111.The
Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
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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