Data, trust and faith: the unheeded religious roots of modern education policy

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the unheeded religious roots of the modern conviction to standardised, scientific education policy and its inherent sciento-social epistemology. In doing so, it traces the discursive roots of this hierarchical but non-governmental idea of social governance from its 16th century Scottish Presbyterian predecessors to its advocates at Teachers College, Columbia University around and after 1900 and ultimately to its global spread in the later twentieth century via the OECD.

KEYWORDS:

• Presbyterianism
• sciento-social epistemology
• faith in numbers
• expertocracy
• nationalism
• imperialism
• philanthropic foundations
• Teachers College

1. Introduction

The discourse of present-day education research and policy making is dominated by keywords such as testing, assessment, accountability, evidence-based and efficiency, and deeply rooted in the alleged functionality of interventions and their evaluative assessments. One term used on the critical side of these developments to describe this reality, ‘datafication’ (for instance Hartong and Piattoeva 2019), indicates the persuasive power on which the current educational policy and test psychology are based: On (big) data or facts that become, as a rule, recognisable in statistics.

We are obviously dealing with faith in data. Confidence in numbers and statistics as objective and thus reliable sources of both information on the current state of affairs and the need for reform is itself a result of a longer historical process that gained momentum primarily with the establishment of nation-states in the long nineteenth century. In his book Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, published before PISA or PIRLS were initiated, Theodore Porter (1995, 90) described precisely how the widely accepted depiction of reality by numbers and statistics is based on a leap of trust that has become increasingly important because it is associated with objectivity ‘as an alternative to personal trust’ of professionals such as medical doctors or schoolteachers.

What had once been considered an effective means (or ‘method’) of exploring the laws of nature and, building on it, of enabling technological, economic and social progress, namely precise observation and experimentation, was later on extended to the cultural and social world of mankind by means of questionnaires and tests (Tröhler 2017). In this cultural and social context, the initial purpose was to discover the laws of the soul (experimental psychology with emphasis on development and learning), which promised the design of efficient curricula that would prepare children for their role as future citizens in a progressing nation: The statistically collected numbers and data were expected to lead – via the targeted education of children-as-future-citizens – to progress. Hence, the social sciences should at the same time experimentally discover psychological laws, identify the problems of the social world and contribute to ordered progress through an efficiently administered school that converted the kid into a ‘learning child’ as an empowered future bearer of progress (Popkewitz 1997; Wolker 2002; Porter and Ross 2003). The guiding thought model behind these visions was a sciento-social epistemology in which faith in detected regularities and visions of salvation were intrinsically inscribed and that promised through the (re-)organisation of society a secured or even blessed future. It was from the 1960s – not accidentally the OECD was founded in 1961 – that large-scale ‘data’ became more and more a core part of a technocratic and expertocratic culture that was believed to be emancipated from both professional expertise and politics or democracy (Porter 1995). It is a system – and this is the overall thesis that we wish to elaborate in this article – that presents itself as modern, scientific, rational and secular, but in which trust, faith and ideas of salvation, although largely invisible, are intimately linked.

Against this background it is no coincidence that the idea of methodologically based natural science for the purpose of objective and useful knowledge was cultivated above all first by Reformed Protestants, often also referred to as ‘puritan’ English, in the context and wake of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth around 1650. They not only made a decisive contribution to triggering what is called the ‘Enlightenment’ (Tröhler 2020a), but also planted their faith in God on the regularity of nature into the entire epistemological system of modern science, which later on also shaped the more radical French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Becker 1932). It paved the way to a science-based social and political rationality labelled ‘modernity’, seeking to encompass progress and welfare. A very decisive step thereby was the development of a modern, i.e., scientific-experimental psychology, which was generally promoted by sons of Protestant ministers (Tröhler 2011). Just as the Puritans in the seventeenth century wanted to discover the laws of God’s visible nature for the benefit of human society, so the sons of Protestant ministers wanted to discover the laws of the divine soul to enable individuals – via efficient education based on these insights – to serve as carriers of progress.

In this paper we want to show how today’s trust or faith in statistical data acting as guiding instances of policy and (re-)ordering society – which thereby obviously not only pretend to describe reality ‘objectively’ but also formulate clear desiderata for intervention and its assessment – expresses not only a scientific but also a closely interwoven socio-political epistemology that are in their roots religious and embody accordingly hopes for salvation. From an analytical point of view, the thesis is that today’s dominant education policy model relies less on democratic deliberation or professional experience than on trust or faith in statistical evidence, and therefore requires a certain type of research which epistemological basis differs from other research attempts in the field of education. From a historical perspective, we propose that this sciento-social epistemological model has a long history that can be traced back to the Scottish Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Its broad institutional configuration took place in the national crises of the United States around 1900 and shaped later on via the US education policy in the post-Sputnik Cold War crisis and affected policies in the individual member states of the OECD and others until today.

Evidently, a thesis that covers almost 500 years and retells a complex history of a victory around the globe cannot be proved in one chapter, but it can be made plausible. The aim is to make it easier to understand why, especially in the field of education policy, people have such strong faith in statistical data as providing evidence and guidelines for intervention defined by experts. The faith in this particular epistemology of testing and evidence is closely interwoven with a centralised form of social and political agency that, however, cannot be equated with centralised state power. Since the Scottish Reformation, this type of social organisation is intended, at best, to function as a supplement to the state or, at worst, even without it, and it relies more on data, hierarchy, and expertise than on political negotiation between different interest groups.

Accordingly, this article is intended as a contribution to a historical epistemology which links science and social ordering and in which notions of salvation are inscribed and which encompasses both the production of knowledge and the (re)organisation of social life. The materials on which the argumentative reconstruction of this sciento-social epistemology is based are essentially reports, printed minutes, announcements, declarations of intent and policy-related publications; unpublished sources are found only indirectly in the research literature consulted.

We will try to make our thesis plausible in five steps. First, we show how this sciento-social epistemological model that governs today’s global education policy became institutionally configured around 1900 in the US, in which a deep national crisis seemed to trigger a need to change the national discourse from a localist principle to a more centrist idea. In a second step, we travel back in time – in terms of a short historical excursion for the purpose of plausibility – to 16th century Scotland in order to demonstrate that these essential ideals were already developed and institutionalised beyond the (Catholic) monarchy of Mary, Queen of Scots. In a third step, we show how an international hub of this type of educational research in the direction of efficient school administration was established, especially at Teachers College in New York, and how an International Institute was founded at Teachers College which sought to spread the test culture internationally and did in fact so in the 1930s. In a fourth step, we focus on the US-crisis after Sputnik, the National Defense Education Act and the rise of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in order to conclude in the final step how the OECD was designed to operate as a bridge of this global religious mission that bears the character of epistemological colonialism.

2. Denominationally redefining the American nation and its efficient administration beyond the state: surveys, standards and statistics

There is a barely measurable number of studies dealing with phenomena of transition from the 19th to the twentieth century, which address different (aspects of) challenges, setbacks and developments (Kaplan 1995; Heideman 2019; Silla 2019). In the case of the United States, this refers to perceptions of social, economic and political crises, often subsumed under the term ‘social question’, which triggered various social and educational innovations such as the rise of Pragmatism as a distinct way of philosophical, social, political and educational reasoning.

Pragmatism turned out to be but only one kind of interpretation and solution in a comprehensive struggle for what was perceived as deep national crisis caused by large-scale industrialisation, growth of metropolises, poverty, crime, commercialisation of life, rise of urban middle-class, and mass immigration, to name a few, but it was not without alternatives (Tröhler, Schlag, and Osterwalder 2010). Especially the last phenomenon, the massive immigration of many people first from Catholic Ireland and after 1890 from largely undemocratic, economically underdeveloped and non-Protestant Southern and Eastern areas of Europe (Gibson and Jung 2006, Table 4) urgently raised the question of what the American nation was in essence, and how it had to organise itself socially. The essential question was what America was as a nation and how it was to be organised politically. It was a time, as a book title puts aptly, of a perceived need of The Search for Order (Wiebe 1967).

Pragmatism as one (prominent) answer to these perceived problems suffered from the fact that it was closely linked to precisely that tradition of social organisation which, in view of the perceived problems, no longer seemed able to function appropriately, namely the strict local-communitarian organisation with maximum autonomy, described by Wiebe (1967, 111) as ‘Island Communities’. No lesser than John Dewey (1927) had proposed, with a regretful (but not nostalgic) view on the ‘harmony’ of the local communities of the eighteenth century, to establish a ‘great community’ with the means of modernity and thus formulated an alternative to the discussion that was conducted under the label of the Great Society (Wallas 1914): The transformation of a localist into a more centralised America. Behind this debate was the struggle about America’s national identity, which was shaped by many actors and ideals but knew two main counterparts, both of whom ultimately came from Calvinism: the originally English Congregationalism with its idea of the highest communal autonomy, weak institutions and the greatest possible cooperation among the citizens on one hand, and the originally Scottish Presbyterianism with its hierarchical idea of social order and of tight social control by non-governmental institutions on the other.¹ Whereas (the University of) Chicago had been, at least until Dewey’s departure in 1904, the hub for the former ideal, it was Columbia/Teachers College in New York of the latter.²

Most of the exponents of Pragmatism, as one side in the discursive fight defining the American nation, were devoted Congregationalists (Tröhler 2006). On the other side we find above all Presbyterians, occasionally ‘supported’ by Methodists and some scholars from Jewish families. The grandfather of one of the very central actors on this side, Nicholas Murray Butler – President of Columbia University and inaugurator of Teachers College – had been the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. The sponsor of the educational reforms that eventually led to the founding of Teachers College, Grace Hoadley Dodge, had been (a very wealthy) Presbyterian (Mcaughey 2003). Andrew Carnegie, the multi-millionaire whose Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching cooperated significantly with Teachers College and supported educational reforms along these lines, had been, as a born Scot, Presbyterian. The first and long-time dean of Teachers College (1897-1927), James Earl Russell, grew up in a devoted Presbyterian family and environment, and the very first experimental psychologist employed by Butler at Teachers College, John McKeen Cattell, was son of a Pennsylvanian Presbyterian minister (Sokal 1981). They did not form a homogeneous religious fighting force in praise of a Presbyterian interpretation of Calvinism, but they did share central ideas about social organisation for the purpose of moral and social salvation, which they were convinced were necessary given the perceived crisis in the United States. Education was to play an important role in this programme as did a particular, statistically based empirical test psychology. They are the central developers and bearers of this sciento-social epistemological model around 1900.

In this epistemology, education, salvation, democracy and progress were brothers in arms. Nicholas Murray Butler defined education – that was not merely instruction – as the ‘gradual adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race’ (Butler 1896/1898, 17), and this adjustment had five consequential hierarchical levels: scientific, literary, aesthetic, institutional, and religious (17-31). Butler placed less interest in elementary education than college education, the institutional place where the crucial professions for social progress were to be trained – medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, but also teachers for the secondary schools (Butler 1895/1898). Convinced of the immense national importance of college education, a great debate arose about how to ensure high standards in the transition from high school to college and to what extent high schools could be understood primarily as preparatory institutions for colleges (Butler 1890/1898). According to Butler – who relied here on Harvard President Charles William Eliot³ – students of American High Schools lagged behind the standards of German and French students (Butler 1894, 188). In these two European countries, Butler argued, education ministers had implemented reforms to raise standards, but this would be impossible in the United States due to the non-existent ‘central educational administration’ (189).

Yet, the reformers did not propose strengthening state structures in the way their European partners had done. Centralisation and standardisation were certainly sought in order to raise and secure education standards, but these measures were to be guaranteed by private associations and institutions. One consequence was the foundation of the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB), founded at Columbia University in 1899 by representatives of twelve universities and three high school preparatory academies (College Entrance Examination Board 1900), which developed the famous and still existing SAT as a fee-based standardised test for college admissions in 1926; since 1947 these tests are published by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), a non-governmental association borne amongst others by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT).

These initiatives to regulate American (higher) education were private endeavours, and it is here that philanthropy, this idiosyncratic US-American way of dealing with social problems beyond the (weak) state, comes into play in organising a new, centralised administration of social order (Parmar 2012, 32): the CFAT was founded in 1905 in order to support and strengthen college and university education with regard to higher professional standards. Its first and long-time President (1905-1930), the mathematical astronomer Henry Smith Pritchett, son of a Methodist minister, understood education as a scientist and advocated in his inaugural lecture as President of the MIT in 1900 improved college education in the ‘service of the State … of a free people’ (Pritchett 1901, 1414). Therefore, human resources were to be exploited for the beneficiary of the nation and both science and science-based professionalism were perceived as the key to true progress. (Pritchett 1901, 40). Pritchett related ‘faith’ to science, church, and higher education alike which determined his interest in educational planning (Lagemann 1983, 35) which aimed at training leaders: ‘The call of the world to-day … is for leaders – but for leaders who think; for men and women who … can teach other[s]’ to turn enterprises form ‘self-interest’ to cooperation ‘with soul’ in ‘which philosophy and religion and science and industry and material progress shall all be threads in the fabric of human culture’ (Pritchett 1920, 77). This was meant both nationally and internationally or imperially.

The CFAT had started as a pension fund for college and university teachers. Carnegie never meant to sponsor individuals, but institutions, as long as they were neither state nor sectarian: Working to transform American local communities into a Great Society meant renouncing to support both state institutions and colleges in the service of a Christian denomination that included Congregationalists, Lutherans and Catholics, too. Given this opportunity of distributing money, Pritchett immediately saw a chance to develop a steering tool with regard to higher standards. Access to the pension fund required – in addition to be free of state control and non-sectarian – to have at least six full-time professors, to offer four-year courses and to have clear admission requirements based on the (expected) knowledge level of a four-year high school visit (CFAT 1906, 15f.); not even 10% of the existing institutions were accepted to benefit from the pension fund (Lagemann 1983, 39f.). The Carnegie Foundation was to become a non-governmental ‘central agency in educational administration’ and directed at ‘centralizing and standardizing … American education’ (Pritchett 1906, 125).

A core means of re-organising higher American education were surveys. The first report was the Medical Education in the United States and Canada (Flexner 1910), and subsequently the American Medical Association’ Council on Medical Education, founded in 1904, started in close collaboration with CFAT to define ‘ideal standards’ of good medical education eligible for the pension fund: they graded the schools with A = acceptable, B = doubtful, and C = unacceptable (Lagemann 1983, 64).⁴ In a second attempt, Pritchett addressed the law schools and commissioned two reports and thirdly he continued by assessing engineering education; both, however had only mixed success (Lagemann 1983).

The standardisation of the professions naturally included teacher training, which had traditionally been offered at normal schools with very different structures and quality. With the founding of the Teachers College – as an associated faculty within Columbia University –, inaugurated by Nicholas Murray Butler, teacher training had institutionalised a flagship that corresponded to the ambitions of the reformers that were concerned with centralised standards and expertise across the United States. The concrete initiative came in 1914 from the Governor of the State of Missouri, the Methodist Elliott W. Major, asking the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to investigate a concern related to teacher education: ‘What is the best preparation and what is the duty of the state in meeting it, and how can the state secure the greatest benefit at a minimum expense?’ (Learned and Bagley 1920, 3).

The driving force behind this 450-page report full of descriptions, statistics and graphs was the devoted anti-pragmatist and psychologist William C. Bagley, a close collaborator to Edward Lee Thorndike at Teachers College. This report demonstrates how the CFAT advised governmental education policy with the aim of centralising and standardising teacher education as crucial element of standardising American education: ‘All institutional education for the teaching profession should be placed clearly upon a collegiate footing … ‘Normal’ schools should drop that name, and as professional colleges of education should become an acknowledged part of the greater university … . We would thus secure a unified and centralised authority prepared to deal in a consistent and efficient manner with the state’s largest problem in higher and professional education’ (12).

Comparison with foreign countries had always been a means to trigger a willingness to reform education. Samuel Lerner, employee at the Carnegie Foundation and co-author of the The professional preparation of teachers, in 1927 accused the Americans of having ‘sentimental’ ideals of democracy – local-congregational – and being blind to ‘‘realistic’ demands of effective education’ that were much better met in Europe (Lagemann 1983, 102). These accusations led to a new report, the so-called Pennsylvania Study, which was co-authored by Lerner and another professor at Teachers College, Ben D. Wood. Wood was an anti-Deweyan and former student of Edward L. Thorndike and had created the multiple-choice test for which some call him the ‘father of modern educational psychology’. The Pennsylvania Study, published under the title The Student and his Knowledge, conducted between 1928 and 1938, examined the academic careers of 45,000 high school and college students in Pennsylvania and had a major impact on the acceptance of standardised testing (Learned and Wood 1938).

Shaped by particular social visions of a Great Society to be built, which knew how to master contemporary challenges with moral greatness, obviously two institutions were responsible to transform American education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Teachers College. Both were, as mentioned above, deeply rooted in Presbyterian imaginaries to organise social order beyond the state. In what way they materialised ideals developed in Scottish Reformation is discussed in the next step.

3. The 16th century presbyterian polity: governance, structure and examination

The educational ideology as part of transforming the American nation developed by the key actors in and around Teachers College in the late nineteenth century – i.e., measuring the quality of education through standardised tests and in turn using this data to ‘improve’ education – was not newly invented, but drew on a long and extensive prehistory which began with the Scottish Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. What makes the (hi)story of Scottish Reformation so compelling, is that until 1560 Scotland was a thoroughly devout Catholic country which showed very little signs of turning Protestant almost overnight. The historical context that had to change to accomplish this conversion of almost the entire Scottish nation was very complex. Prehistories of the Scottish Reformation Rebellion often reference perceived failures of the Catholic church supported during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, the change in Scotland’s foreign policy by turning away from its old ally France and closer to its loathed neighbour England, and Scottish rulers tolerating (at least moderate forms) – for example James V⁵ – or even promoting – Earl of Arran⁶ – Protestantism prior to the Rebellion (Ryrie 2006). Furthermore, Reform movements, both Protestant and Catholic, were circulating all across mainland Europe, influenced by the ideas of Renaissance humanism, in attempts to purify and restore the Christian Church (Hansen 2019).

The Reformed Church with its inherent aim at building the city upon the hill propagated in 16th century Scotland established a distinctly Presbyterian polity. The term Presbyterianism already sheds light on the most central characteristic of its polity as the Presbyterian Church of Scotland was, and still is, governed by so called ‘presbyteries’, which is a transliteration of the Greek word for ‘elders’. Within the Scottish Reformed Church, presbyteries referred to an elected council responsible for the government of the churches in its assigned region, including the spirituality of the congregants as well as practical social decisions (Hansen 2019; Ryrie 2017). The presbyteries, alongside the kirk sessions of the parishes, formed a series of largely locally organised judicial authorities, which were all subordinate to the central General Assembly, the ‘supreme governing body of the Scottish Church’ as Ryrie (2017, 241) has described it. Notably, the Church of Scotland thus established a clearly hierarchically structured central agency of social order that was detached from the government.

The General Assembly established in the 16th century was to meet annually, in order to maintain governance over the whole of Scotland and ensure its devotion to the true denomination. Besides the presbyteries, the Presbyterian polity established two other central offices: the pastors, that is teaching (or better yet preaching) elders who direct the parishioner’s spiritual formation, and the deacons, who were to take care of the poor and ill (Smith and Kemeny 2019). A crucial order of the General Assembly to ensure uniformity in worship was that all ministers and others entrusted to guide the parishioners in their spirituality, such as exhorters and readers, had to own a copy of the recently printed psalm-book (Durkan 2013), thus setting standards for worship which could later on be examined. The idea of establishing verifiable standards of (religious) knowledge can be found in one of the most influential documents of the Scottish Reformation, the First Book of Discipline drawn up by the famous six Johns⁷ in 1560. This book served as a blueprint, so to speak, for a new Scottish national order under the Presbyterian world view, and its main objectives were practical issues regarding the governance of the Church and thus its members, ranging from doctrine and sacraments to the policy of the Church and even including concrete regulations, for example, for the election of ministers, elders and deacons or the rents and patrimony of the kirk (Cameron 1972). Even the youngest members of the Church community were encompassed, whose purpose on earth was understood as becoming useful members of church and state. Thus, the reformers directly linked the preaching of Protestant faith with the ideology of goodly citizenship (Vance 2000). In order to ensure the quality of preaching, not only were the ministers to be elected, but also to be educated and examined in regard to their Christian knowledge (Cameron 1972; Durkan 2013).

One section of the First Book of Discipline – arguably the most well-known today – is concerned with plans for an extensive, structured and regulated school system across the kingdom. This system was to include a vernacular school in every parish as well as grammar schools and arts colleges in the major towns of Scotland.⁸ As these schools were to secure the godly citizens envisaged by the Presbyterian doctrine, the reformers had no intention of letting them run unsupervised. Instead, they envisioned that ‘discreet, grave, and learned men be appointed to visit [all] Schooles for the trial of their exercise, profit and continuance: To wit, the Ministers and Elders and the rest of learned men in every town shall in every quarter make examination how the youth have profited’ (Cameron 1972, 133). The goal was to govern both those responsible for teaching the youth as well as the pupils themselves. However, the reformers’ plans were so extensive, and the circumstances were not compliant (see e.g., Anderson 1995; Durkan 2013; Ryrie 2006), that it took a few decades for their ideas to be implemented, both with regard to the church order and specifically in the school sector. One of the biggest obstacles in developing the nation-wide, regulated school system was the shortness of ministers. Nonetheless, while the establishment and examination of an able body of teachers was not immediately achieved, already in the 1570s children in Scottish parishes were examined regularly in regard to their Christian knowledge at the ages of nine, twelve and fourteen (Durkan 2013).

It is not the place here to demonstrate how this form of religiously inspired social observance and order has survived for well over 300 years and how it has developed in detail. What is crucial is that this social and political epistemology comes to light precisely when the previously dominant rival epistemology, the localist-egalitarian form of English Congregationalism, was no longer believed capable of solving the perceived problems with regard to ‘modernity’ and was even accused of being part of the problem. The time had come to change the essence of the American nation, and its activists were, predominantly, Presbyterians, such as in the Carnegie Foundation and in Teachers College, both fostering, disconnected from the government, hierarchically structured social governance through standardised examination. As good Christian ideals the aim was first national, but also, at the same time, in a missionary way, international or better global.

4. Teachers College as hub for worldwide reform

How the intention to convert the American nation according to and by means of the sciento-social epistemology of Presbyterianism and the willingness to missionize the world according to this epistemology went hand in hand simultaneously, can be shown with the example of the further development of Teachers College.

From 1905 onwards, Teachers College published the results of its research in its own book series, Contribution to Education, which still exists today (as does the journal Teachers College Record, since 1900). The title of the first volume represents (almost) the entire programme, Normal School Education and Efficiency in Teaching, by Junius Lathrop Meriam (1905). The second volume, also published in 1905, was by Elwood Cubberley (1905), perhaps the most active representative of an efficiency-based administration, and the third volume, published in 1906, focused on The Rise of Local School Supervision in Massachusetts and was written by Henry Suzallo (Suzzallo 1906), who was to become president of the CFAT in 1930 which by that time had long become a supporter of Teachers College as an international hub for efficiency in school administration.

The international interest was definitely mutual. Many budding school graduates wanted and actually did go to Teacher College to pursue a doctorate, remarkably often, with the aim of finding good jobs in their home countries (Friedrich and Brandt, in press). In that sense, in particular the psychometric dissertations – all supervised by Thorndike – contributed to what Mignolo and Walsh (2018) labelled as ‘the coloniality of knowledge’, that is the way in which Western – more precisely Presbyterian – rationalities acted colonially to the extent that they spread certain taken for granted assumptions about the functioning of the social order, about the ways of exploring it, and about intervention in a global way.

The intention was, of course, morally legitimised as, in the eyes of the actors, the goal was to promote international understanding and democracy. Historiography has followed this, until recently. Bu, for instance, explains that during the interwar years, American educational institutions were keen to export American democratic education abroad ‘to promote world democracy and international understanding’ and ‘the Institute spearheaded such international activism via direct faculty participation in the reform of foreign educational systems and the professional training of foreign students and educational leaders’ (Bu 1997, 413). Yet, as Takayama (2018) has recently shown, how these ‘philanthropic activities’ borne by private American institutions can also be understood as imperialism aimed at colonising other countries, as the activists had doubts that, in the words of Nicholas Murray Butler – while he advocated a reorganisation of Europe according to the model of the US (Butler 1914) – the US were ‘the first moral power in the world today’ (17). As Butler said, ‘true internationalism is not the enemy of the nationalistic principle’ (8), and one should simply change the slogan ‘learn to think imperially’ to ‘learn to think internationally’ working with others ‘toward a common end, the advancement of civilization’ (16).

The Philanthropist ‘appetite’ had never been limited to the realm of the nation but was ‘imperial in character and content’ as Parmar (2012, 33) argued. An expression of this global ‘appetite’ was the foundation of the International Institute within Teachers College, allowing at the same time to give funds to international students and to expand the international activities of those reforming the United States. It had been founded in 1923 by a gift of $1million from John D. Rockefeller Jr. (Bu 1997) and enabled scholars of Teachers College to act as international ‘comparativists’, not least with the publication of the Educational Yearbook, and to undertake extensive international consultancy for educational development. One expression of this was an international cooperation regarding examination.

Faced with the problem of how to ensure a high standard of achievement in the transition from high school to college, the director of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, with the generous help of both the CFAT and Carnegie Corporation⁹, organised the International Examination Inquiry (IEI), which lasted from 1931 to 1938 and included Calvinist Scotland and Calvinist Switzerland, in addition to the major nation states such as England, France and Germany; later Finland, Norway, and Sweden were added, all Protestant (Lutheran) countries. The founders of the IEI, most prominently Paul Monroe and Frederick P. Keppel, Dutch-Calvinist of origin and President of the Carnegie Corporation, had envisioned that each country would send representative educators which would work on independent national committees within an internationally and jointly constructed framework of investigation.

Notably, this international cooperation under the leadership of Teachers College originated from a more or less close circle of friends and acquaintances of Paul Monroe (Lawn 2008). Sponsored by money from both the Carnegie Corporation and the CFAT, the participants met in 1931, 1936 and 1938, twice in England and once in France. During those meetings, the US representatives left no doubt that they were leaders in testing and emphasized, how a ‘new technique in education, founded on psychology and the statistical study of phenomena in quantity, has become an essential part of the equipment of every trained teacher’, as the chairman Paul Monroe (1931, 2) highlighted.¹⁰ However, it should be less about examining individual school performance and more about institutional standardisation and examination and thus about guaranteeing future professional quality as a ‘means of social control’ (3).

The IEI is perhaps the most striking undertaking of the key New York actors in internationalising, or better Americanising, educational research and policy making. Aimed at a particular, shared policy issue – that of the transformation of secondary education from an elite to a mass good – the self-entitled US ‘experts’ on educational measurement and standardisation set out to progress education, in Europe and at home, in accordance with their sciento-social epistemology. Already in the first gathering of the IEI, the language utilised by many of the US members, particularly the experimental psychologists from the Teachers College, were derived from this scientific approach to education and included terms such as statistics, tests, and surveys (Lawn 2008). As Lawn (2008, 14) pointed out, ‘[it] was to become the new common language of educational research, a kind of scientific Esperanto, circulated and constructed by the IEI across borders and through the permeable walls of their offices and projects’.

That this conviction of standardised and measurable education was not yet widely dispersed becomes evident by British educator Philip B. Ballard’s recollection of a conversation with a prominent actor of the Swiss progressive education movement Pierre Bovet,¹¹ during one of the conferences of the IEI: ‘When I remarked that in England examinations were under suspicion and in America under arrest, Professor Bovet added that in Switzerland they had been tried and convicted’ (Ballard 1937, as cited in Lawn 2008, 12). Nonetheless, over the course of seven years, Thorndike and other psychologists argued within an emerging discourse of reliability and objectivity of universal standards and numerical analyses, which was beginning to overpower the idea of qualitative assessment of other, usually national, education systems (Lawn 2008).

The IEI came to an end with the outbreak of the second world war. Its innovative contribution to the spread of this particular educational discourse was however not lost after its resolution. Strikingly, however, the members of the IEI in the years following the Inquiry poured their newly gained insights into education research and policy making in national rather than international incentives of educational progress. The Scottish representatives were all members of the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE), founded just a few years before the IEI in 1928 by teachers themselves, not by government. This was a rather loose but widely dispersed network of educational actors (teachers, professors, psychologists) who during the period of IEI and long after implemented the ideas of scientific educational research and policy making in Scotland, representing in nuce the sciento-social epistemology that had been developed centuries ago in the same place, in the meantime, however, closer linked to political government and its funding. Notably, in the year following the first meeting of the IEI, the SCRE undertook a nation-wide Mental Survey in 1932, testing every 11-year-old Scottish child’s intelligence on the same day – June 1st – through a standardised and statistically evaluable test (Deary, Whalley, and Star 2009). The results of this survey were published in 1933 by SCRE and the trust in its value is already demonstrated by the very confident title The intelligence of Scottish children: A National Survey of an age-group (SCRE 1933). The Mental Survey was only one of many following scientific examinations of Scottish education that was carried out during Scottish membership of the IEI and after its resolution. The contribution of the SCRE, which in the 1930s received one third of its funding from the Carnegie Corporation, is in contemporary education research discussed as ‘an indispensable agent in the internationalising of American education and its methods and concerns’ (Lawn, Deary, and Bartholomew 2008, 134). Like the Scottish representatives, many others continued to implement and develop this ‘American educational dream’ on a national level after the second world war (Lawn 2008, 27), however not nearly as rapidly and thoroughly as their US colleagues did, whose determination to controlled education for the social, economic and political progress was unmatched at the time.

5. The Cold War, Sputnik, the reorganisation of national education, and imperial prospects

The eminent American educational historian, David Tyack, had convincingly proposed that the two reform groups of US American education that emerged around 1900 be named ‘pedagogical progressives’ on the one hand (foremost pragmatism), and ‘administrative progressives’ on the other (foremost test psychology, behaviourism) as an expression of a ‘centralization movement’ in the US (Tyack 1974, 126–129). These two movements remained alien to each other for decades; while the teachers and teacher unions belonged primarily to the ‘pedagogical progressives’, most school administrators and municipal education policymakers were part of the ‘administrative progressives’.

They clashed violently only in a new era of deep national crisis that broke out at one of the first high points of the Cold War, the launch of the satellite Sputnik by the USSR in autumn 1957. In the eyes of most Americans, it was simply impossible that a system like communism, which in their eyes was completely inhuman, could manage to gain a technical (and thus indirectly a military) lead over the USA. It had been evident to Americans since the nineteenth century that technical progress was always an expression of a well-functioning democracy and an expression of divine providence, which, in their eyes, could only be true in the case of the United States (Nye 1994). What in principle was never allowed to happen, had to have – since it had now happened in spite of everything – a (bad) culprit; and that was the schools and the teachers. Consequently, the need for a comprehensive reform of the American education system, in view of the threat to national security, seemed urgently necessary. This educationalization of the Cold War demanded that the school and its development be transferred into hands other than those of the teachers. Francis Keppel, the son of the former President of the Carnegie Corporation who had promoted the International Examination Inquiry, meanwhile US Commissioner of Education, stated in 1965 that ‘Education is too important to be left solely to the educators’ (Keppel 1965, title page).

This statement, which after all made it to the front page of Time Magazine, was, however, a kind of plagiarism for, five years earlier, Walter W. Heller, economic advisor to the President of the United States, had said at the second OECD conference in Washington DC in 1961: ‘May I say that, in this context, the fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators’ (OECD 1961, 35). What had to be considered good policy at the national level had a global equivalent, and the OECD should become the arena for the global colonisation of this particular sciento-social epistemology which has now been vehemently opposed by the teaching staff and its affinity to pragmatism; or, how it was called since the end of the Second World War, to ‘life adjustment education’.

Now the whole reservoir of argumentation, as it had been promoted in the first decades of the twentieth century at Teachers College and by the CFAT, was reactivated for national salvation. The opposition was clear, teachers and life adjustment education, and so was the solution: national standards with regard to clearly defined knowledge and skills that were to be defined and monitored by private parties, not the state and its agencies. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, one of the activists, attacked those doctrines of ‘life adjustment’: ‘If the local school continued to teach such pleasant subjects as ‘Life Adjustment’ and ‘How to know when you are really in love’, instead of French and physics, its diploma would be, for all the world to see, inferior. Taxpayers will begin to wonder whether they are getting their money’s worth’ (Time Magazine 1957). In this same context, Rickover asked for national standards in education and a system of incentives controlled by a private agency. ‘In some fashion we must devise a way to introduce uniform standards into American education. It would be best to set up a private agency, a Council of Scholars, financed by our colleges and universities as a joint undertaking – or perhaps by Foundations. This council would set a national standard for the high school diploma, as well as for the scholastic competence of teachers (Time Magazine 1957). Education should follow the example of medical education, as it had developed triggered by the above-mentioned large survey sponsored by the CFAT, the Medical Education in the United States and Canada (Flexner 1910). Rickover said: ‘High schools accepting this standard would receive official accreditation, somewhat in the order of the accreditation given [to] medical schools and hospitals’ (Time Magazine 1957).

What followed has been told several times before (see Tröhler 2010; 2013; 2014; Bürgi 2017; Bürgi and Tröhler 2018; Ydesen 2019; Ydesen and Bomholt 2020). The incentives, which were introduced by the 1958 National Defense Education Act for the promotion of science, mathematics and foreign languages at high schools (i.e., almost identical to the preferred areas of competence in the PISA study), were gladly accepted by the schools, but were used for their own purposes such as the renovation of school buildings or the construction of modern sports facilities. The state authorities and their constitutional impotence to exert concrete influence on the schools subsequently developed a system to measure the impact of the corresponding activities in the schools. The idea was that those schools who by virtue of federal money invested more in mathematics, science and foreign languages would have corresponding results that could be assessed. Accordingly, from now on only those schools that could prove that they had made ‘the right progress’ would continue to receive federal money. It was precisely for this purpose that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was founded in 1964, with funds from the Carnegie Corporation, which developed a test programme that later became the basis for PISA; again, the national solution was to serve a global solution, even if in most of the countries around the world state authorities do have, in fact, power to reform schools. In 1969, after long arguments and fights with the teachers’ unions, the first comparative performance test was performed.

Developments in the USA and the OECD countries ran largely parallel, but always with a certain time lag. The OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) was founded in 1968 and was tasked to develop tools to produce indicator-based information on the various education systems in a comparative way.

However, the major national unrests associated with ‘1968’, the Vietnam War, race riots, social inequalities and the hippie movement absorbed the reform initiatives on a national level and brought a little more calmness at the OECD level for several years. This changed under the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), who first had to fight the severe crisis in the automobile industry, which – typical of an educationalized culture – was not seen as a technical challenge (people were buying Japanese and Korean cars instead of American cars because they used far less gasoline), but as an educational one. The deep crisis in the automotive industry was seen as a national challenge, and Reagan appointed a commission to write a report that – again – brought together national crisis and school reform. This report written by a ‘National Commission of Excellence’ (1983) – A Nation at Risk highlighted the failures of the education system in view of the economy and stated ‘an imperative for educational reform’, as the subtitle of the report claimed.

This policy was now to be transferred to the entire OECD, but the European member countries in particular resisted this request as, in their opinion, the national school systems could not be compared on the basis of indicators due to their historical differences: many of them seemed to doubt the feasibility and the usefulness of international comparisons and favoured the more ‘individual’ development of the single education systems. The American representative then threatened the CERI that the American contributions would be deducted if the Europeans did not agree to resume the collection of comparable indicators in the field of education, which was all the more powerful as the contributions made to the CERI by the Ford Foundation had expired (for an anecdotal recollection of the CERI board of directors meeting in 1983, see quote by Stephen P. Heyneman (1983) in Grek & Ydesen's (2021) contribution in this issue). Despite skepticism among the CERI staff, the United States’ concern was accepted and the path to the first OECD report paved: In 1993 the first report labelled Education at a Glance was published; a most remarkable witness of a sciento-social epistemological transfer and dissemination from one nation to (at least one part of) the world (OECD 1993). Eight years later, the results of the first PISA-study were published (OECD 2001), which were taken so seriously that it was believed they actually reflected the real state of the school system, which must be reformed accordingly. This took a few years, but most states have since begun to submit themselves to the religious power of this sciento-social epistemological model and have begun to plough their school systems so that they would perform better on the next test. Just like the church members under the supervision of the General Assembly in Scotland or the individual schools under the supervision of the US-American testing authorities, now the nation states were to obtain the favour of the OECD and show themselves to be obedient actors and that could expect praise and blessing, deserving to be worthy member in this ‘temple of growth’ (Schmelzer 2016).

6. OECD as a bridge for the mission of the dominant US-national sciento-social epistemology

The founding of the OECD in 1961 was no coincidence. Its predecessor organisation, the OEEC, had emerged from the Marshall Plan with the aim of rebuilding Europe’s economy. With the first major national crisis in the USA, however, which had arisen with Sputnik in the fall of 1957, not only the American education system was to be reformed on the basis of binding standards and evidence-based education policy, but also, if possible, all the participating states of the OEEC, which Canada and the USA now wanted to join personally. Even before the OECD was founded, the Americans had wanted to disseminate a completely new form of mathematics, New Math. For this purpose, a seminar was organised lasting several days in the former Royaumont Monastery (near Paris) in 1959, based on comprehensive country reports, with the aim of convincing countries to reorganise the teaching of mathematics in order to fabricate the new rational ‘man’ equipped for the Cold War; the American chairman was Howard Franklin Fehr, Math professor at Teachers College (OECD 1961). The OECD, whose educational policy activities were largely funded by American foundations, was to take over the global role played by Teachers College in the US. Although the OECD is a governmental organisation, it has no power of direct political decision, but can only make convincing cases derived from what it considers to be evidence-based data.

The extent to which belief in this sciento-social epistemology was able to spread, sometimes with the threat of financial aid being cut off, is shown by the fact that, according to the first PISA report, several countries now had enough ‘evidence’ of their inadequate education system to start redesigning it so that it would perform better on tests in the future. All the elements contained in this epistemology, which were American-national and Presbyterian, were somehow unquestionably adopted and paved the way for global imperialization. Not only is it believed that the data collected actually reflect one’s own school reality, but it is also used, especially against the background of ‘international comparison’, as an opportunity to redesign one’s own system by introducing standards and competencies that can be measured and compared both here and there. Test psychologists collect the data that carry their own normativity, but which are regarded as evidence that is available to those responsible for education policy in their policies.

Against this background, it is not surprising that tests like PISA contain hardly any features that make them truly scientific; there are no intelligent and state-of-the-art based research questions, the tests are secret, the methods used are applied but not reflected, and the results are not published after a peer review process, but by the company itself. The belief system contained in this sciento-social epistemology shows that politics acts accordingly. The fact that it also contains a conviction that the state is not the panacea has led many critics to interpret it as the expression of a neo-liberal ideology. But this does not go far enough. It is not simply a matter of the greatest possible economic freedom, for which children should be made fit, but of a thoroughly moral vision of social order, which orients its policies less democratically than data-based expertocratically. This was already the case in Scotland in the 16th century, and this model was about to be realised in the USA around 1900, but it took the Cold War to become dominant in America and the OECD to spread globally – also and especially after the end of the Cold War. Thus, the main theories, ideas, and styles of reasoning – one of the central themes of this special issue – underlying the development of today’s dominant educational policies must also be seen against the background of a long-standing religious, or more precisely Presbyterian, legacy of the social order and the way we think about education.

The Cold War has been over for over 30 years, but this particular hierarchic, non-governmental religious idea of an order of the world is not. And it profits from the fact that both activists as well as critics see themselves as heirs of a secular enlightenment and therefore have no sensibilities to recognise belief systems and ideas of salvation behind the reorganisations of social life that follow one particular sciento-social epistemology that easily manages to have both national and imperial effects at the same time. There have always been faithfuls who long for salvation, and often children have become the first objects of their desires. If he still could, John Knox would be happy, and John Calvin probably too.

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Notes

1 How these two Calvinist denominations emerged and developed in the course over the centuries, how they entailed distinct educational theories and how these differed from Lutheran inspired ideas of German Bildung see Tröhler 2020b.

2 Of course, there were several institutional places in the world where psychometry was developed. Yet, Teachers College is the place where the epistemological amalgam of knowledge and governance was developed in a particularly sustainable manner and which later first established itself in the USA and from there – not least through the OEEC and OECD – globally dissimilated.

3 Like Butler, Eliot was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Chairmen of the so-called Committee of Ten, formulating recommendations for the future High Schools on behalf of the National Education Association (National Education Association of the United States 1894).

4 Ever since these days, medicine was the forerunner of standardization and the preoccupation with its way of conducting research paved the way for educational reforms inspired by the OECD, whose epistemology is thoroughly medicalized (Tröhler 2015).

5 In the decades leading up to the Scottish Reformation Rebellion an ambiguity towards the Protestant movement is evident in the ruling powers of Scotland. James V had, for example, tolerated moderate forms of Protestantism to be practiced in Scotland even though he strongly rejected heresy (Ryrie 2006).

6 After James’ V sudden death in 1542, his daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, who was born the same year, was next in line for the Scottish throne. During her childhood years, her regent, the Earl of Arran, attempted briefly to reform the Scottish Church in accordance with Protestant England (Ryrie 2006).

7 The most prominent figures of the Scottish Reformation – John’s Douglas, Knox, Row, Spottiswoode, Willock and Winram – are commonly referred to under the collective ‘the six Johns’ as they all shared the same first name. The most well-known of the six John’s, however, was undoubtedly John Knox who had ministered in Geneva and experienced Calvinist preaching by non-other than his namesake John Calvin himself.

8 Remarkably, this nation-wide school system was in the main realised by the eighteenth century (Anderson 1995).

9 The Carnegie Corporation of New York is another philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States and later worldwide. In 1923 Frederik P. Keppel became its president for almost 20 years.

10 Also present at the first of these conferences was Graham Wallas, who in 1917 with the book The Great Society (Wallas 1914) had provided the slogan of the American reformers, then Henry Suzallo, who after having worked at Teachers College had replaced Pritchett as director of CFAT on 1930.

11 Bovet was a Genevan Protestant psychologist, son of a Swiss Protestant minister and husband of Amy Babut, daughter of a French Huguenot minister.