Elite power and educational reform: An historiographical analysis of Canada and the United States

Abstract

In this article, I reopen some of the seminal theoretical debates among critical scholars on the nature of educational reform, arguing that there has been a consistent tendency in the literature to dismiss or downplay the significance of “instrumentalist” analyses in favour of cultural/hegemonic and structuralist explanations. As a result, education scholars who advance the instrumentalist emphasis on elite intervention in the policy process and the importance of organised class action have often been dismissed as one-dimensional and conspiratorial. To support this argument – and, by extension, those made by instrumentalist theorists – I bring together historical evidence from Canada and the United States in three historical periods: the mid-nineteenth century, the early twentieth century and post-Second World War. In each of these historical periods, I demonstrate how the structure and purpose of educational institutions were modified largely at the behest of economic elites (closely associated with political power and the professional educational establishment) in order to shape and implement a particular model of educational reform. Central to my argument is that powerful economic actors have always recognised the political nature of schooling and that elite class consciousness is and has been well-developed with respect to educational issues. The concluding section outlines the implications of my arguments for the future of educational reform.

Keywords:

• critical education theory
• instrumentalism
• class consciousness
• business activism
• educational reform

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Salena Brickey for reviewing and editing the paper and Bruce Curtis for his valuable guidance as well as Wallace Clement, Aaron Doyle, Neil Gerlach, Kevin Walby and Doug Lowther for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

¹Susan Saulny, “U.S. gives charter schools a big push in New Orleans”, New York Times, 13 June 2006.

²Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Alfred A. Knoff, 2007), 6.

³I am not inventing or re-inventing the term “instrumentalism” here, even though this concept is not typically used in the educational literature. Instrumentalism incorporates the work of “instrumental” Marxists such as Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1969) and G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power and Politics in the Year 2000 (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1998), as well as power elite theorists like C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) and Thomas Dye, Who’s Running America? The Clinton Years (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995). As a point of reference, I refer the reader to the debates between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas in the 1960s and 1970s. While this debate specifically concerned the relative autonomy of the state, it has come to represent a more general set of divisions between instrumentalism and structuralism.

⁴Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1993).

⁵See also Michael Apple (ed.), Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology and the State (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).

⁶For some of the classic expositions, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, La Escuela Capitalista (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1975); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976); and Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1985).

⁷Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

⁸Nicos Poulantzas, “The problem of the capitalist state”, New Left Review 58 (1969): 67–78.

⁹See, for example, Marvin Lazerson, Origin of Urban Schools: Public Education in Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1971); Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1968); and Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972).

¹⁰See note 6.

¹¹For some of the classic expositions, see Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977); and Peter McLaren, Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

¹²See, for example, Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (London: Collier Macmillan, 1977); Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983); and Aronowitz and Giroux, Education Still Under Siege.

¹³Henry Giroux, “Teacher education and the ideology of social control”, in Henry Giroux and David Purpel, eds. The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education (Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1983), 405.

¹⁴Aronowitz and Giroux, Education Still Under Siege, 31.

¹⁵Svi Shapiro, Between Capitalism and Democracy (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990), 103–104.

¹⁶Roger Dale, 1982. “Education and the capitalist state: Contributions and contradictions”, in Michael Apple, ed. Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology and the State (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 147.

¹⁷Michael Apple, Education and Power (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 138–139.

¹⁸Phillip Corrigan, Bruce Curtis and Robert Lanning, “The political space of schooling”, in Terry Wotherspoon, ed. The Political Economy of Canadian Schooling (Toronto: Methuen, 1987), 24–25.

¹⁹The most famous of these critiques is Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

²⁰For some early critiques of Bowles and Gintis’ work, see Gilbert Gonzales, Progressive Education: A Marxist Interpretation (Minneapolis, MN: Marxist Educational Press, 1982); Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey, eds. Power and Ideology in Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Willis, Learning to Labour.

²¹Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling For All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 18.

²²Daniel Liston, Capitalist Schools: Explanation and Ethics in Radical Studies of Schooling (New York: Routledge, 1988), 69.

²³Most of the discussion in these sections emphasises the similarities between the two countries under review; however, this is not meant to deny that the structure and content of school systems differ significantly across and within both nations. While educational traditions and structures within Canada have never mirrored those in the US, it is nonetheless true that “similarities in social forces, in economic development, and in political and cultural values produced educational systems with many of the same underlying features” (Michael Katz, “Introduction”, History of Education Quarterly 12 (1972): 253). Moreover, educational ideas from the US have always been highly influential in Canada. The majority of early Canadian educational reformers, for example, had at least some educational training in centres like Columbia, Chicago and Stanford. Canadian periodicals also routinely drew upon American sources to describe new educational developments. See, for example, Robert Patterson, “Society and education during the wars and their interlude”, in J. Donald Wilson, Robert Stamp and Louis Philippe Audet, eds. Canadian Education: A History (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall, 1970). This emphasis on educational similarities is also reflected in the focus on public school systems. While private schools occupy an important history in both the US and Canada, providing training and socialisation for many generations of economic and political elites, this article only engages with private schooling in relation to private non-profit universities in the US. Moreover, as this article is concerned primarily with educational reform in Canada and the US, it relies primarily on literature emanating from North America. It should be noted, however, that many of the same theoretical debates, arguments and conclusions outlined in this article have also been addressed in the European literature on education and schooling.

²⁴See Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Joel Spring, The American School, 1642–1985: Varieties of Historical Interpretation and the Foundations and Development of American Education (New York: Longman, 1986).

²⁵John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2005), 22.

²⁶See Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (London, Ontario: Althouse Press, 1988); Harvey Graff, “Respected and profitable labour”, in Gregory Kealey and Peter Warrian, eds. Essays in Canadian Working Class History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); and Stephen Schecter, “Capitalism, class and educational reform in Canada”, in Leo Panitch, ed. The Canadian State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

²⁷Schecter, “Capitalism, class and educational reform in Canada”, 375.

²⁸John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2003), 37.

²⁹Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform, 35.

³⁰Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1959), 77.

³¹Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 164. In addition, Alexander Field has shown that manufacturers viewed schools primarily as agencies of social control and made few references to technical requirements for skilled or educated labour. See Alexander Field, “Educational expansion in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts: Human capital formation or structural reinforcement?” Harvard Educational Review 46 (1976): 521–552.

³²Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (Boston, MA: James Munroe, 1844).

³³Susan Houston, “Politics, schools and social change in Upper Canada”, in Michael Katz and Paul Mattingly, eds. Education and Social Change: Themes from Ontario’s Past (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 41.

³⁴Some mill and factory owners in Canada offered to end the practice of child factory labour on the condition that education was compulsory. However, it is not clear if Canadian children would have welcomed the offer. For example, an informal survey of 500 working children in US factories found that over 80 per cent of them preferred to labour in the treacherous conditions of the factories than return to school (Gatto, The Underground History of American Education).

³⁵For similar reasons, Eastern capitalists were determined to have a say in how education developed in the West. Bankers, merchants and industrialists looked to public schools and colleges to teach unpredictable “frontier folk” proper economic doctrines and to ensure the security of their property rights. See Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators, 68–70 and Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 219.

³⁶Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators, 218.

³⁷Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, 32.

³⁸Haley Bamman, “Patterns of school attendance in Toronto, 1844–1878: Some spatial considerations”, in Michael Katz and Paul Mattingly, eds. Education and Social Change: Themes from Ontario’s Past (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 218.

³⁹Although alternative models of schooling were put forward by labour and other groups, they could not compete with the bureaucratic model favoured by elite reformers. For a discussion, see Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools (Chapter 1).

⁴⁰Egerton Ryerson, Report on a System of Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada (Montreal: Lovell and Gibson, 1847), 20.

⁴¹Terry Wotherspoon, “The incorporation of public school teachers into the industrial order: British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century”, in Pat Armstrong and M. Patricia Connelly, eds. Feminism, Political Economy and the State (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1999), 33.

⁴²For a good overview of the “New Education”, see Douglas Lawr and Robert Gidney, eds. Educating Canadians: A Documentary History of Public Education (Toronto: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973).

⁴³Alf Chaiton, “The National Council of Education: A case study of a voluntary, lay, extra-governmental organization in the inter-war period”, in J.H.A Wallin, ed. The Politics of Canadian Education (Alberta: Canadian Society for the Study of Education, 1977), 21–24.

⁴⁴Robert Stamp, “Education and the economic and social milieu: The English–Canadian scene from the 1870s to 1914”, in J. Donald Wilson, Robert Stamp and Louis Philippe Audet, eds. Canadian Education: A History (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall, 1970).

⁴⁵Graham Bleasdale, “Towards a political economy of capitalist educational values”, in Randle Nelson and David Nock, eds. Reading, Writing, and Riches: Education and the Socio-economic Order in North America (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1978), 17.

⁴⁶Nancy Jackson and Jane Gaskell, “White collar vocationalism: The rise of commercial education in Ontario and British Columbia, 1870–1920”, Curriculum Inquiry 17 (1987): 190.

⁴⁷It is worth noting that there was some opposition to the “New Education” agenda promoted by Canadian elites. Opponents of manual training included not only trade unions but also prominent Canadian educators. Vincent Massey, for one, deplored that manual training had become a “fetish” in primary schools. In his words, it was wrong to turn a school “into an elementary contractor’s workshop and to treat every lad as if he were a carpenter in embryo”. The Massey quote is taken from Robert Stamp, “Evolving patterns of education: English-Canada from the 1870s to 1914”, in Wilson et al., Canadian Education, 321.

⁴⁸While the emphasis here has been on elites as proponents of school reform, it is also worthwhile to note that the views of these proponents were often aligned with those of middle-class liberal reformers. In part, this alignment reflected a desire on the part of the middle class to allow increased access to education at the same time as preserving their own advantages within the system. The middle class supported the role of the educational system in tracking and streaming (stratifying) individuals and groups – ostensibly through meritocratic means – and thereby perpetuating the unequal allocation of social positions. This alliance also reflected broader political and ideological similarities between ruling elites and liberal middle-class reformers. For example, these groups both ascribed to the liberal assertion that schools should teach the values of sound citizenship, including those associated with subordination and obedience in the workplace, and to the views of liberal democratic theorists, who claimed that systems of schooling, like other democratic institutions, should function to pacify the population and legitimate the social order. Also, it was in the early decades of the twentieth century that liberal theorists began to discuss the importance of the “manufacture of consent” as a means of controlling the population in societies where the state did not have absolute authority to use force or violence; see, for example, Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922). For a useful discussion of liberalism and education, see also Howell Baum, Brown in Baltimore (New York: Cornell University Press, 2010).

⁴⁹Cited in Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 54–55 (emphasis in original).

⁵⁰Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 187.

⁵¹Scott Nearing, “Who’s who on our boards of education?”, School and Society 5 (1917): 89–90.

⁵²George Counts, The Social Composition of Boards of Education: A Study in the Social Control of Public Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1927); Upton Sinclair, The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools (Pasadena, CA: Author, 1924).

⁵³David Cohen and Marvin Lazerson, “Education and the corporate order”, Socialist Revolution 8 (1972): 47–72. Although the ideology and practice of scientific management was especially strong in the US, Canadian schools were not immune from its influences. For example, in “The incorporation of public school teachers into the industrial order”, Wotherspoon documents how schools in British Columbia were reorganised and governed like business enterprises in the early 1900s. This reorganisation was, in part, a response to a 1903 federal commission that expressed concern with rising working-class consciousness and class conflict in the province. Employing technical analyses of schooling adopted from scientific management, new pedagogical methods were introduced along with a reordering of educational administration and finance, all in an effort to induce “a new morality infused with dedication to the industrial order and corporate state” (p. 37).

⁵⁴Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

⁵⁵Teachers were also a target of business leaders. Teacher training textbooks, such as William Bagley’s widely circulated Classroom Management (1907), showcased the business ideology of the times. According to Bagley, the problems of classroom management were no different to those encountered in business. He advocated a mechanical, rigid and efficient classroom environment, one that would build solid industrial habits.

⁵⁶These efforts did not go unchallenged. Fearing that vocational education would threaten the power of unions and provide a source of cheap labour for industrialists, many labour unions and teachers’ organisations strongly opposed it. In cities such as Chicago, Atlanta and New York, resistance movements blocked early attempts at establishing dual systems of schooling, and even began their own labour colleges as an alternative to the public system.

⁵⁷Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, 121.

⁵⁸In referring to the “success” of vocational guidance, it is important to draw attention to the distinction between the effectiveness of the specific content of the formal curriculum and the overarching legitimation and social control functions of schooling. Many programmes of vocational education have been less than successful in providing workers with a skillset suited to work within industrial occupations. At the same time, what they have been effective in doing is instilling particular values, attitudes and ideologies, particularly with respect to practices of authority in the workplace. In this article, the focus is on the role of vocational and other forms of education in allocating people to social positions, providing a cover of legitimacy for this allocation, and inculcating a social consciousness in youth compatible with the capitalist work ethic. These educational programmes have been successful insofar as they have prepared people for the context of work in capitalist societies.

⁵⁹Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 32, 14.

⁶⁰Robin Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada 1663–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976).

⁶¹David Smith, Who Rules the Universities? An Essay in Class Analysis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).

⁶²David Noble, American by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

⁶³Phillip Enros, “The ‘Bureau of Scientific and Industrial Research and School of Specific Industries’: The Royal Canadian Institute’s attempt at organizing industrial research in Toronto, 1914–1918,” in Richard Jarrell and James Hull, eds. Science, Technology and Medicine in Canada’s Past: Selections from Scientia Canadensis (Thornhill, Ontario: Scientia Press, 1991), 211.

⁶⁴Phillip Enros, “The University of Toronto and Industrial Research in the early twentieth century”, in Richard Jarrell and Arnold Roos, eds. Critical Issues in the History of Canadian Science, Technology and Medicine (Kingston, Ontario: HSTC Publications, 1983).

⁶⁵Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum (Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 44.

⁶⁶Earl McGrath, “The control of higher education in America”, Educational Record 17 (1936): 259–272.

⁶⁷Scott Nearing, “Who’s who among college trustees?”, School and Society 6 (1917): 297–299. Similar conclusions are provided by Hubert Beck, Men Who Control Our Universities (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1947) and Counts, The Social Composition of Boards of Education.

⁶⁸Upton Sinclair, The Goose-step: A Study of American Education (Pasadena, CA: Author, 1923).

⁷⁰Ibid., 256.

⁶⁹Noble, America By Design, 180.

⁷¹Smith, Who Rules the Universities?

⁷²Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State, 61–63.

⁷³Smith, Who Rules the Universities?, 104.

⁷⁴Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada 1663–1960.

⁷⁵Smith, Who Rules the Universities?, 86.

⁷⁶Noble, America By Design, 158.

⁷⁷Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

⁷⁸By 1955, Business–Industry–Education days had involved over 36,000 companies and some 300,000 teachers.

⁷⁹Liston, Capitalist Schools, 111–112.

⁸⁰Employer organisations required that teachers attend workshops to familiarise themselves with the materials. “How Our Business System Operates” (HOBSO) was a typical example of such a programme. By 1956, the NAM had trained 2000 teachers to present HOBSO in their classes, and by the following year the programme was being used in over 12 per cent of all secondary schools in the US (See Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise). Efforts to impart a proper understanding of economics was also promoted by groups like Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System, the American Economic Foundation, the Joint Council on Economic Education, the Foundation for Economic Education and the Industrial Information Institute.

⁸¹Inger Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

⁸²Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, “Business propaganda in the schools: Labor’s struggle against the Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System, 1949–1954”, History of Education Quarterly 40 (2000): 255–278.

⁸³Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 234.

⁸⁴Robert Brady, Business as a System of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 217–218. These campaigns only increased in the following decades. Relevant details can be found in Sheila Harty, Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in the Schools (Washington, DC: Center for Study of Responsive Law, 1979). Harty notes a survey conducted in the 1970s by the Research Department of the National Education Association. It indicated that half of the teachers in the United States were using industry materials; 64 per cent of the Fortune’s 500, 90 per cent of the trade associations and 90 per cent of the utilities were sending “informational” materials to the schools. To meet these demands, a clearinghouse, known as The Institute for Constructive Capitalism, was established at the University of Texas to make corporate materials more available.

⁸⁵George Martell, “The schools, the state and the corporations”, in George Martell, ed. The Politics of the Canadian Public School (Toronto: James Lewis & Samuel, 1974).

⁸⁶Martell, “The schools, the state and the corporations”,11.

⁸⁷Terry Wotherspoon, The Sociology of Education in Canada: Critical Perspectives (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998).

⁸⁸Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.

⁸⁹Paul Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars: Politics, Economics and the Universities of Ontario 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).

⁹⁰Herbert Byleveld, Corporate Aid to Higher Education in Canada (Montreal: National Industrial Conference Board, 1966), 22.

⁹¹Paul Axelrod, “Business aid to Canadian universities – 1957–1965”, Interchange 11 (1980–81): 27 (emphasis added). To support these efforts, Canada’s advertising industry launched a nationwide media campaign to inform Canadians that the country faced serious dangers if higher education was not expanded, though it did not compare in size or scope to the American offensive.

⁹²John Barkans and Norene Pupo, “The board of governors and the power elite: A case study of eight Canadian universities”, Sociological Focus 7 (1974); Wallace Clement, The Canadian Corporate Elite: An Analysis of Economic Power (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975) 81–98.

⁹³Michael Ornstein, “Corporate involvement in Canadian hospital and university boards, 1946–1977”, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 25 (1988): 365–388.

⁹⁴Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars, 55.

⁹⁵Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise.

⁹⁹Gatto, The Underground History of American Education, 254–255.

⁹⁶For instance, by 1954–55 nearly 20 per cent of university graduates in the US were studying business and commerce, more than all students in the basic sciences and liberal arts combined (Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society).

⁹⁷Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 145.

⁹⁸US foundations also had considerable influence over Canadian social science in the post-war period. According to Harris (1976), the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations provided the majority of the funding for the Canadian Social Science Research Council from 1940 to 1957.

¹⁰⁰Proponents of the first view include John Dewey, “My pedagogic creed”, The School Journal 54 (1897): 77–80 and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). Proponents of the second include Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education (New York: Horizon Press, 1964); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, eds. The Limits of Educational Reform (New York: David McKay, 1976); and Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.