Schools do not only exist to provide education.
It is a contemporary norm that the parents of most children are employed, and during their working day need their children to be supervised. Schools are where the children of working parents can spend their day under legally approved supervision, usually without parents making any direct payment for the supervision service.
It is reasonable to speculate for how much longer this arrangement will continue to be necessary. A recurrent theme in reflections on changes occurring in education is the future workplace that students need to be prepared for, more specifically the possible lack of such a workplace for many due to rapid growth of technological unemployment. It may be that for cultural reasons relating to alienation from technology, technology that could replace much human work will not do so as soon as it could be made to. In my opinion, such alienation is something that is perhaps a reality to generations that did not experience a childhood in which they routinely interacted with apparently intelligent machines more than with other humans, but less clearly a reality to a generation who as children experienced digital personal assistants as a pseudo-people that were always there for them when their parents and other human caregivers often were not.
Constraining the scope of speculations to situations within which it would continue to be a practical necessity for most children to attend schools for much of their childhoods, I found myself speculating how unrelated to an arbitrary, centrally imposed education system the processes of education could be while maintaining the need for physical school attendance for the great majority of learners.
Imagine then if schools were regulated only in respect to how they ensured the health and safety of their attending learners, but otherwise had no prescribed procedures or policies beyond those that each school chose for itself. Each school would decide what it taught, how it taught what it taught, how it assessed and accredited what it taught, who it taught and who taught it, and how it funded itself.
Suppose that schools were funded primarily by those whom they directly served, by their learners. Such schools could be thought of as service providers that could be accessed by those who paid for services, such as by subscriptions and by generating data, such as by taking part in educational technology trials. If services offered were to most benefit the most learners, and therefore attract the most funding, such services would need to be offered on demand, with as much or as little granularity as learners demanded.
Many educators have recognised that in general learners are poor judges of what they do and do not need to learn in order to meet given objectives, and tend not to be proficient at recognising the limits of the effectiveness of their judgement regarding this issue. The ineffectiveness of learners’ self-assessment of their capabilities is partially why assessment by schools is necessary at all.
Assessment by schools is however not an end in itself but is rather a sorting method for directing learners along various career preparation trajectories. Schools with full autonomy could coordinate with employers to design services and assessments that employers would value. A school could demonstrate that it provided services targeted at preparing learners for recruitment by specific employers, where such demonstrations could be independently confirmed by those employers (in some cases, aspects of employers’operations could be situated within schools). Schools that were effective at providing these kinds of demonstrations should tend to be more successful at convincing learners of the value of their services. Schools that relied more on deceiving learners regarding the value of the services they provided might fairly easily find a supply of more easily deceived learners, but presumably the trait of being easily deceived correlates negatively with the trait of having ample funds available to offer schools in exchange for services.
Assuming then, that autonomous schools could on the whole provide services that learners genuinely required, issues arise relating to how services could most effectively be provided. At this point, the original premise should be recalled that a school as a physical location where learners assemble only necessarily exists to provide a place for pre-adult learners to be safely supervised. Other than procedures relating to health and safety of learners, procedures are not determined by anything other than what is agreed between educators and learners.
Firstly then, who counts as an educator and who counts as a learner? Formally, learners are those with claims to the services provided by the school, however those claims might be paid for. Formally therefore, educators are those who receive payments from learners. An educator might not necessarily ask for payment, or might be required to work without payment pending some sort of promotion (as a trainee educator). Does this mean that if one learner paid another for help with their learning, the helper would formally be considered an educator at the school? This question raises the issue of collegiality.
The importance of collegiality for educators perhaps seems rather quaint in the twenty-first century. The notion that teachers, amongst themselves, have experiential knowledge of an activity that those without such knowledge cannot usefully comment on has been cumulatively undermined for about a century (albeit with a few partial reversals). A previous post contained this extract on the industrialisation of education (my emphases).
Frederick W. Taylor’s “scientific” and managerial approach to the workplace maximized efficiency and productivity through the standardization of labor. Through motion and time study, Taylor vigorously studied body movements and assigned exact approximations of the time necessary to complete the labor. A primary principle of his management approach was to eliminate opportunities of chance or accident through the scientific investigation of every detail of labor. Scientific management eliminated the need for skilled labor by delegating each employee one simple task to repeat over and over. Although this method increased the productivity of factories, it stripped employees their freedom to choose their work, as well as how it should be done.
With the publication of his first article, “The Elimination of Waste in Education,” John Franklin Bobbitt (1912) started his career as a leader in the field of curriculum and became one of the pioneers that set the stage for the adoption and implementation of scientific management in school administration in the US. Bobbitt’s work in curriculum studies in the US is particularly important because of his application of Frederick Taylor’s concepts of scientific management to educational management and planning. While arguing that factory-like efficiency in education should be driven by objectives, Bobbitt (1920) stated: “It is the objectives and the objectives alone … that dictate the pupil-experiences that make up the curriculum. It is then these in their turn that dictate the specific methods to be employed by the teachers and specific material helps and appliances and opportunities to be provided. These in their turn dictate the supervision, the nature of the supervisory organization, the quantity of finance, and the various other functions involved in attaining the desired results. And, finally, it is the specific objectives that provide standards to be employed in the measurement of results.”
Bobbit argued that schools, like businesses, should be efficient, eliminate waste, and focus on outcomes to the degree that the curriculum must be useful in shaping students into adult workers. Along with Frederick Winslow Taylor, Bobbit believed that efficient outcomes depended on centralized authority and precise, top down instruction for all tasks performed. Within Bobbitt’s educational vision—similar to Taylor’s vision of managers—the administrator gathers all possible information about the educational process and develops the best methods for teachers to get students to meet the standards.
According to Bobbitt’s (1913) scientifically managed education, teachers must be required to follow the methods determined by their administrators because they are not capable of determining such methods themselves: The burden of finding the best methods is too large and too complicated to be laid on the shoulders of the teachers … The ultimate worker, the teacher in our case, must be a specialist in the performance of the labor that will produce the product. Bobbitt’s conception embraced one of the core logics of scientific management in education, which asserts that the end-points of predetermined objectives and/or standards alone drive the educational process (the production of students). Within these logics, all aspects of education therefore must serve the ends of the education process, with student learning purely based on pre-determination, and teachers’ content delivery structured by pre-determined scientific methods. Thus, the ends determine the means. This allowed the curriculum to be broken down into content units that could be standardized, determined in advance, taught in a linear manner, and easily assessed.
The collegiate community of educators has been ceding its authority to the administrators of centralised authorities for a long time, and collegiality among educators has come to largely mean the recognition (even if resented) of the necessity of and methods for following the dictates of central authority administration. The abandonment of a centralised authority potentially introduces a fertile unplanned space in which collegiality could reassert itself.
How might a collegiate spirit amongst educators arise in an autonomous school ecosystem? There would seem to be two preconditions for such a renewal of collegiality; first a consensus on what objectives educators should strive for, and second a willingness for educators to negotiate with each other the values of their individual and collective contributions to meeting these objectives.
The objectives of educators are to some extent (hopefully to a useful extent) identified using the same shared information involved in identifying the services to provide to meet the needs of learners that the school hopes to serve. Assuming that the objectives of the educators in a school are understood, how might those educators cooperate to meet the needs? At this point, the original premise should again be recalled that a school as a physical location where learners assemble only necessarily exists to provide a place for pre-adult learners to be safely supervised. Other than procedures relating to health and safety of learners, procedures are not determined by anything other than what is agreed between educators and learners.
The allocation of a school’s learners to its educators for learning activities would be decided by negotiation between the educators and the learners; a learner can join in any learning activity associated with an educator that the learner is prepared to pay for, if the educator agrees to the inclusion of that learner. Considered in isolation, this would imply that some educators would be in greater demand and earn more than others. In practice, educators would to varying degrees recognise that the educational activities that they provided interacted with the activities provided by the other educators in the school. The more effectively that the teachers in a school recognised how successfully their various learning activities interacted with each other, the more they would be predisposed to redistribute their own earnings amongst their colleagues on whose contributions their own successes depended, in proportion to the degrees of interdependence. Those schools with educators that cooperated more effectively would be more likely to retain more educators achieving better collective results, and such schools would tend to recruit more learners.
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