The
Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools
In 1903, The Atlantic Monthly called for adoption of business
organization by schools and
William C. Bagley identified the ideal teacher as one who would rigidly
"hew to the line."
Bagley's" ideal school was a place strictly reduced
to rigid routine; he
repeatedly stressed in his writing
a need for "unquestioned obedience."
Before 1900, school
boards were large, clumsy organizations, with a seat available to represent every interest (they often
had thirty to fifty members). A great transformation was engineered in the first decade of the twentieth century,
however, and after 1910 they were
dominated by businessmen, lawyers, real estate men, and politicians.
Business pressure extended from
the kindergarten rung of the new school ladder all the way into the German-inspired teacher training
schools. The Atlantic Monthly approved what it had earlier asked for, saying in 1910, "Our universities
are beginning to run as business
colleges."
Successful industrial leaders were
featured regularly in the press, holding forth on their success but seldom attributing it to
book learning or scholarship. Carnegie, self-educated in libraries, appears in his writings and public appearances
as the leading school critic of
the day; echoing Carnegie, the governor of Michigan welcomed an NEA
convention to Detroit with his
injunction: "The demand of the age is for practical education." The
State Superintendent of Public
Instruction in Michigan followed the governor:
The character of our
education must change with the oncoming of the years of this highly practical age. We have educated the
mind to think and trained the vocal organs to express the thought, and we have forgotten the fact that in four
times out of five the practical man
expresses his thought by the hand rather than by mere words.
Something was
cooking. The message was clear: academic education had become a strange kind of national emergency,
just as had been prophesied by the Department of Education's Circular of Information in 1871 and 1872. Twenty
years later Francis Parker praised
the elite Committee of Ten under Harvard president Charles Eliot for
rejecting
"tracking," the practice of school class assignment based upon
future social destination. The
committee had come down squarely for common schools, an ideal that Parker
said was "worth all the pains
necessary to produce the report. The conclusion is that there should be no such thing as class
education." Parker had noticed the start of an attempt to provide common people with only partial
education. He was relieved it had been turned back. Or so he thought.
The pronouncements of
the Committee of Ten turned out to be the last gasp of the common school notion apart from Fourth
of July rhetoric. The common school was being buried by the determination of new tycoon-class businessmen
to see the demise of an older
democratic-republican order and its dangerous libertarian ideals. If
"educators," as they
were self-consciously beginning to refer to themselves, had any
misunderstanding of what was
expected by 1910, NEA meetings of that year were specifically designed to clear them up. Attendees were told the
business community had judged their work to date to be "theoretical, visionary, and
impractical":
All over the country our courses are
being attacked and the demand for revision is along the line of fitting mathematical teaching to the needs of
the masses.
In 1909, Leonard
Ayres charged in Laggards in Our Schools that although these institutions were filled with
"retarded children," school programs were, alas, "fitted..
.to the unusually bright
one." Ayres invented means for measuring the efficiency of school systems by computing the dropout/holdover
rate — a game still in evidence today. This was begging the question with a vengeance but no challenge
to this assessment was ever
raised.
Taylor's system of
management efficiency was being formally taught at Harvard and Dartmouth by 1910. In the next year,
219 articles on the subject appeared in magazines, hundreds more followed: by 1917 a bibliography of 550 school
management-science references was
available from a Boston publisher. As the steel core of school reform, scientific management enjoyed national
recognition. It was the main topic at the 1913 convention of the Department of Superintendence. Paul Hanus,
professor of education at Harvard,
launched a series of books for the World Book Company under the title
School Efficiency Series, and
famous muckraker J.M. Rice published his own Scientific Management in Education in 1913,
showing local "ward" schooling an arena of low-lives and grifters.
Frederick Taylor's influence was not
limited to America; it soon circled the globe. Principles of Scientific Management spread the efficiency
mania over Europe, Japan, and
China. A letter to the editor of The Nation in 1911 gives the flavor of
what was happening:
I am tired of
scientific management, so-called. I have heard of it from scientific managers, from university presidents,
from casual acquaintances in railway trains; I have read of it in the daily papers, the weekly paper, the
ten-cent magazine, and in the Outlook.
I have only missed its treatment by Theodore Roosevelt; but that is
probably because I
cannot keep up with his writings. For 15 years I have been a subscriber
to a magazine dealing with
engineering matters, feeling it incumbent on me to keep in touch but the touch has become a pressure, the pressure
a crushing strain, until the mass of articles on shop practice and scientific management threatened to crush
all thought out of my brain, and I
stopped my subscription.
In an article from Izvestia dated April 1918, Lenin urged the
system upon Russians.
6.
His jargon-enriched Classroom Management (1907) was reprinted thirty times in
the next 20 years asa teacher training text. Bagley's metaphors drawn from big business can fairly be said to have
controlled the pedagogical imagination for the entire twentieth century.
The Ford System And The Kronstadt
Commune
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