Education: If we have to do it, keep it bloody cheap and efficient as possible, I say!

When ninetieth century British statesman Robert Lowe declared rather conceitedly “if it’s not cheap it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient it shall be cheap,” he was capturing the essence of the Revised Code, a scheme warmly introduced into British education in the mid-nineteenth century.

To say that the Revised Code was all about money and efficiency and had very little to do with educating children would be fair enough, as it was largely introduced to regulate school spending. Interestingly, though, the Revised Code was born out of fear. To be precise, the fears of the middle-classes, who, we are told, were terrified of rising calls upon the state to cough up funds (read: more taxes) for elementary schools charged to meet the needs of the business age that urgently required a literate workforce.

In essence, schools were now expected to achieve standards based on the assumed needs of industry, the success or failure of which teachers’ salaries were dependent. In effect, the Revised Code not only humiliated teachers, forcing them to renounce their professional integrity by falsifying the attendance and examination results of their students, but also impoverished them as they were slavishly dominated by the standard and mechanical form of pedagogy ardently implemented by the scheme. If this sounds all to familiar and a precursor to today’s standardized education, you wouldn’t be far off.

A little later, around the turn of the twentieth century, things on the other side of the pond weren’t much better for kids and teachers. At this time, a second turn of events would greatly sway educational thinking of that period that would further disconnect its teachers from their students and alienate students from their learning. We at The Slow Human have fittingly named the thinking and events that unfolded at this time as the ‘War on Wastage.’  

As we understand things, to combat the apparent climate of inefficiency and “wastage” present in education at that time, and spurred on by business interests and corporate principles, not to mention economically and politically driven by conservative political interests, the United States education system succeeded to actively transport and implement the autocratic principles of scientific management, as devised by Frederick W. Taylor, into schools.  In his hard-hitting paper The Cult of Efficiency in Education, Anthony R. Welch explains that across the country, the US education systems succumbed to the whims and demands of business and United States capitalism to “service the needs of an industrializing economy.” However, what at first appeared to be a noble experiment by the state came to have a deleterious effect on children’s learning. As the state adopted the financial burden of training, education became streamlined, increasingly “along practical and utilitarian lines,” resulting in the marginalization of book and scholastic learning and the increase of vocational courses in schools. The outcome, according to Welch was that “the quality and quantity of education was reduced, by a concentration on economies and business ideologies” to the point impoverishment.

It’s fair to say that Frederick W. Taylor turned efficiency into a science, and that his principles of scientific management were designed with one goal in mind, to make people and systems more efficient, with all immeasurable characteristics of a person’s behavior deemed superfluous all but eliminated.

Naturally, The Slow Human looks on disapprovingly. But, what do you expect? This is, after all, what happens when we live in a world where the business world messes about with education systems, and where business world values, particularly efficiency, productivity, calculability, competition and speed have been imported largely unchallenged into education with harmful consequences for teachers and children.  Let’s hope the intentions of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and their Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which pressures countries to narrow their education curricula, isn’t another scheme that ignores the importance of student engagement and reduces the education experience to mere numbers