Social Purpose and Schooling

Alternatives, Agendas and Issues

Jerry Paquette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351846936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1991, this work critically analyses the competing claims about alternative arrangements for schooling. It does so in light of major popularly understood agendas for social and political purpose, and of the troubled and much less clearly understood assumptions and issues behind them. The book examines closely four generic types of arrangements for schooling in light of a comprehensive framework for understanding the publicness or privateness of schools, and the relationships between social and educational purpose.

The book poses key questions about the meaning and purpose of schooling in the rapidly evolving social, demographic and technological realities of the time. It also probes fundamental assumptions, values and beliefs behind educational and public policy-making. In doing so, it offers a way to make sense of unorthodox arrangements for the provision and funding of schools.

Chapter 1

Education and Social Purpose:
The Front Line of Ideology

How to find direction and set a course as societies in a maelstrom of social, economic and technical change is the central problem confronting most peoples and their governments in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In the face of vast newfound technical capabilities — and problems — a volatile combination of boundless optimism and fatalistic determinism shapes and limits discussion of fundamental issues of social purpose. A profoundly mixed reaction to the brave new world in which we live kindles both dialogue and confrontation over what we wish to become as peoples and nations. We cannot judge with certainty, of course, whether we have more or less power over our social destiny than previous generations since much of the evidence lies in history yet to be enacted. Beyond the problem of not knowing what has not yet happened, however, lies the inherent ambiguity of the word power, an ambiguity which will continue to vex the issue of how much control we really do have over our collective fate even when and if a definitive history of our era is written.

Rightly or wrongly schools are generally viewed, even by their worst critics, as important instruments of social policy. More than that, they are highly visible, and highly costly, symbols of official policy aimed at shaping who we are and become as nations and peoples. In fact, the vision of schools shared by many, if not most, stakeholders in education is strikingly reminiscent of the view Catholics and orthodox Christians have long had of their sacraments, that is, things which bring about what they symbolize. Certainly the idea that schools affect learning and shape values has not been undisputed, but the persistence of public support for all forms of schooling strongly suggests that most people believe schools are important elements affecting the knowledge, values and culture of the young — as well as their life chances.

If schools powerfully symbolize and shape knowledge and values, if they are in that respect a sort of secular, social sacrament (whatever the moral or religious content of the education they provide) — or even if people only believe they are — then schools unavoidably become a natural focus for all the energies of competing cultures and belief-systems seeking control of the minds and allegiance of the young. Perennial contests, struggles and battles to gain control of school curricula, and endless debate over what knowledge is of the most worth are fuelled by faith in the efficacy of schools as transmitters, however imperfect or perverse, of knowledge and culture.

Control over both the form of schooling and its academic and moral content is the symbolic battlefield whereon ideas, beliefs and cultures struggle perpetually for more control of what societies will be like in the future. Struggle for control over schooling thus becomes the ultimate public-policy crucible in which our vision of social purpose is tried. For that reason, the major ideologies vying for control over the way people think about social and economic relationships have inescapable counterparts in schooling content and arrangements.

Not long ago, the rationale for a predominately publicly-funded, operated and controlled schooling arena seemed fairly obvious. Schools were instruments of social policies aimed at economic stability and growth, and at equalizing educational opportunity and life-chances. They were needed engines of assimilation and moral indoctrination into majority cultures, languages and ethical standards. Today, all of these assumptions about the purposes of schooling are, at the very least, contested. That they are so is the result of many changes, but above all perhaps, the result of renewed debate about social purpose and about the assumptions which undergird the major agendas of social purpose in modern societies. Interest in such questions is no longer limited to academics and political ideologues. Parents and non-parents alike seem less disposed than in the past to accept uncritically the assumptions and claims which underpin monolithic state-sponsored education.

Current widespread scepticism, soul-searching and experimentation in educational and social policy is almost certainly related to profound changes in the way we live and work as well as in our cultural and linguistic make-up. Urgently needed are:

1  a framework for understanding, comparing and contrasting the driving agendas of social purpose, that is, our most generic and widely shared ideas about the good life in the best society practically possible;

2  a framework for making sense of how schooling is and can be orchestrated in different conditions and times; and

3  an exploration of potential relationships between these two frameworks.

Only with such tools can one hope to make sense of the dizzying array of arrangements for schooling which exist in various countries and regions. Only with such tools can one organize useful research into the effects of different approaches to schooling in different contexts. What follows is an attempt to lay the foundations for a workable and useful way of making sense of the burgeoning diversity in schooling arrangements across the world, and, perhaps more importantly, to link different approaches to schooling to different ideas about social purpose. Finally, none of this will be very useful to anyone unless such frameworks and linkages take into account the enormous social, cultural, life-style and work-style changes which confront and challenge each of us in almost every aspect of our daily lives. Completing the circle of social and educational policy, then, requires major attention to change and to the issues it raises, and that examination of change is the final, major agenda of this book, and the main business of chapters 3 and 8.

Chapter 2

Ideologies and the Agenda of Schooling

What are the central agendas of social purpose which contend for the power to shape our society? What are their counterparts in educational purpose? What alternatives do these agendas suggest in how we sponsor, organize and judge learning? Finally, what issues do these alternatives raise for our schools and for the society which creates, legitimates and empowers them?

We live in a world in which people hold fundamentally different visions of what human societies ought to accomplish for their members (as well as of what they do in fact accomplish). Proponents of differing perspectives vie for acceptance of their particular vision and for the power to direct social policy according to the assumptions behind that vision. In the end, we can neither solve nor ignore the dilemma of social function. In an existence increasingly choreographed by large, private and public organizations, we need — perhaps desperately — to know what such organizations do both for us and to us. Yet, an apparently intractable irony of the human condition is that, in the absence of agreement about some ‘right’ model of human organizations and human society generally, we cannot reach consensus about the effects of organizations and policies. Even as we hone, diversify and redouble research efforts to evaluate the impacts of organizations and of public social policy, we are condemned (or perhaps privileged, if we value diversity) to fundamental and ongoing disagreement about what our institutions do to and for people. This inevitable disagreement follows directly from the differing values and assumptions which underpin alternative models of human organizations and society.

Our assumptions about social reality shape the questions we ask about it. Those who consider human society a battleground among contending interest groups pitted against one another in the social equivalent of gladiatorial combat, will ask questions very different, for instance, from the questions asked by those who think of human society as a well-oiled machine. Moreover, beyond, in the first place, limiting the scope of inquiry into human institutions, beliefs about the nature of human society inevitably shape the interpretation of data in social inquiry.

In the end, research data never speak for themselves. They must always be interpreted and we have only our own preferred model of human society, and the values and beliefs behind our model, to shape that interpretation. What the data produced by a study of social or educational policy or practice means will ultimately depend on beliefs and assumptions used in their interpretation — and hence the same data will mean many things to many people. In educational as in sociological research generally, the tradition of ‘reinterpreting’ a researcher’s results with different assumptions is now well established. Only the naive now believe that research can lead to clarity, certainty and consensus about the effects on people of institutions and social policies.

Not being able to prove the correctness of one’s favourite interpretation of social reality to proponents of competing views, however, rarely inhibits either fervour of belief or willingness to prescribe public policy on the basis of that belief. Those who believe society is like a machine remain committed to remedying social problems through ‘structural change’, while those who view society as a battlefield of the classes, are quick to suggest stratagems for winning the battle. How our institutional arrangements, as such, affect people is ultimately unknowable. Indeed, such arrangements may not exist at all in any meaningful way apart from the action and beliefs of persons who work in and are touched by them.

My purpose here, however, is not to discuss the effects of human institutions and how we can come to know these effects. Neither is it to minimize the importance of working to understand how people affect other people in institutions and in society at large. Rather I want to stake out clearly the scope of the discussion that follows, which has to do with value commitments that lead to agendas of social purpose that in turn lead to particular approaches to public policy, including educational policy. Convictions about the nature of human society and human institutions shape how we understand them and how we inquire into the action of persons within them. The same convictions shape our prescriptions for what society ought to do for its various members, and how it can best do this.

Coherent agendas of social purpose stem from commitments to belief systems that have some degree of internal consistency — at least in the minds of adherents and advocates. Such belief systems are, in effect, the ideologies behind the major policy platforms of interest groups and, although often in a much less pure sense, behind the platforms of major political parties. Of course, national political parties must frequently ‘compromise their principles’ in order to attract a broad enough constituency to get members elected to regional and national governments. Nonetheless, an orientation toward one or another fundamental agenda of social purpose is usually discernible, however tarnished and compromised a party’s commitment to it may be when judged on the basis of its legislative record. In the absence of any minimal commitment to a social ideology, a political party becomes ‘the party of the center’ or, less charitably, the party of opportunism.

Governments collect and spend taxes. Whatever specific arrangements may exist for providing particular services and regulating particular activities, every government faces the quintessentially political problem of allocating and distributing scarce and contested public resources. One can justify extracting and reallocating resources that would otherwise be consumed in the private sector only on the basis of overarching social purpose,¹ the ‘public good’ used generically as the justification for public sector activity. Thus every government is confronted with justifying public expenditures on the basis of one or more elements in the agenda of social purpose to which its leaders formally subscribe. In other words, no government can avoid both providing and defending a rationale for its expenditures.

In addition to the ambiguities, complications and compromises that occur as law-makers at any particular level seek to meld varying agendas of social purpose into coherent law and policy, another set of compromises is enforced by the intricate financial and policy webs which enmesh different levels of government with one another and which correspondingly decrease their freedom to act unilaterally. In such a world — the world of democratic political process — the wonder is not that governments are frequently perceived as vacillating and ineffective, but that any concerted effort of government ever occurs at all.

While pure ideological commitments are largely the prerogative — or folly — of newly formed interest groups or of fanatic, and most often marginal, fringe groups, general value sets do tend to shape the agenda of social purpose which an interest group, party or government champions. What, then, are the major competing agendas of social purpose vying for the allegiance of voters in democratic nations today? To what extent and in what ways have these agendas been affected by the technology explosion and demographic changes of the last decade? Finally, to what extent and in what ways are these agendas reflected in schooling and in the provisions people and governments make for it? Such questions are crucial for our futures as peoples and nations. Unfortunately, they are far too often answered in myopic and sterile conceptual frameworks that isolate education from wider social-policy issues.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism

Both the appeal of and the challenge to free-market capitalism have rarely been greater than at present. On the one hand, the arguments of economic efficiency advanced by supply-side economists from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman² seem to have acquired a new popularity and urgency in the post energy-crisis technological revolution. Business, emerging leaner and meaner from the rigors of the energy crunch and the recession which followed, has found that surviving in the world of the eighties and nineties is only possible if one keeps at the cutting edge of available technologies. And keeping on that edge inevitably means substituting technology for labour wherever possible — and increasingly that is almost everywhere.

On the other hand, the perception of a growing gap between rich and poor, has galvanized the efforts of economic interventionists to demand social policy aimed at ameliorating the circumstances of both the traditional poor and the new poor created by the micro-chip. Renewed concern for social justice in the face of massive substitution of technology for human labour leads opponents of the unfettered free-market ethos to stake out their agenda of social purpose around state intervention and control.

Social-purpose agendas are founded on beliefs about the nature of human society and the relationships within it; in fact, political statements of social purpose are really manifestos fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Glossary of Terms
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Education and Social Purpose: The Front Line of Ideology
• Chapter 2 Ideologies and the Agenda of Schooling
• Chapter 3 Changing the Rules of the Social Policy Game
• Chapter 4 Frameworks for Understanding
• Chapter 5 Options and Alternatives
• Chapter 6 The English Experiment: Privatize and Standardize
• Chapter 7 Issues in Conflict: The Principal Arguments
• Chapter 8 The Pluralist Agenda and Education
• Chapter 9 The Schooling Crucible: Education and Our Future
• Bibliography
• Index