Chapter Nine The Cult of
Scientific Management
On the night of June 9, 1834, a group of
prominent men "chiefly engaged in commerce" gathered privately in a Boston drawing room to discuss a
scheme of universal schooling.
Secretary of this meeting was William Ellery Channing,
Horace Mann 's
own minister as well as an
international figure and the leading Unitarian of his day. The location of
the meeting house is not entered
in the minutes nor are the names of the assembly 's participants apart from Channing. Even
though the literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98 percent, and in neighboring Connecticut, 99.8 percent, the
assembled businessmen agreed the
present system of schooling allowed too much to depend upon chance. It encouraged more entrepreneurial
exuberance than the social system could bear. — The minutes of this meeting are Appleton Papers
collection, Massachusetts Historical Society
110. Frederick W.
Taylor
The first man on record to perceive how much
additional production could be extracted
from close regulation of labor was Frederick Winslow Taylor, son of a
wealthy Philadelphia lawyer.
"What I demand of the worker," Taylor said, "is not to produce
any longer by his own initiative,
but to execute punctiliously the orders given down to their minutest details."
The Taylors, a
prominent Quaker family from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had taken Freddy to Europe for three years from
1869 to 1872, where he was attending an
aristocratic German academy when von Moltke's Prussian blitzkrieg
culminated in the French disaster at
Sedan and a German Empire was finally proclaimed, ending a thousand years of disunion. Prussian schooling
was the widely credited forge which made those miracles possible. The jubilation which spread through
Germany underlined a presumably
fatal difference between political systems which disciplined with ruthless efficiency, like Prussia's socialist
paradise, and those devoted to whimsy and luxury, like France's. The lesson wasn't lost on
little Fred.
Near the conclusion
of his Principles of Scientific Management '(1911), published thirty- nine years later, Taylor summarized the
new managerial discipline as follows:
1 . A regimen of science, not rule of
thumb.
2. An emphasis on
harmony, not the discord of competition.
3. An insistence on
cooperation, not individualism.
4. A fixation on
maximum output.
5. The development of
each man to his greatest productivity.
Taylor's biographers,
Wrege and Greenwood, wrote:
He left us a great
legacy. Frederick Taylor advanced a total system of management, one which he built from pieces taken from
numerous others whom he rarely would credit.... His genius lies in being a missionary.
After Taylor's death
in 1915, the Frederick W. Taylor Cooperators were formed to project his Scientific Management
movement into the future. Frank Copley called Taylor "a man whose heart was aflame with missionary
zeal." Much about this Quaker-turned- Unitarian, who married into an Arbella-descended Puritan
family before finally becoming an
Episcopalian, bears decisively on the shape schooling took in this country.
Wrege and Greenwood describe him
as: "often arrogant, somewhat caustic, and inflexible in how his system should be implemented.... Taylor
was cerebral; like a machine he was polished and he was also intellectual. ...Taylor's brilliant reasoning
was marred when he attempted to
articulate it, for his delivery was often demeaning, even derogatory at
times."
Frank Gilbreth's 2
Motion Study says:
It is the never
ceasing marvel concerning this man that age cannot wither nor custom stale his work. After many a weary
day's study the investigator awakes from a dream of greatness to find he has only worked out a new proof for a
problem Taylor has already solved.
Time study, the instruction card, functional foremanship, the differential
rate piece method of compensation,
and numerous other scientifically derived methods of decreasing costs and increasing output and wages — these are
by no means his only contributions
to standardizing the trades.
To fully grasp the
effect of Taylor's industrial evangelism on American national schooling, you need to listen to him
play teacher in his own words to Schmidt at Bethlehem Steel in the 1890s:
Now Schmidt, you are a first-class
pig-iron handler and know your business well. You have been handling at a rate of twelve and a half tons per
day. I have given considerable
study to handling pig-iron, and feel you could handle forty-seven tons
of pig-iron per day if you really
tried instead of twelve and a half tons. Skeptical but willing, Schmidt started to work, and
all day long, and at regular intervals,
was told by the men who stood over him with a watch, "now pick up a
pig and walk. Now sit down and
rest. Now walk — rest," etc. He worked when he was told to work, and rested when he was told to rest, and at
half past five in the afternoon had his forty-seven tons loaded on the car.
The incident
described above is, incidentally, a fabrication. There was no Schmidt
except in Taylor's mind, just as
there was no close observation of Prussian schools by Mann. Below, he testifies before Congress in
1912:
There is a right way
of forcing the shovel into materials and many wrong ways. Now, the way to shovel refractory stuff is to
press the forearm hard against the upper part of the right leg just below the thigh, like this, take the end of
the shovel in your right hand and
when you push the shovel into the pile, instead of using the muscular
effort of the arms, which is
tiresome, throw the weight of your body on the shovel like this; that pushes
your shovel in the pile with
hardly any exertion and without tiring the arms in the least.
Harlow Person called
Taylor's approach to the simplest tasks of working life "a meaningful and fundamental break with
the past." Scientific management, or Taylorism, had four characteristics designed to make the worker
"an interchangeable part of an
interchangeable machine making interchangeable parts."
Since each quickly
found its analogue in scientific schooling, let me show them to you: 3 1) A mechanically controlled work pace;
2) The repetition of simple motions; 3) Tools and technique selected for the worker; 4) Only superficial
attention is asked from the
worker, just enough to keep up with the moving line. The connection of
all to school procedure is
apparent.
"In the
past," Taylor wrote, "Man has been first. In the future the system
must be first." It was not
sufficient to have physical movements standardized; the standardized
worker "must be happy in his
work," too, therefore his thought processes also must be standardized. 4 Scientific management
was applied wholesale in American industry in the decade after 1910. It spread quickly to schools.
In the preface to the
classic study on the effects of scientific management on schooling in America, Education and the Cult of
Efficiency, 5 Raymond Callahan explains that when he set out to write, his intent was to explore the origin and
development of business values in
educational administration, an occurrence he tracks to about 1900. Callahan
wanted to know why school
administrators had adopted business practices and management parameters of assessment when
"Education is not a business. The school is not a factory."
Could the inappropriate procedure be
explained simply by a familiar process in which ideas and values flow from high-status groups to those of
lesser distinction? As Callahan
put it, "It does not take profound knowledge of American education
to know that educators are, and
have been, a relatively low-status, low-power group." But the degree of intellectual domination shocked him:
What was unexpected was the extent, not
only of the power of business-industrial groups, but of the strength of the business ideology... and the
extreme weakness and vulnerability
of school administrators. I had expected more professional autonomy and
I was completely unprepared for
the extent and degree of capitulation by administrators to whatever demands were made upon them. I
was surprised and then dismayed to learn
how many decisions they made or were forced to make, not on educational
grounds, but as a means of
appeasing their critics in order to maintain their positions in the
school, [emphasis added]
1. The
actual term "scientific management" was created by famous lawyer
Louis Brandeis in 1910 for the Interstate Commerce Commission rate hearings. Brandeis understood
thoroughly how a clever phrase could control public imagination.
2. Gilbreth,
the man who made the term "industrial engineering" familiar to the
public, was a devotee ofTaylorism. His daughter wrote a best seller about the Gilbreth home, Cheaper
By The Dozen, in which her father's penchant for refining work processes is
recalled. Behind his back, Taylor
ran Gilbreth down as a "fakir."
3. List
adapted from Melvin Kranzberg and Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow.
4. Taylor was no garden-variety fanatic. He
won the national doubles tennis title in 1881 with a racket of his own design,
and pioneered slip-on shoes (to
save time, of course). Being happy in your work was the demand of Bellamy and
other leading socialist thinkers, otherwise you would have to be "adjusted" (hence the expression
"well- adjusted"). Taylor concurred. 5
5.Callahan
, s analysis why schoolmen are always vulnerable is somewhat innocent and ivory
tower, and his recommendation for reform — to effectively protect their revenue stream from criticism on
the part of the public — is simply tragic; but his gathering of data is
matchless and his judgment
throughout in small matters and large is consistently illuminating.
The
Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools
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