The Education Industry

W Kenneth Richmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136669330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In one sense, education was always a service industry. This book examines the quality as well as the quantity of contemporary education as it answers the following questions: Are we getting value for money? What makes a good teacher? What sort of education do we want? In the UK in the twentieth century education grew while national income did not. Britain devoted more of its resources to education than any other European nation and yet the UK had the largest proportion of children leaving school at 15 and spent more on each university place than the USA. The author argues that far too little attention was paid to cost-effectiveness analysis and planning. He examines Swedish and American examples and concludes that we must seek and employ the common features of modern management – network analysis, operational research and organizational theory. He also argues that traditional education has to come to terms with the mounting pressures of new curricula and new media.

1 · The Education Industry

Does the title cause offence? It need not and it should not. If we accept the twin truisms that education is a social process and that we live in an industrial society, why stop short of acknowledging that the two are so intimately linked as to be interdependent? From now on, surely, any raising of academic eyebrows at the verbal juxtaposition of education and industry must be reckoned outmoded or, worse, merely affected. The stock response, of course, is that a school is a school is a school, not a strip mill or a pickle factory. Broadly, the argument is that the process of learning which we call education has to do with bringing about ethical and intellectual changes in people, whereas industrial processes have to do with bringing about material changes in things – and that the differences between the two are therefore fundamental. While the philosophical standpoint of those who uphold it is too often reminiscent of Dr Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley, this argument has to be respected, if only because of the inherent dangers in any theory and practice of human engineering. To the extent that it ignores the symbiotic relationship between men and machines in modern civilization, however, it may be thought that the argument protests too much.

In any case, if we see nothing wrong in speaking of the hotel industry, say, or the tourist industry, both of which are concerned with the creature comforts of human beings, there are good reasons for insisting that it is both legitimate and necessary to think of the educational services in similar terms. There are even stronger reasons for saying that unless educationists do so the initiative, and ultimately the control of these services, may slip through their fingers and be taken over by a coalition of management consultant experts, systems analysts, electronic wizards and commercial entrepreneurs.

Of all the public services, education ranks first in importance if only by virtue of its size – the biggest and fastest-growing business of them all. Any figures for the expenditure involved in these services, currently quoted as being around the £2,000 million mark per annum, underestimate the extent of the total outlay for they refer only to the provisions made within the statutory system. It is as well to remember that the Department of Education and Science is by no means the only sector of government which has a stake in the national enterprise. At the moment, the new Industrial Training Boards, responsible to the Department of Employment and Productivity, are levying a further £130 million per annum.¹ The armed forces, needless to say, are actively engaged in their own educational and training schemes, financed by the Ministry of Defence. Add to this the money spent by the various informal agencies of mass communication – radio, TV, film, advertising, newspapers, books and the rest – and the total outlay is nothing less than prodigious.

It is pointless to retort that some of these agencies provide for vocational training, not education, and that others are purveyors of entertainment, not instruction. In so far as they are all in the information business they all have a part to play, and their impact (which is inescapable) is not to be minimized simply because it does not fall within the existing institutional framework of schools and colleges. The 11-year-old who watches an erotic TV play may not be receiving a lesson on sex education in the formal sense, but no doubt he is learning a thing or two.

What is happening is not simply that the age-old distinction between the kind of learning and instruction which takes place in the classroom and the kind which occurs naturally and incidentally in life as it is lived has become progressively blurred. It is not simply that the prestige accorded in the past to liberal–general education is being queried and that the claims on behalf of vocational-technical training are being voiced more openly. As Sir Peter Venables reminds us, the holier-than-thou attitude which proclaimed that ‘I am pure, thou art applied, he is technological’ has had its day, and so, it may be hoped, has the professional class-distinction between ‘educator’, ‘schoolmaster’, ‘teacher’, ‘instructor’ and ‘trainer’. Despite the early warnings of educational thinkers (Whitehead among others) that any antithesis between liberal and technical aims is fallacious, British education has for too long clung to its snob values and paid for it dearly as a result. The change in the climate of opinion goes deeper than this, however: what is really happening is that the hegemony of literate culture is under attack.

Quite suddenly, traditional modes of thought are being challenged as never before. As one writer puts it,

During the past few years, a notable (and some would say dangerous) change has been taking place in the way that the educational system is regarded by those on its periphery: the administrators, the economists, the politicians, and all others concerned with justifying the vast expenditure, mainly from public funds, which education now demands. Such observers – and it must be acknowledged that they are neither impartial nor disinterested–have begun to ask how far the concepts which are applied to industrial efficiency are also applicable to educational efficiency. They have begun, for example, to question whether the outputs of the educational system represent a fair return on the investment in that system, just as an accountant might ask whether the products of some manufacturing process represent an optimal use of the capital invested in that process.

Now this analogy between education and industry may well offend or appal the educationists among us: their immediate and understandable reaction is to protest that students are individual human beings, not cans of beans turned out on an assembly line. But before the idea is dismissed as utterly wild and absurd, we should do well to ask what it is that happens when people press analogies of this kind . . .

What, then, are the consequences of regarding education as if it were an industry? It is easy game to point to the absurd consequences, but what about the illuminating ones ? First of all, perhaps, it leads us to ask certain pertinent – or even impertinent – questions. Are we really getting good value for money? Are we using expensive buildings and equipment intensively enough to justify the large capital investment which they demand? Are we satisfied that the wastage in the system – the number of students who are rejected before completing any given part of the educational process – is kept to an effective minimum?

We can hardly deny that, judged by the criteria applicable to industry, the educational system is not one in which we should wisely buy a large number of shares. Any company which remained in the present state of technology, so heavily labour-intensive, any company which fully used its factories only for about seven or eight months in the year, and which rejected at various stages seventy-five per cent of its products, and subsequently some fifty per cent of the remainder, and finally some fifty per cent of this last residue, would not survive for long [1],

A hit, a palpable hit! As more and more of those who stand on its ‘periphery’ train their sights on the educational system, sniping of this sort can be expected to develop into a withering cross-fire of criticism, criticism of its waste of human as well as of material resources, criticism of its curricula and methods, criticism of its failure to deliver the goods either in the shape of economic growth or of social justice. Rightly or wrongly, those who are prepared to accept the consequences of bringing industrial experience to bear on educational problems are dissatisfied with what they see happening in schools and colleges and feel tempted to intervene. As Becher rightly points out, their motives are far from being disinterested, for as the onus for learning shifts from the teacher to the learner himself (a shift which affects all three stages of education and which has the official blessing of the Plowden and Robbins reports), a profitable market exists for the sale of learning materials of one sort or another.

Technological invention is the pacemaker and the trend-setter for this growing market. In turn, the printing press, the camera, the microphone and radio transmitter, the tape recorder, the computer and the communications satellite have simultaneously opened up new possibilities in extending the range of human experience and new areas for commercial exploitation: simultaneously because progress in any field of activity invariably involves a blend of mercenary and missionary motives. Just as the book made mass literacy possible, so electronic systems of communication necessitate a drastic revision of any concepts of educability envisaged hitherto. Just as those enclaves of so-called liberal education, the English public schools, prospered in the conditions created by the first industrial revolution, so the drive for so-called general education has gathered momentum during the second. The forces behind this drive are economic, political and social, manifesting themselves at the national level in pleas for increased productivity and at the individual level in the need to acquire the qualifications which will enable the learner to gain and hold a skilled job and the status that goes with it. With aspirations and expectations steadily rising, with standards of attainment and proficiency becoming ever more exacting in every walk of life, and with conventional methods of organization and instruction patently incapable of coping with the demands made upon them, no one can afford to feel complacent about the phenomenon which goes by the glib name of the Education Explosion. The central problem, in short, is ‘that never before has there been the need to teach so much to so many by so few’.

Despite a shortage of teachers, the problem is not so acute within the statutory system as it is outside it–though the dissensions aroused by the reorganization of secondary schools on comprehensive lines and widespread student unrest in the universities are two indications of the stresses and strains which threaten to disrupt the system. In this situation, inevitably, the tendency is to adopt strategies and techniques which have proved effective in the world of big business. Since it is no longer possible to teach all things to all men, and since the aims of general education are felt to be so vague as to be ineffectual, the tendency is to cut the losses and concentrate on specific objectives.

The fate of the County Colleges, which never got off the pages of the statute book, provides an interesting case-study, symptomatic of the way things are going. As designated in the 1944 Education Act, these were to have been ‘centres approved by the Ministry for providing for young persons who are not in full-time attendance at any school or other educational institution such further education, including physical, practical and vocational training, as will enable them to develop their various aptitudes and capacities and will prepare them for the responsibilities of citizenship’. The very wording typifies the fatal vagueness of the plan, with the result that ‘the way to county colleges’ was paved only with good intentions, undermined at the outset by every kind of pretext for doing nothing at all. The duties of all four parties concerned – young people, employers, local education authorities and Minister – were laid down explicitly in the Act, and none of them was fulfilled. Thanks to this, as late as 1966 over half the boys and over three-quarters of the girls in England and Wales were receiving no daytime education at all. In fact, these proportions actually increased in the years immediately following the publication of the Crowther Report in which the urgency of the need for action was belatedly stressed. Legislation which had been hanging fire for nearly fifty years turned out in the end to be utterly abortive. Post mortem inquiries into the reasons for the failure are idle: the plain fact of the matter is that the proposals were so hopelessly muddle-headed that they engendered no enthusiasm among school-leavers, parents, employers or the authorities who were expected to implement them. The significant point to note is that the responsibility has now been taken out of the latter's hands. The terse statement of the objective of the 1964 Industrial Training Act–’to make better provision for training people for employment in industry and commerce’–is in sharp contrast with the long-winded and pious lip-service which attended the still-birth of the County College, reflecting the change of mood between 1944 and 1964. It is no accident that in appointing the members of an Industrial Training Board the Minister of Employment must nominate a chairman having industrial or commercial experience, equal numbers of employer and employee representatives and (after consultation with the two Secretaries of State for Education) only a minority of educational representatives. (In the Boards which have been set up to date the number of employer, employee and educational representatives ranges from 5,5,3 to 10,10,7.) When it comes to getting things done, industry has evidently decided that it would rather do the job itself. Impatient with the shillyshally of day continuation school courses, it is single-minded in its belief that the theory and practice of training design must be based first and foremost on the acquisition of skills. The psychology of human skill, unlike other learning theories which have so far been less than helpful, affords some hope that the scientific backing to the technical aspects of education and training which has hitherto been lacking will soon be available. It is, thinks Professor W. T. Singleton, ‘a late starter which may well prove to be the winner’. From this point of view,

Virtually all human behaviour depends on skills, in that behaviour which is not skilled is, by definition, instinctive and human beings have few innate behaviour patterns. Thus learning is a synonym for acquisition of skill, and training is the utilization of procedures for the encouragement of learning. Education is a special kind of training characterized by the broadness of objectives and the reliance on the conceptual approach. That is, the student is provided with perceptual models which can be manipulated to predict system behaviour and from which the more adaptive responses to given situations can be deduced. If the student is taught specific responses to identifiable stimuli (so called S–R or ‘programmed’ training by contrast to conceptual training), then this is firmly regarded as training rather than education. There is an unjustifiable tendency to assume that the converse must be true and to postulate that since there is training which is not education, education is not training and the two are complementary categories. It seems logically tidy to regard education as a sub-class of training which may indeed have merely administrative rather than theoretical justification, e.g. education is the kind of training as defined above and is controlled by local and national authorities. There is scope for discussion on this point, but its resolution is not necessary for the continuation of the main thesis, which is that the basic studies of education/training are the studies of human skills and their acquisition and that we can best discuss the technical problems of education/training in the context of what we know about skills [2].

It may come as a distinct shock to teachers of the old school to find the tables turned on them in this way: in their innocence, they have always supposed that education included training, not vice versa. The new school, evidently, is not standing for any such transcendental nonsense. As with work study and job analysis, research into skills is a branch of industrial psychology which derives its data not from controlled experiments in the laboratory but primarily from the observations of actual practices and activities on the shop floor. It is interested in the hierarchies of mental and physical experience which underlie the learner's performance. Since the learning situations which it investigates are for the most part those which involve the use of mechanical equipment, it is hardly surprising that the theory it propounds is essentially mechanistic. The model of man it presents is a twentieth-century version of Boyle's ‘matchless-engine’. ‘The human operator’, we are told, ‘can be regarded as a dexterous machine powered and maintained by its own biochemical factory and controlled by a central nervous system which consists of data-handling and storage devices fed by a versatile range of data sensors’ [3].

On the face of it, this is a bleak doctrine, seemingly ruling out any consideration of moral values for the sake of solving purely technical problems. As to that, the philosophy of industrial training has three possible retorts. The first is that for all its professed concern for the nurture of personal growth, education has conspicuously failed, both in theory and practice, to live up to its pretensions or to achieve its ethical, still less its spiritual, aims; and that to that extent no great harm would be done if such pretensions were dropped. The second is that technical problems necessitate technical solutions: the fact that we have not been particularly successful in educating people makes it all the more necessary to train them in the most rational and systematic ways possible. The third is that there is no reason to suppose that the higher thought processes – symbolic, aesthetic as well as moral – will not eventually prove to be as amenable to empirical study (and control) as the relatively low-level mechanical skills are seen to be.

But if we are to trace the invasive influence of industrialism in education to its source, in the end we come back to our starting point, technological invention. For the industrial trainee, as was said earlier, the learning situation almost invariably involves the use of mechanical equipment. Almost invariably, too, it is a situation in which there is either no competent instructor present or where the skill to be mastered has to be acquired wi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 The Education Industry
• 2 What Price Robbins?
• 3 The Improvident Society
• 4 The New York State Quality Measurement Project
• 5 A Systems Approach to Educational Reform: the Swedish Example
• 6 The End of Literate Man
• 7 Towards a Technological Theory of Education
• 8 Beyond Literacy
• 9 The Advent of Educational Technology
• 10 Notes and Queries on General Systems Theory
• 11 Systems Engineering and Educational Planning
• 12 Educational Technology: What Is and What Might Be
• APPENDIX Memorandum on Courses of Training in Educational Technology
• INDEX