S. Bernanke, Remarks at the C. Peter McColough, Roundtable Series on International Economics, Council on Foreign Relations. Presented at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Business Forum, Little Rock, Arkansas, February 24, 2005, http://www.federalreserve.gov/ BoardDocs/Speeches/2005/20050119/ Robert Holland, International Scorecard for U.S. Education: Big Spending, So-So Results, School Reform News, November 1, 2003, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=13542. Jaekyung Lee, An In-depth Look into National and State Reading and Math Outcome Trends, (Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 2006), http://eric.ed.gov/ ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/29/de/7e.pdf . See, for instance, Cristovam Buarque, Bolsa Escola: Bridging Two Worlds, http://siteresources. worldbank.org/INTCL/Resources/SPectrumBolsaEscola.pdf. Schultz, T. Paul, School Subsidies for the Poor: Evaluating the Mexican Progresa Poverty Program (August 2001). Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 834. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=286518. See also Progressing through PROGRESA: An Impact Assessment of a School Subsidy Experiment in Rural Mexico Economic Development and Cultural Change 2005 54:1, 237275. Mexico PROGRESA: Breaking the Cycle of Poverty, International Food Policy Research Institute, 2002, 2, http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/ib/ib6.pdf. Happy families, The Economist, Feb 7th 2008, http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory. cfm?story_id=10650663. Eric Krangel, At New School, Gingrich Calls for New Dialogue on Poverty, The new York Sun, September 14, 2006, http://www.nysun.com/article/39654. Bill Turque, 14 Schools Named to D.C. Program to Motivate Students With Cash, Washington Post, August 29, 2008; Page B01. See his home page at http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer. Stephen J. Dubner, Toward a Unified Theory of Black America, New York Times Magazine, March 20, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20HARVARD.html.

175

CHAPTER 17
13

14 15

16

17

Jennifer Medina, Schools Plan to Pay Cash for Marks, The New York Times, June 19, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/nyregion/19schools.html?ex=1339992000&en=23fc26fb46faf 8b2&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink. http://www.americaninequalitylab.com/education.php. US Census Bureau, Public Schools Spent $9, 138 Per Student in 2006, press release Tuesday, April 1, 2008, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/011747.html. NYC Department of Education, School Based Expenditure Reports, http://www.nycenet.edu/ offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/exp01/y2004_2005/function.asp. http://ets.org.

176

CHAPTER 18.

THE CURRICULUM AND THE MONEY TRAIL

Once we agree in principle that students must be paid to learn, we need to decide what is so important that it deserves to be learned at the publics expense. In this chapter, I propose an outline of a new system for selecting curriculum, which would use the flow of funds to assist curriculum development. The Curriculum Tax Herbert M. Kliebard expressed the difficulty with contemporary curriculum as follows: Although lags between what knowledge a society values and what knowledge gets embodied in the curriculum of its schools are not uncommon, it is hard to imagine a culture in which the knowledge deemed to be important for whatever reason does not find its way into what is taught deliberately to the young of that society The route between the knowledge a society values and its incorporation into the curriculum becomes infinitely more torturous, however, when we take into account the fact that different segments of any society will emphasize different forms of knowledge as most valuable for that society. Rarely is there universal agreement as to which resources of a culture are most worthwhile Each of these interest groups, then, represents a force for a different selection of knowledge and values from the culture and hence a kind of lobby for a different curriculum. 1 Kliebard then paints a picture of the epic struggle among four main groups that shaped the American curriculum: the humanists, the developmentalists, the social efficiency educators, and the social meliorists. In light of the core problem presented above, the most compelling case was made by the social efficiency theorists and the social meliorists. The former proposed to remove human intervention from the construction of curriculum: analysis of existing occupations would have to find its way into curriculum. The social efficiency theorists deplored the randomness and seeming uselessness of most school curriculum, and wanted a more accurate alignment of curriculum to the demands of real life. They were particularly influenced by Thorndikes experiments that dealt a major blow to the mental disciplinarians (roughly the same group as humanists) belief that traditional subjects exercise the mind, and that the skills gained by studying them are transferrable. Yet skills do not seem to transfer from subject to subject, and excellent knowledge of mathematics does not guarantee that the skills of mathematical reasoning will apply to ethical or linguistic reasoning. This made traditional school curriculum highly suspect. Curriculum construction is still a haphazard affair, each time involving a dozen or so people sitting around a table for months and arguing with each other about what should and what should not be learned. One problem with the process is that curriculum experts rarely use any data on the usefulness of knowledge outside their own intuition. When all is said
177

CHAPTER 18

and done, it is impossible to see why certain things end up inside and others outside the curriculum. Another problem is that curriculum thus developed tends to stay unchanged for years, because the process is long, cumbersome, and expensive. Because of the interdependence of state standards, textbooks, and assessment systems, most states keep a curriculum despite obvious flaws, because it is too expensive to change and the ripple effects are disruptive to the school systems. While work, consumption, leisure, and civic life change rapidly, K-12 curriculum seems to be stagnant and unresponsive to the demands of changes in society. Curriculum writing by committee is even more problematic now than when the social efficiency movement first challenged it. However, removing such committees from curriculum development has proven to be very difficult. Despite the persistent invocation of science in the interest of curriculum tied to direct utility, the technique of activity analysis almost inevitably resorted in the end to consensus. Whatever may have been the scientific procedure used to create the list of activities or traits originally, they were incapable of standing on their own as elements in the curriculum without the intervention of human judgment. 2 The Social Efficiency theorists influenced curriculum somewhat, but ultimately failed to change it radically. Yet their failure had to do with technical and methodological difficulties, not with a conceptual weakness. Indeed, if it were possible to know for sure what kinds of knowledge and skills are used in peoples daily livesinwork, leisure, consumer and political and behaviorwouldnt you want to know? How much do people rely on their reading skills, and what kinds of reading do they do? And consequently, how much should the public spend to promote reading vis--vis other skills, such as knowledge of the governmental system, or knowledge of the tax code, or the ability to speak another language? Those are tantalizing questions, and they were utterly impossible to answer in the early 20th century, when the scientific curriculum movement appeared. Milton Friedman once explained why his idea of school vouchers did not emerge at the beginning of the American public schooling system. He guessed that it was technically impossible to administer. 3 He is probably right; the voucher system requires some database management capabilities, or high-quality expensive printing. Similarly, something similar to the scientific curriculum approach can actually be attempted with the advent of large relational databases with web-based user interfaces. We live in the midst of a data management revolution that allows us to know things we have never been able to know before, and ask questions we could never dream of answering. Here is how the curriculum piece might work. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has an extensive Occupational Outlook Handbook. It provides not only the number of jobs available and anticipated in each category, but also briefly describes the nature of the work. For example, it says that college professors, among other things, should be able to do the following:
178

THE CURRICULUM AND MONEY TRAIL

Faculty keep abreast of developments in their field by reading current literature, talking with colleagues, and participating in professional conferences. They may also do their own research to expand knowledge in their field. They may perform experiments; collect and analyze data; and examine original documents, literature, and other source material. From this process, they arrive at conclusions, and publish their findings in scholarly journals, books, and electronic media. 4 There is also the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), developed by the International Labor Organization, with somewhat similar categories and different descriptions of skills: College, university and higher education teaching professionals teach their subjects at some or all levels after the termination of secondary education, conduct research and improve or develop concepts, theories and operational methods, and prepare scholarly papers and books. Tasks include designing and modifying curricula and preparing courses of study in accordance with requirements; delivering lectures and conducting tutorials, seminars and laboratory experiments; stimulating discussion and independent thought among students; supervising, where appropriate, experimental and practical work undertaken by students; administering, evaluating and marking examination papers and tests; directing research of post-graduate students or other members of department; researching into and developing concepts, theories and operational methods for application in industrial and other fields; preparing scholarly books, papers or articles; attending conferences and seminars; participating in decision-making processes concerning college or university departmental, budgetary and other policy matters; assisting with extra-curricular activities, such as debating societies; performing related tasks; supervising other workers. 5 What we have is the beginning of a catalogue of all the skills used in the American economy. Of course, these two are only relatively vague approximations. They also do not include knowledge bases for occupations: what concepts, facts, dates, names, or principles should people know to be able to do their work? It may be a daunting task to figure this out with some degree of accuracy. Using a version of Blooms taxonomy could be a way of simplifying the task. The field of occupational analysis is complex, and I do not pretend to survey is here. 6 It is possible, however, to find out what skills and knowledge a worker is most likely to use. Theoretically, we can accurately estimate demand for the skill of, say, analyzing data, by tracking the wages of people who use the skill. Not only can we know the number of people using it, but also figure out the relative importance of that skill to

179

CHAPTER 18

the economy. Highly compensated and specialized skills such as database analysis can be compared to skills that are more broadly distributed, but compensated at a lower rate, such as reading. The skills and knowledge used in many occupations should be considered general, and deserving to be in a K-12 curriculum; they can be both basic and advanced, but just broad enough to justify the taxpayers support. Skills and knowledge used in one or a few occupations should be considered specialized, and belong in vocational training and higher education. We know that literacy affects economic growth. A UNESCO report, for example, shows that literacy levels have a positive impact on earnings beyond that of years spent in school. 7 Yet we dont know the importance of literacy in relation to numeracy, for example. Besides, most studies focus on the economic impact of a certain skill, but not on how widely the skill is used in real life. Those two measures may or may not correlate. Linking Curriculum to Taxation Because we can easily link wages to skills, and wages are already taxed, we already have a mechanism for collecting information. Governments already tax the use of labor; it is a relatively minor step to slice the labor performed into categories of the kinds of skills used. In other words, my payroll stub can be a bit longer and include coded categories such basic literacy deduction, data analysis deduction, etc. We can tax both employer and employee for the use of the skill. Payroll taxes can be earmarked to fund the reproduction of all skills that comprise the given type of work. In the American system, unfortunately, educational funding comes primarily out of property taxes and sales taxes. It is unfortunate, because income differences are directly related to education, and income tax is the more logical choice for educational taxation. The tax-funded educational fund will be both the source of funding and the source of information on demand for specific skills and knowledge. For example, it may include a basic numeracy account, or a data base analysis account, or a grade 10-level reading comprehension account. We would still need a committee to break down skills and knowledge into larger subjects, and then further into smaller curricular units that can be tested or otherwise assessed. However, the committees would not have the challenging (and politically charged) task of assessing which type of knowledge is more important than some other; the market will determine that. One may suspect that the Shakespeare account may turn out to be much smaller than Spreadsheets account. However, one need not be overly concerned with the demise of the Bards impact on our cultural life. As I will explain later, there will be plenty of kids who will learn about him without compensation, and Shakespearian scholars and fans can raise money to supplement the tax, and/or lobby governments to fund it directly. Any individual can demonstrate through an exam or performance test that she possesses a skill, and be compensated for her labor of developing it. The level of compensation will be determined by the amount of funds available in the skill
180

THE CURRICULUM AND MONEY TRAIL

fund, divided by the number of people who are willing to take the exam at a certain time. For example, let us assume that in any given month, a million American workers used mathematical reasoning to perform their jobs, but a hundred million used basic reading comprehension skills. All these people and their employers will pay toward the mathematics skill account, and the reading account. Many billions of dollars attached to specific skills will be available for all willing students to bid on. The demand for knowledge will play against the supply of student labor. The system will weed out unnecessary learning, and improve the quality of necessary learning. One can imagine a formula for diverting money from complex skill accounts to more foundational ones. For example, data analysis skills require the ability to build and understand tables and a basic knowledge of statistics. Because many occupations and social roles depend on reading, there will be more money available to younger learners. However, because almost all kids will want to read, their compensation may not be high. Imagine a teenager who just passed his Algebra I exam. He is a few hundred dollars richer, and would like to be richer still. He logs into the learning auction site, and learns that if he passes Algebra II within three months, he is likely to make another thousand dollars. However, he can also learn Advanced Biology for three thousand. He is less sure about Biology, and just finished Algebra I, with some difficulty, but it was not too bad. Most colleges will probably like to see Algebra II, and Biology only for certain majors. But it is three thousand dollars, which will be enough to buy that bike Who knows what kinds of reasoning will go through the teenagers mind? There is a chance his education will be a hodgepodge of random skills and facts. However, it will be a less random and more useful hodgepodge that he has now, because his choices would be influenced by the actual demand and supply of skills and knowledge. A market of knowledge and skills can include both the consumption and production sides of education. For example, some skills will generate little revenue, but if many children want to learn them, they can pay rather than be paid for learning. The kid above might make money learning algebra only to spend it on guitar lessons. In other cases, the demand for a skill may be so low that would only be sufficient enough to cover the cost of testing. Those skills will be then listed as compensated at $0. However, children might want to acquire these skills and to have the units listed on their academic record. There would be a lot pressure for the kid to sign up for that Shakespeare unit, and maybe even for a course, because either his future colleges would still like to see it, or his parents would strongly suggest it, or he would simply want to belong to that class of people who can quote Shakespeare. However, another teenager would simply ignore Shakespeare and concentrate on the skills that lead her to her dream of being a vet. It will be up to the learner to decide what kind of knowledge she would be interested in obtaining, and for what sums of money. It is also possible that some children will find gainful employment without much education at all, for the hypothetical learning market system will compete for labor with other industries. This would require changes in child labor laws, the focus of Chapter 20.
181

CHAPTER 18

The Creation of such a market for skills may take years, but it will be superior to the existing system that promotes low student effort and a more or less random design of curriculum. Direct Financing An ideal curriculum should include an accurate snapshot of the adult world; not just of the workforce, but of society as a whole. It should assemble itself, be flexible, and reflect all the general skills and knowledge currently being used by society in its entirety. Society must find a way of sending finely tuned signals about the use of specific knowledge or skills to the educational system. However, the social meliorists also have a valid point. The curriculum tax cannot be the only source of educational funding. Curriculum does not only reflect present society, but also its imaginary future. The curriculum tax will provide no information on the skills and knowledge that are not compensated, or used outside of the labor market. For example, it will miss peoples civic and political behavior, but also, their leisure and consumer behavior. Education for consumption purposes can probably be measured with a use of sales taxes. For example, people who buy fiction books should probably subsidize learning about fiction. In other words, sophisticated consumers should subsidize the reproduction of their knowledge and tastes. Theater aficionados, along with actors, should contribute to the theater education account. However, it is very difficult to track the knowledge and skills needed for civic engagement, voting, taking care of ones own body and soul, and family life. In addition to the curriculum tax, there should also be a managed competition between the different forces that strive for control over the curriculum, but not necessarily a competition resolved through political means. This should not be a competition about what can be forced on students to learn. Students and their parents will have the final choice of learning or not learning, the choice guided and regulated by financial incentives. If a political entity such as a state or the Federal Government believes that certain skills are important for citizens to have, it will contribute to a fund dedicated to, say, citizenship. Such funding is always subject to voters indirect or direct approval. Perhaps some skills/attitudes cannot be demonstrated through an exam, but can only be shown in a longer program with required attendance; still, it will be up to students and their families to decide whether a citizenship day camp is worth the amount it pays to its participants. This wont guarantee that every student will sign up, but public schools do not guarantee anything of the sort now anyway. If a state legislature feels strongly about certain types of knowledge, dispositions, or skills, all it has to do is provide more properly designated money to the educational fund. One can conduct instant efficiency studies: how many students learned the directly funded content? What were their ages, gender, race, and was the money efficiently spent? It would be possible to compare the effectiveness of raising public awareness through an advertisement campaign vs. through an educational fund.
182

THE CURRICULUM AND MONEY TRAIL

Churches might create the Bible knowledge account, health authoritieshealth education account, environmentalistsa green education account, etc. Instead of requiring children to know something or to attend school, the fund will offer monetary incentives to learn. And yes, they will be competing for childrens attention. The National Science Foundation, Coca-Cola, the Catholic Church, and the U.S. Congress, among other groups, should all have the equal right to pay students to learn content they deem important; no one should be allowed to impose anything by force. Depending on how much money is available to learn, say, calculus, or the Declaration of Independence, or the Ten Commandments, and how many students at any given moment want to learn it, the payment for each learning unit will be established. Yet if a student does not want to learn something at all, no amount of money will entice her to do so. Of course, governments of all levels will be the largest consumers of learning, but they should compete for the limited numbers of learners and their time with other private and public bodies. My concern about contemporary curriculum is not only that it is irrational, but also that it is wasteful. Since public education is funded by taxes, no one has any incentive to apply scrutiny to its usefulness. The public funds the entire package; it is never asked if history or music should be funded by the public, or whether students and their parents should be expected to foot those bills. There is a lot of haggling and complaining about the curriculum from professional associations and interest groups. Perhaps if the right questions are raised, taxpayers will react differently. For example, a state government may notice that foreign language instruction does not get much support, because actually, very few people use that skill at work, despite the mighty rhetoric of the global village. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages introduces a bill to ask such and such government to provide direct funding for foreign languages. Of course, the rationale should include the reasons why children in a particular state should learn more foreign languages, even if it is clear that this is not a widely used skill. The Council may argue that it increases Americas international standing, or that the future economy will demand more of the skill, etc. But all of this should be backed up by some evidence. And such a bill is likely to compete with other requests. For example, the National Association of Tax Professionals will ask the state to fund tax law awareness education, because even though not many people use the knowledge of tax laws at work, everyone uses it in their personal finances, and there is evidence people dont know the law and it hurts them. Direct funding should be carefully regulated. For example, extremist groups, or those promoting racial hatred or violence have to be kept out. The quality of learning units and associated testing should be examined by curriculum specialists; units that do not promote higher level thinking might be banned. Foreign governments and commercial entities with weak ties to the country may or may not be allowed to enter the market. Otherwise, competition is good. For example, if creationists are able to amass large sums of money to teach their version of natural history, it would be up to the scientific community to raise more funds privately or from taxpayers to teach science. And if a student ends up learning both versions, well, this wont be the end of the world as we know it. Hopefully, science has more
183

CHAPTER 18

persuasive force, and scientists can engage more effective curriculum developers. And if not, it is a concern that has to be addressed through fair competition, not through government or court decisions. Meta-Curriculum Would the implementation of my proposal bring about curricular disintegration? One overwhelming concern of early public educators, such as Horace Mann, was the cultural unity of the nation. The major rationale for the reform of the common schools was not economic, but political and cultural. I have addressed this point in critique of Dewey in Chapter 9. The unity of curriculum now has nothing to do with cultural cohesion; the latter is created and sustained by mass media and mass culture. But let me take this argument one step further. The informational revolution is changing the basic assumption that much knowledge needs to be stored in human brains. Let us assume that human civilization is one big computer. All information stored outside human brains can be the equivalent of a hard-drive (HD), while information that actually resides in brains, can be called RAM, or random access memory. RAM can be accessed at any time, on demand, while HD information should be retrieved first, and then recorded back for safekeeping. If the connection between RAM and HD is slow, it makes sense to have large RAM, so that you have a lot of available information to work with. Ideally, RAM could have an almost complete copy of the HD loaded, so its all there, readily available. The Renaissance man is the equivalent of RAM bursting with excessive amount of information. One may spend over half of ones productive life loading the most important knowledge of human civilization into ones brain, to have it there, just in case. But now the situation is changing, mainly because connections between human brains and what used to be books and libraries are improving. Why learn something that can be almost instantly retrieved? learning in the old-fashioned sense, as increasing ones ability to recall information, is losing its appeal. Meta-skills for information processing are becoming more important than knowledge itself. In other words, a brains operating system is now more important than its storage capacity. The great liberation of human memory is being brought about by Google and Wi-Fi. In certain habitats, anyone can have access to any information at any time. When I speak to my daughter or my son on the phone, we often both have laptops and look up information while we speak. When we discuss some of our family members medical problems, the most advanced knowledge can be recalled at once. Reading original research takes minutes, while reference sites can be read instantly, without interrupting the conversation. This is very different from when I used to argue with my own father about things neither of us knew very much aboutnor did we know how to find more information without making a trip to the library. The difference between the educated and the uneducated persons is now in their knowledge about what kinds of knowledge exist, where to find it, and how to understand and use it. This still requires a large vocabulary, and a basic
184

THE CURRICULUM AND MONEY TRAIL

understanding of various fields. It just does not require memorization of facts, formulas, dates, and rules. Our curriculum is desperately outdated, just because the relative importance of skills and knowledge is changing so rapidly. Without some sort of mechanism of rapid feedback between the world and the curriculum, the latter is doomed to become increasingly outdated. In reality, a Curriculum should become a means of transferring knowledge about databases and the skills of information retrieval. Horace Manns argument about cultural unity is irrelevant not only because of mass media, but also because of changes in the nature of the contemporary curriculum. A curriculum should be organized differently now. It does not simply separate important knowledge from unimportant knowledge; primarily, it separates knowledge from meta-knowledge. Systematic knowledge of a subject will be replaced with a sampling of fields. One needs to know just enough to be able to place found information in the right context; this is a sampling curriculum. But the samples should be different for different people. Let me give an example of a sampling curriculum. A few years ago, my sons high school history teacher required his students to read the Financial Times of London every week. Each class was spent on discussions of world events and what students needed to know from history to understand the events context and origins. Of course, students received a sampling of world history, not a systematic knowledge of the subject. However, it was still a curriculum, for the students gained the meta-skill of interpreting facts for which they dont have enough background information. Moreover, they had learned just enough vocabulary to help them with independent searches later on, should the need arise. They also learned that many problems and conflicts in contemporary Europe can be better understood if one learns about the disintegration the great European empires of the late 19th century. The point is that a sampling curriculum can and should be different for different children; this does not ruin cultural unity, nor does it abolish the curriculum per se. *** Curriculum development can become a more or less self-organizing process. Demand for work-related skills can be measured through a curricular tax. All governmental, civic, or private entities can compete for students attention by funding the learning of specific content, but none of these entities should be allowed to impose its curriculum without student and parent consent. The changing nature of knowledge should be reflected in allowing a sampling curriculum, which does not imply a common core of knowledge.
NOTES
1

Herbert M. Kielbard, The struggle fir the American Curriculum 18931958 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7. Kliebard, 103.

185

CHAPTER 18
3 4

5 6

Friedman, 97. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, http://www.bls.gov/oco/ ocos066.htm#nature. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/index.htm. See, for an overview The Changing Nature of Work: Implications for Occupational Analysis (1999), Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (CBASSE), also available on-line http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9600#toc. Education for All. Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO, 2005, http://portal.unesco.org/ education/ en/ev.php-URL_ID=43048&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html.

186

CHAPTER 19.

THE END OF SCHOOLING

The Radical Solution does away with public schooling as we know it. Political forces associated and allied with public schooling, the weight of tradition, and its vast stores of symbolic capitalall these make public schooling an unassailable institution. Only some conservatives, probably a small minority, really wish to dismantle public schooling. They want to do this for all the wrong reasons, such as to try and diminish the political influence of teacher unions, and to create competition using vouchers. Yet it is my belief that the institution of public schooling will outlive its usefulness sometime within the next few decades. The belief is not going to win me many new friends and will, perhaps, cause me to lose a few old ones. In the short run, my belief is unlikely to find much political support. Most people still equate quality education with quality schooling. Breaking the association would require a major cultural shift, and this or other books wont do it. Theorists do not change peoples minds; economic shifts do. Consider manufacturing: it was such a permanent feature of American economy for so long, that no one predicted its eventual demise. In the end, its entrenchment in the political, cultural, and social fabric of society meant very little. As globalization and outsourcing arrived, most manufacturing sectors dwindled. No political force was able to stop or even slow down this process. Most people learned not only how to cope economically, but also changed their minds about what the contemporary economy is and is not. De-schooling will not happen as Ivan Illich once predicted it would, 1 but it might be every bit as painful as de-manufacturing. A lot of people are likely to lose their livelihoods, many will need to be retrained and relocated. The entire ethos and mythos of schooling will have to change, shrink, and perhaps vanish. Homecoming, proms, commencements have become ingrained in the cultural fabric of America, and cannot just disappear. Yet people adapt; adaptability and flexibility is the one major asset America still possesses, and it must use it to reform education. Otherwise, someone else will. I wont be surprised if some developing countries skip the era of mass schooling or shorten it significantly. As soon as their informational infrastructures catch up with those of the developed countries, they might just decide to pay students to learn on their own. These countries are not as entrenched in past ideas of what constitutes schooling. Brazil and Mexico may adjust their conditional cash transfer programs slightly, and get good results. All they need is universal internet access, and a reliable testing network. Once this is completed, they simply need to stop paying for school attendance, and start paying for learning results. The next step is diverting money from public schooling to direct payments to students. The Teaching Profession If we to try the pay-to-learn route, market will force the teaching force to shrink significantly. Any efficiency gains in education are only possible if more learning
187

CHAPTER 19

per unit of input is produced. Teacher payrolls are the largest component of educational spending. To be exact, in 2005/06, American schools paid 262 billion in salaries and benefits, out of 449.6 of total expenditures on K-12 education. 2 No reform will be successful without reducing the number of teachers. Even if one finds flaws with my pay-to-learn proposal, any alternative must still provide for a reduction of the teacher force. Since increasing class sizes or reducing salaries do not seem to be viable alternatives, some other mechanism should be shown to increase the overall teacher to student ratio. In my view, this can be done only if students significantly intensify their own effort, and if they teach themselves at least partially. In other words, students should require less teaching. Teaching must stop being a wholesale operation, and instead become flexible, on-demand and right-on-time service. Teaching will become a service profession; only those who need and want teaching will receive it, those who can learn on their own will be left alone. Expert teachers will set up private practices, just like accountants and doctors do, work for a larger commercial school, or form smaller teaching firms. A former teacher and a teacher educator for over a decade, I would be sad to see the feisty communities of teachers dissolve, and their numbers decrease. At the same time, I am looking forward to seeing teacher millionaires and teacher entrepreneurs, a leaner and stronger group of well-educated, independent professionals. I would like to witness an end to the tremendous turnover of teachers, increased competition in the profession, and more selectivity in teacher education schools. Teachers self-respect will improve, if they are relieved from the shameful obligation to impose their services on many unwilling clients. Their political influence may eventually rise. As one may see, political strength is not necessarily in numbers. Much smaller, but better organized and more independent professions such as lawyers and doctors exert political influence comparable to that of the multi-million member teacher unions. The new market-based economy of learning will produce larger demand on other education-related occupations, and many teachers will need to retrain to enter those. For example, the national network of testing centers will need staff. While the same or better amount of knowledge can be produced with a much leaner teaching force, public will demand more and more sophisticated assessment to prove that learners are paid only if they show strong evidence of learning. New curriculum units will need to be constantly developed, supplemented by study guides and tests. Therefore, we will need many more curriculum developers and assessment specialists. Students will have to answer one entirely new question: What kind of learner am I, and what kind of teaching or coaching do I need? This is not an especially challenging question to answer; its just that schools have always provided an answer before one had even thought to ask. Imagine you are a student, and you see all this money being offered for, say, writing units, but you are unable to pass any of them. Your choice is either to keep going after all those math units you do well, or perhaps admit that you are not learning writing skills in the right way, or have a learning disability or difficulty. In fact, you might suspect something is wrong, and this may affect your career choices. If people are put in charge of their own
188

THE END OF SCHOOLING

learning, they will need to figure out what does and does not work for them as learners. Massive questioning will undoubtedly spur the growth of educational consultants, coaches, and diagnosticians. The Organization of Learning These new organizational arrangements will be diverse and changing. The most obvious way of financing teaching services is to make a deal with students and their families: we will help you learn a unit. If you pass the test, we will keep a portion of your earnings. This may not be the only arrangement. Some schools will charge a percentage of what children earn by learning, others will take everything, while still others will take everything and charge parents on top of that. These contracts are likely to be different for each student. Teaching firms betting on a students learning ability may hedge their risk by requesting a learning history, and place-testing students. They may demand higher shares of a learners paycheck, or may request a fee up front. Some schools will become specialized in certain subjects, while others will emphasize their community spirit, and the development of social skills. Some will become mostly baby-sitting institutions (or, rather, remain such), while others will become consulting and testing centers. It is not too difficult to imagine a school charging parents for childcare services, and at the same time contracting for teaching services separately. It is likely that some teaching institutions will specialize in low-level, easy to teach basic skills, and in younger children. In practice, these may not be very different from existing elementary schools, especially in the early grades. In practice, many existing schools will survive. A majority of parents will still put their children through local elementary schools, and forgo whatever their children can earn. Most parents will figure that elementary schools do a decent job in both socialization and basic literacy, on top of valuable child care services. However, secondary education will eventually split into a multitude of different shapes and forms, from quite traditional schools to homeschooling, from online consulting to youth communities that also help with learning. Once children are recognized as agents of choice, we will find out that they want different things. Small town and rural schools will be more difficult to change, because their monopoly on teaching is difficult to break. They may simply charge students 100% of their earnings, and cast aside low-performers. Fighting monopolies is where the regulatory force of the state should be exercised. However, it is also likely that online teaching institutions, homeschooling and parent cooperatives may provide enough competition, even in the smallest markets. Sweden has one of the most far-reaching voucher systems in the world, which allowed the creation of a low-cost, independent chain schools called Kunskapsskolan. The secret of their success is quite simple: Like IKEA, a giant Swedish furniture maker, Kunskapsskolan gets its customers to do much of the work themselves. The vital tool, though, is not
189

CHAPTER 19

an Allen key but the Kunskapsporten (Knowledge Portal), a website containing the entire syllabus. Youngsters spend 15 minutes each week with a tutor, reviewing the past weeks progress and agreeing on goals and a time-table for the next one. This will include classes and lectures, but also a great deal of independent or small-group study. The Kunskapsporten allows each student to work at his own level, and spend less or more on each subject, depending on his strengths and weaknesses. 3 The schools are also frills-free, and emphasize standardization and performance monitoring. It is worth mentioning that such schools are not allowed to charge tuition, but can make a profit by saving on state funding that comes to them on a per-student basis. I have expressed my reservations about the voucher proposals, but this example shows how teaching will be changed once it is exposed to the normal discipline of the markets. What I am proposing is the vouchers-on-steroid approach, which will apply even greater pressure on schools to change, and, in many cases, take them out of the equation entirely. It will also make it easier to eradicate inequality. Educational Equity and State Regulation Does the Radical Solution eliminate inequity in education? It does notnot on its own. It is easy to imagine that children in poor and minority neighborhoods will quickly exhaust their quota of easier, lower level units, but then eventually become frustrated with being unable to master more complex, and more lucrative units. Middle and upper class kids, motivated by higher education prospects, will bid on those complex units, and lower the amount to be earned per unit, and thus reduce incentives to learn. Better quality schools and tutoring will be available in more affluent neighborhoods, and more home resources will be available to those children. This has happened time and again; whatever the social arrangements, the more affluent have always been able to take advantage of them. The governments are not off the hook when it comes to equality; one of the main reasons for their existence is to regulate in favor of more equality. However, the pay-to-learn solution gives a powerful instrument for state intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged. It makes interventions more effective and less expensive. I will now list the major interventions that will be made possible. First, it will become very transparent where the incentives are not strong enough to ensure educational progress. Since the bidding and payment processes can be tracked by race, income level, or location, governments will be able to adjust incentives through indexation to provide higher incentives to poorer and minority children. It might be the case that for mastering the same unit, a child from a certain neighborhood and background is offered several times more money than her compatriot in another neighborhood. Incidentally, the system can be tuned in such a way that it wont matter what kind of disadvantage a population suffers; it can be made blind to class, race, gender, ability, etc. If you are a student that completed a certain number of learning units, and then your progress becomes

190

THE END OF SCHOOLING

below what is expected, you may be entitled to higher pay for the same unit, just to convince you to keep going. And because disadvantaged children will receive more for the same amount of learning, qualified help will be driven to where they are concentrated. As children with learning disabilities get closer to the ceiling of their abilities, they will become a very lucrative business for anyone able to move them just one step up, thereby providing funding for special education services. As I stated earlier, the state may interfere by indexing payments to provide more incentives for teaching firms to take on more students with learning disabilities or from poor and minority families. In general, I envision aggressive regulation from the state to ensure that markets do not systematically exclude disadvantaged groups. Hopefully, much of these regulations will be done through financial incentives. The state will control the most important mechanisms of financing education. Where financial incentives are not likely to work, they may be augmented by a legal mandate for non-discrimination. The Federal Reserve keeps watch over the economy, and uses its power to intervene in the economy using a few very important financial mechanisms. Similarly, an independent board of educational technocrats should monitor the actual flow of finances in learning, and react to any exclusionary trends by raising pay for targeted groups. One can also imagine algorithms helping to automate such regulation. *** There is no way of predicting how a new organization of subsidized learning may play out on a large scale. It is not my intention to predict every little detail. I argue for a change to the economic rules of learning. If we start paying students to learn, they will determine how and in which form they will seek help. Economic power should be transferred to learners and their parents, with the state playing an active role in ensuring the equity of educational outcomes.
NOTES
1

Illich, Ivan, De-Schooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). He thought teaching can be paid for from something like medical insurance. However, he failed to see that if no incentive to learn exist, students are unlikely to want to learn. Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education School, Year 200506 (Fiscal Year 2006). National Center for Educational Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/ expenditures/findings.asp. The Swedish model, The Economist, July 14th 2008, 83.

191

CHAPTER 20.

THE EMANCIPATION OF CHILDREN

The Economics of Emancipation The idea of the emancipation of children may seem easy to accept, although it is by no means new. Nonetheless, the creation of a true learning labor market requires the political emancipation of children. In chapters 4 and 5, I have described the emergence of children as a class of bound laborers. The Creation of a true market for the labor of learning requires undoing of much of that process. Specifically, I advocate scaling down current limitations on childrens personal, property, legal, and political rights. Contemporary childhood evolved as a device to ensure the uninterrupted supply of childrens free labor. To create a true labor market for learning, many legal, cultural, and economic restrictions must be lifted. Children are deemed immature and unable to make good decisions, because we put them in a position of secondclass citizens, utterly dependent on parental and state authority. We literally train them to be helpless, and then limit their rights to justify the helplessness. If they were suddenly immersed in a situation with a free labor market, they may not make rational choices. To make more or less rational choices, they would need to be free economic and political agents, cognizant of their own interests. However, such agency is denied to them precisely because they are immature and cannot chose wisely. Childrens rights are a well-debated issue, 1 and I will refrain from reviewing the discussion (my position coincides with the liberationist camp). 2 My concern is not with childrens rights as such, but with their economic implications. We should emancipate children to the extent possible, if we want the labor markets to work properly. If extra-economic coercion is left in place, markets will be distorted, inefficient, and in need of excessive regulation. Historical records show that the abolition of American slavery and Russian serfdom both caused large economic shifts, and resulted in a series of political and cultural changes. Both caused major economic disruptions. 3 However, womens suffrage and entrance into the labor markets were connected, but not simultaneous processes. Womens emancipation was much more gradual, and did not cause major economic crises. However, the essence of the connection is the same. Lack of political and civil rights significantly affects labor markets. The case of illegal immigrants is important. Below-market wages are the result of the immigrants unequal legal status. Political inequality directly creates distortions in labor markets. But cheap undocumented labor also creates unrealistically low prices in the agriculture industry and distorts competition in other markets as well. Childrens emancipation is not only an economic, but also a moral issue. There is no ethical justification to delaying adulthood more than necessary. And any necessity for a delay must be determined in the interest and with the input of the child, not of society as a whole. A democratic society simply cannot afford

193

CHAPTER 20

continuous discrimination against its younger citizens under the pretense of it being for their own good. Declassing Children One straightforward solution is to stop treating children as a legally defined class, and design a legal and political system that treats people as individuals. This can be done initially by expanding the Mature minor doctrine 4 from healthcare decisions to all other rights. The doctrine is relatively new and has been adopted by several states relatively recently. It gives the right to minors under 18 to make important decisions about their healthcare, if they can demonstrate maturity. For example, the Arkansas statute states, any unemancipated minor of sufficient intelligence to understand and appreciate the consequences of the proposed surgical or medical treatment or procedures, for himself [may offer consent]. 5 It is not immediately clear why the same standard may not be applied to the right to own property, to choose education, to vote, and everything else adults get just by virtue of their age. In the longer term, the change I advocate is similar to that of womens emancipation. In democratic countries, women are no longer treated as a class of citizens for most purposes. Although remnants of such treatment exist (in military service or for the purposes of retirement age, for example), in most affairs women are treated on individual merit or need, not as members of a special category. Similarly, instead of simply assuming maturity levels and the ability to judge, we should be able to establish simple tests (judicial or administrative) that qualify a person to own property, to spend her own money, to live alone, to drive, to vote, to work, etc. If we did that, plenty of adults would lose the rights they currently have merely because of their age, and many but not all children would gain more rights much earlier than they are allowed to do currently. For example, such a common privilege as a drivers license is based on the high probability of younger people being less careful, or less able to drive than adults. It is done because we dont have a good way of measuring judgment or level of risktaking. So we take a guess. However, the same strategy should bar men of 16-20 from driving, for their fatality rates are double of those for women of the same age. 6 This does seem untenable, because group treatment for adults seems discriminatory and unfair. But if we can measure the fitness to drive (and it can include certain height, strength, and body mass), why set any age limits at all? It is unlikely that 7-year olds will come in droves to take their driving test. It is likely many 14-year olds will, but it is also very likely that most of them will fail. It is also possible some individuals wont be able to pass the tests until they are 25, which is just fine. Others will never be able to drive, because they present a clearly defined danger to themselves and others. The legal doctrine of the age of majority is already split into many subcategories. Any line,writes Howard Cohen,which uses age to distinguish people with rights from people without can be shown to be arbitrary. 7 Marriage, alcohol consumption, military service, voting rights, owning property, making
194

THE EMANCIPATION OF CHILDREN

decisions about ones body, legal liabilityall of these are legal at different ages; those may coincide in one country and be different in another. In case of the mentally ill, the burden of proof is on the party that seeks to deny them rights. In case of minors, legal emancipation is possible, but the burden of proof is on the minors seeking emancipation. There does not seem to be any rational, scientific grounds for such a disparity. What I am suggesting is abolishing the very notion of the age of majority, and turning most of legal and property rights into conditional rights. 8 I fully realize that this has some bad historical connotations. Literacy and property censuses were widely used in the past to disenfranchise voters. Perhaps a compromise can work for voting rights. All adult citizens should be granted the right to vote, but this would not prevent us from allowing children to obtain the same right earlier, if they can demonstrate reasonable competence. In other words, an extension of the mature minor doctrine into voting rights can be sufficient. In most other cases, making some every-day rights conditional would allow minors to achieve segments of adulthood at different times. Rights For monetary incentives to work, children should be able to spend their own money. And this should include some current consumption, not only delayed consumption in terms of savings or investments. It would be fascinating to watch how families will adjust to having a wage earner as young as 6 years old. What kinds of negotiations and spending/saving patterns emerge? One would guess that it wont hurt children to have a little more power and little more say in family affairs. When women entered the labor market, it did not hurt their standing within family hierarchy; rather, it empowered them to demand more respect and to break financial dependency on their husbands and fathers. Having The ability to work empowered women to stand up against abuse, and gain equal status with men. Something similar could happen with children. Of course, we should still ease children into becoming wage-earners. For example, from birth until age 8 or so, parents or guardians should have the right to spend or invest the money on behalf of the child. From age 8 to age 14, both the child and her parents need to agree on how the money is spent or invested. In the case of disagreement, funds are automatically invested in a college or trust fund. After the age of 14, the child reaches the age of majority in financial and property matters. One may ask, what happens if many children refuse to learn, and instead waste their time doing nothing? That scenario ignores the economic dependence of young children on their parents. Parents of all classes are unlikely to continue providing food and shelter to children who do nothing. They will apply all sorts of pressures to encourage children to learn, including limiting or blocking childrens access to their own money. In a way, parents also get more control over childrens educational choices. This is especially important for poor families. If a middle class parent always has some leverage over their children (take away the car keys,
195

CHAPTER 20

or cut the allowance), poor parents do not, and often have no real power over their children other than the physical force. The age of majority is unreasonably high, because adolescents have become unable to support themselves through employment. However, there is no practical reason for some adolescents not to strike out on their own much earlier in life. One may object that this can increase homelessness or street crime. The opposite is likely to happen. Teenage homelessness happens because adolescents have no legal means of supporting themselves, nor can they rent a place to live (most landlords will not sign a lease with a minor, because it is likely to be unenforceable in court). The federally funded National Runaway Switchboard reports that between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away in a year, 47% of runaway/homeless youth indicated that conflict between them and their parent or guardian was a major problem. 9 Most of the rest have a conflict with peers or school authorities. 32% of them attempt suicide at some point in their lives. This is a tremendous price to pay for keeping a lot of teenagers out of the labor and housing markets. Giving adolescents a chance to earn money by studying or working will relieve much economic pressure from them, and benefit the economy. The most important legal change would be the elimination of child labor laws. The context in which they were adopted was vastly different from the present. In the mid-19th century, many occupations were dangerous for children. Most importantly, child wages were a very strong incentive for parents to keep them out of schools. At the same time, taxpayers certainly could not afford to pay children to go to school. In effect, child labor laws restricted competition for child labor, so that children would have no choice but to attend schools. However, this initial rationale was obscured, and paid work by children has become morally objectionable. We do spend vast amounts of money on public education, and labor safety regulations are firmly in place. There is no danger that students will abandon education en masse, and become agricultural workers.
CODA

In my utopia, an office building contains people of all ages, young and old. A 12-year old shares an office with a 70-year old; both will be working, but also moonlighting on their learning. The 12-year old will learn for money, for fun, and for the future, all at the same time. The 70-year old will probably do it mostly for fun. People will be free to enter higher education or labor force at any age, and switch places with each other. Their lives will not be locked in one predictable sequence of school, college, work, and retirement. They will be firmly in charge of their own learning, and will get paid for learning the boring and difficult stuff that the society wants them to know. This is a well educated society, which spends significant resources on affording all its citizens the opportunity to learn. It will reward talented students, and talented teachers, who engage each other in a multitude of different ways. In every case, the student will come and ask a teacher for help. This society will use less coercion,

196

THE EMANCIPATION OF CHILDREN

and tend to see all of its citizens as endowed with rights, regardless of race, gender, class, or age. It will have 12 year old senators and 70 year old students.
NOTES
1

7 8 9

See an overview in Childrens Rights, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University, 2006), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-children/#3. Richard Farson, Birthrights (London: Collier Macmillan, 1974); John C. Holt, Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); Howard Cohen, Equal Rights for Children (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, and Co., 1980). F. Cooper, T.C. Holt, R.J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemansipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Jeffrey Blustein, Carol Levine, and Nancy N. Dubler, The Adolescent Alone: Decision Making in Health Care in the United States (Caambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 214. Cited in J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, Sarah Weddington, Who Decides?: The Abortion Rights of Teens (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 57. Michael R. Elliott, Jean T. Shope, E. Raghunathan, and Patricia F. Waller, Gender Differences Among Young Drivers in the Association Between High-Risk Driving and Substance Use/Environmental Influences, Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 67/2 (2006): 252260. Howard Cohen, Equal Rights for Children (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, and Co., 1980), 48. Peter Jones, Rights (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1994), 194195. The National Runaway Switchboard Annual Report (2006), http://www.1800runaway.org/ downloads/pdfs/NRSAnnualReport_06.pdf.

197

INDEX

A Academic honesty, 15 Accountability, xi, 15, 47, 54, 77, 121, 122, 128, 129, 130, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 165, 173 Accountability, managerial, 119 Administrative production, 65 Adult authority, 32, 33, 59, 161, 164 Age of majority, 194, 195, 196 Alienation, 21, 85, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 164 Altriciality, 6 Apprenticeship, 8, 84 Archaic economy. See Relational economy Aris, Philippe, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38 Audit society, 119 Authentic self, 124, 126 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 17, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155 Baldrige framework, 119, 120, 130 Becker, Gary, 60, 66, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 135 Bentham, Jeremy, 123 Betts, Julian R., 105, 110 Biesta, Gert, 119, 130 Big Man, 73 Blatt, Moshe, 157 Bolsa Escola, 170, 175 Borges, George Luis, 124 Bound labor, 36, 37, 118, 193 Bounded rationality, 108 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 31, 34, 38, 100, 101, 103 Bowles, Samuel, 111, 118 Brain gain hypothesis, 116 Bruner, Jerome, 7, 10 C Care, pedagogy of, 159, 161 Chayanov, Alexander, ix, 69, 71, 72, 75, 79, 169 Child labor, 39, 40, 41, 42, 182, 196 Chore Schoolwork as, 59, 64 Classic schooling, 8, 9, 69, 78, 148 Coercion, 16, 28, 49, 93, 107, 117, 123, 126, 136 Collective misrecognition, 14 Communists, 72, 97 Complicity, relationship of, 101 199

Compulsory education, 33, 39, 40, 42, 72, 100, 112, 116, 142 Consumer good Schooling as, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112 Continuous improvement, 127 Cooper, Harris, 70 Countergift, 14 Curiosity, 6, 7, 8, 26, 57, 94, 95, 98, 147 Curriculum tax, 182 Customary rate of labor, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 135 D Darling-Hammon, Linda, 141 Darwin, Charles, 127 Deci, Edward, 93, 98, 102 Declassing of children, 194 Deming, W. Edwards, 119, 121, 130, 135 Derrida, Jaques, 146 Dewey, John, 5, 10, 19, 20, 23, 29, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103, 135, 138, 160, 165, 184 Domestic labor, 36, 54, 60 Domestic mode of production, 75, 76 Dominance, 4, 10, 14 Domination, 4, 8, 32, 35, 37, 62, 120, 121, 126 Drudgery, 35, 71, 73, 74 Durkheim, Emile, 157 E Economic anthropology, 60, 61, 63, 66, 71, 135 Economic motivation, 58, 60, 130, 135 Education Definition, 26 Educational achievement, 110 Educational exceptionalism, xi, 84, 89, 96, 171 Educational reform, 53, 119, 121, 126, 170 Edutainment, 96 Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 121, 131 Emancipation of children, 193 Empowerment, 121, 122, 123 Entertainment, 26, 57, 58, 62, 65, 69, 76, 95, 96, 107, 139, 148 Era of Excellence in educational reforming, ix, 119, 120, 122, 128, 130, 141, 145 Error Role of in social sciences, 12 Event deficiency, 152, 153 Eventness of Being, 145, 149, 151, 152, 153 Extra-economic coercion, xi, 31, 36, 118, 193 Extrinsic motivation, 96, 100 Repression of, 100 Extrinsic rewards, 93, 94, 96, 97, 101

INDEX F Fagina, 65, 66 Fear, 5, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 59 As commodity, 50 Fear manufacturing, 54, 55 Fischer, Stanley, 50 Foucault, Michel, 31, 119, 120, 121, 123, 126, 128, 131, 163, 164, 165 Free labor, 16, 36, 72, 79, 110, 193 Freinet, Clestin, 164 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 11, 12, 13 Friedman, Milton, 49, 60, 105, 110, 135, 178, 186 Fryer, Roland G., 171, 172 Fukuyama, Francis, 128, 131 G Gift, 7, 11, 14, 24, 28, 61, 67, 98, 110, 140 Gifts of childhood, 6, 7, 8 Gilligan, Carol, 158, 159, 165 Gintis, Herbert, 111, 118 Goodlad, John, 121 Google, 184 Gould, Stephen James, 127, 131 H Habitus, 100, 101 Hacienda economy, 110 Halperin, Rhoda, 65, 67 Henry, Sue Ellen, 158, 165 Higgins, Ann, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 166 Homo floresiensis, 3 Homogeneous time, 127 Householding, 61, 62 Housewives, 15 Hublin, Jean-Jaques, 3, 4, 10 Human capital theory, 22, 42, 60, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 135 Human Capital theory, ix, xi, 58, 66, 101, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118 Key error, 114 Hybrid institution, 138 I Illich, Ivan, 187, 191 Immaturity of children, 10, 11, 32, 33, 72, 106, 107, 110, 116, 174 Innate interest, 98 Innocence, 32, 33 Instructional embellishments, 95 Interest transfer, 86 Intergenerational justice, 42 Intrinsic motivation, xi, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 Shortage, 101 Investment and labor, 114 J Joffe, Tracy, 6 Just Community Approach, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165 Juvenile justice system, 40, 41 K Karakovsky, Vladimir A., 137, 153, 154 Kerr, Donna H., 160, 165 Kliebard, Herbert M., 177, 186 Knowledge consumption, 25 Four types, 26 Knowledge production, 25, 26 Kohl, Herbert, 47, 48, 52, 55 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 Kohn, Alfie, 70, 79, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 135, 171 Korczak, Janusz, 164 Kula trade, 61 Kunskapsskolan, 189 L Labor market, 24, 36, 72, 79, 97, 108, 114, 115, 116, 117, 169, 182, 193 Labor power, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 40, 48, 53, 114, 115 Labor tax, 72, 74, 109, 110, 117 Learning activity, 24, 25, 26, 39, 58 Learning labor As taxation, 16, 72, 107, 108 Learning motivation, xi, 20, 21, 57, 58, 85, 93, 99, 101, 128, 139, 154 Leontyev, Alexei N., 19 Lepper, Mark, 93, 95, 102 Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 14 Lived truth of practices, 16 M Makarenko, Anton S., 163, 166 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 61, 63, 66 Mann, Horace, 89, 184, 185 Market economy, 15, 60, 63, 76, 78, 97, 106, 107, 115, 130, 135 Marx, Karl, 11, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 36, 48, 50, 54, 55, 85, 89, 92, 114, 135, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 155 Mass schooling, 9, 16, 41, 69, 75, 76, 78, 135 Mature minor doctrine, 194, 195 Mauss, Marcel, 14, 62, 67 Meier, Deborah, 121 Mellars, Paul, 3, 10 Merit pay, 96, 97 Meritocracy, 37, 52, 53 Mincerian equation, 115 Modern humans (Homo Sapiens), 3, 4, 7, 10

200

INDEX Montessori, Maria, 19 Mosher, Ralph, 160 Motive as a story, 99 Mousse, Marcel, 61 Mutual obligation, 62, 65 N Nation at Risk, 77 Natural exchange, 136 Neanderthals, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 No Child Left Behind, 53, 54, 119, 130, 170 Nodding, Nel, 160 Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, 49 Non-economic thinking, 63, 84, 89, 130 Non-learning, 47, 48, 52, 53 Normality, 57 O On-task time, 35, 70, 72, 73, 137 Opportunity cost, 113, 115 P Pacheco, Arturo, 145, 155 Panopticon, ix, 120, 121, 123 Participative action, 153 Participative thinking, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154 Paternalism, 43 Pay-to-learn, 175, 187, 188, 190 Peer authority, 161 Peer culture, 91, 138, 139, 164, 165 Perpetuation of change, 122, 127 Piaget, Jean, 11, 33, 157 Polanyi, Karl, 61, 62, 66 Positional good, 69 Power relations, 31, 120, 124, 126, 127, 128 Power rituals, 126 Power, Clark, 157, 160 Private investment, 112, 114 PROGRESA, 170, 175 Progressive education, 6, 23, 26, 88, 89, 92 Progressives, 6, 19, 23, 26, 88, 89, 92, 95, 96, 135, 140 Public schooling, 51, 52, 54, 69, 90, 91, 92, 109, 110, 127, 129, 136, 145, 173, 178, 187 Punishment, 32, 34, 59, 115, 120 R Racism, 70, 183 Radical Solution, 135, 175, 187, 190 Rational choice, 72, 108, 109 Rawls, John, 42, 44 Reciprocity, 14, 42, 61, 62, 63, 64, 73, 74, 98, 136, 138 Redistribution, 61, 62, 64, 74 Relational capital, 87, 88, 136, 137, 140 Relational economy, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69, 75, 76, 77, 98, 130, 135, 136, 138, 140, 165, 169 Four principles, 62 Resistance, 15, 47, 48, 52, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 89, 94, 127, 128 Return on educational investment, 101, 109, 115 Ritual writing, 122, 123, 125, 126 Robbers Cave Experiment, 153, 155 S Sahlins, Marshal, 17, 72, 75, 76, 79, 169, 175 Sahlins, Marshall, 71, 76 School choice theory, ix, 54, 60, 105, 109, 110, 112, 119, 140 School prom Example of redistribution, 64 School reform, 40, 53, 57, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 79, 121, 128, 153 Schoolwork, 11, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 136, 138, 147, 149 Schultz, Theodore, 112, 118, 175 Screening theory, 111 Self-reforming, 119, 121, 122, 127, 128 Self-regarding duty, 42, 43 Self-serving labor, 59 Sensible Solution, 135, 138, 157, 165, 169 Sherif, Muzafer, 153, 155 Shortage of labor, 101 Singer, Marcus G., 42 Sizer, Theodor, 121 Skinner, B.F., 99 Slavery, 35, 36, 40, 118, 142, 172, 193 Smith, Adam, 61, 62, 85 Social capital, 109, 138, 142 Social efficiency, 177, 178 Social meliorists, 177, 182 Soviet economy, 128, 129, 130 Spiro, Melford E., 163, 166 Storyline, 153, 154 Structural truth, 14, 15, 16 Student error, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 59 Surveillance, 120, 131 Symbolic capital, 15, 100, 101, 138, 140, 187 Symbolic exchanges, 14 Symbolic violence, 15, 17, 34, 35, 36, 37 T Taylor, Charles, 126, 131 Teacher authority, 64, 65, 86, 88, 138 Teacher turnover, 141, 188 Teachers truth, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17 Teaching Definition, 5 Thorndike, Edward, L., 177

201

INDEX Threshold effect, 171 Token economies, 97, 171 Total Quality Management, 119, 120, 127 Traditional schools, 161, 189 Transfer of interest, 86, 87, 88 Trobriand Islands, 61 Trotsky, Lev, 109 U Unconscious, 13, 43 Underperformance of students, 69, 70, 71, 72 Uneventfulness, 152 Unofficial conscious, 13 Use-value, 19, 27, 61, 125 Utopianism, 85, 89, 92, 93, 97, 98, 136, 147, 164, 196 V Vegetative reproduction of practice, 157, 165 Voloinov, Valentin, 12, 13, 14, 17, 103 Vouchers, xi, 105, 109, 110, 135, 178, 189, 190 Vygotsky, Lev, 19, 165 W Wastebasket economy, 19, 20, 21, 86, 147, 152, 154 Westbrook, Robert, 89, 92 Woolf, Virginia, 16

202