Not sure who coined the phrase “Education Industrial Complex”, a play off the more famous “Military Industrial Complex” used by President Eisenhower in a 1961 speech. I kept thinking it was radical educator and public school critic John Taylor Gatto, but in my research on the Internet could not find any confirmation of that. I did find a use of the term by Paul Peterson, director of Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard Kennedy School, in a 2008 commentary...
Around 1970 or thereabouts, the educational-industrial complex was hammered into place: School boards gave teachers collective bargaining rights. State governments assumed greater responsibility for financing the schools. The courts instructed schools on the civil liberties of their students. Regulations multiplied. America gained a federal Department of Education. And state and federal dollars poured into the system.
Behind your perhaps unassuming neighborhood public schools is a true leviathan of money, power, politics and influence that supports (or feeds on, depending on your point of view) the maintenance of a national institution that manages the compulsory twelve years of schooling for some 50 million American kids. An institution that may employ as many as 25 million adults in the school system itself and the plethora of vendors that support it in various ways.
FYI... I am concerned that Kossacks in their focus on for-profit charter schools are missing what I think is the real story that big business may have in fact taken over the entire public education system and their drive for ever greater profits are keeping it from naturally evolving as it otherwise would!
According to education blogger Dave Chandler from his piece “More of the Same: Obama and Schools”...
Our 'education' establishment is very much about preserving a multi-hundred-billion-dollar spending machine. Corporations make tremendous profit from selling high tech hardware and software to virtually every school district in the nation. Textbook companies and testing companies and education consulting companies and pension investment advising companies and public relations firms and bond dealers... Then there are the politicians who get campaign contributions from the above mentioned special interests and the 'educrat' administrators who make hundred thousand dollar a year salaries.
The Corrosive Influence of So Much Money to be Made
Like any other area where so much money is involved, the effort tends to be torqued towards protecting (if not outright corrupted by) the vested interests that reap a financial reward from maintaining the status quo. In the case of the American public school system, that business as usual seems to have become a perpetual inside-the-box “reform” that involves the development, marketing and mass consumption of the latest textbooks and social-science-based learning programs and the perpetuation and growth of an entrenched bureaucratic hierarchy of educational staff above and beyond the actual teachers that interact with the actual students.
I found it thought provoking to read some of the text from Eisenhower's 1961 speech from the Wikipedia article on the “Military Industrial Complex”...
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we mus not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
What Eisenhower called out as new in 1961 appears to be replicating in the business of education, for not unlike defense spending, it is difficult for any politician on either side of the political spectrum to oppose ever increasing funding.
I regularly scan the articles featured on-line in Education Week magazine, which I understand to be the most widely read education “industry” publication in the country. Its pieces focus on developing and implementing curricula, training and managing teachers and principals, standardized testing and how to finance it all. Given that all these things are intended to facilitate student success, there seems to be very little in its pages directly about those students.
Promoting Business Efficiency in Schools
All this focus on education as big business I think leads to the kind of thinking expressed by Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of Stanford's School of Education and a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration...
Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
When I first read this quote to my partner Sally, she thought (since he was an ed school academic in the progressive era of John Dewey) that he was critiquing the "factory model" of education. I had to tell her that he was in fact promoting it! My understanding of the thinking of that period was that since public schools were expensive and people generally thought that "the business of America is business", that couching public education in the business assembly line model would put concerned taxpayers more at ease.
What I find particularly disturbing as a parent (whose kids spent a number of years in public schools) is that with all this focus on education as a major “industry”, I fear that the development of individual young human beings gets lost in the shuffle. It is subsumed by a focus on making incremental improvements in standardized testing statistics of large populations of our youth. How does that translate into a unique young soul having an enriched environment to pursue their own development?
My fear is expressed by social critic H.L. Mencken's words from The American Mercury in 1924...
The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
As a parent I don't think we should have to surrender our kids to a huge impersonal system that is more about its financial bottom line, political posturing and testing statistics than providing an enriched environment for our youth to best pursue their own development.
The Educational Leviathan
So what is the impact of this hugely hierarchical and bureaucratic leviathan on the very personal, naturally self-initiated process of learning. These mega institutions that exercise such control over us, rather than facilitating our own initiative (though well intentioned) I see as a growing obstacle to our continuing human development in the direction of a a more evolved “Circle of Equals”.
To set what's at stake here, Dave Chandler's words I think capture the essence of this leviathan I am wrestling with, from his piece “More of the Same: Obama and Schools”...
Our 'education' establishment is very much about preserving a multi-hundred-billion-dollar spending machine. Corporations make tremendous profit from selling high tech hardware and software to virtually every school district in the nation. Textbook companies and testing companies and education consulting companies and pension investment advising companies and public relations firms and bond dealers... Then there are the politicians who get campaign contributions from the above mentioned special interests and the 'educrat' administrators who make hundred thousand dollar a year salaries.
In a well-intentioned effort to ensure that every kid in America can get a quality education (certainly a progressive humanistic goal that I heartedly support) kids are compelled (with the force of truancy laws and social convention) to spend approximately one quarter of their waking hours from age five or six until age seventeen or eighteen in school. That is the reality, perhaps framed by me with a more negative spin than most people usually contextualize our participation in the K-12 education system.
Your response to this framing might be, “Kids should be so lucky!”, and for millions of American kids, their local public schools represent perhaps their only opportunity to escape from a hostile and non-nurturing environment of poverty, danger and irrelevance. Those youth would certainly not be well served if suddenly all our public schools were closed and the millions of adults, who perform their critical service working with our youth as teachers, no longer could offer that service.
But given that, I am a firm believer that learning (and a human being's education) is essentially an intimately personal process that has to be self-initiated and self-directed to be most effective. Others (including teachers, parents and other mentors) can participate in that process when called-upon or otherwise needed by the learner. Think “when the student is ready the teacher will come”.
But it is hard to self-direct ones learning when you are compelled to spend so much time within a huge bureaucratic institution where what you learn, who you learn it from, where you learn it, when you learn it and how you learn it is pretty much mandated by people other than yourself, and to make matters worse, people you have no knowledge of or redress to. That is a hierarchical top-down control model with a vengance, creating an educational environment IMO that is completely out of whack with the natureal process of human learning.
Bureaucratic Rules Rather than Genuine Relationships Between Student and Mentor
The classic anecdote is the student just getting into their current project, whether writing a poem, looking through a microscope or finally grasping a difficult mathematical concept, when the bell rings and they are forced to move on to the next class instead of following their natural inclination to stick with a compelling learning experience.
Add to this that instead of monitoring the pace and effectiveness of ones own learning, you are constantly judged by the adults around you who continually conduct high-stakes evaluation of your academic output and your behavior as you attempt to produce that output. This is necessary because in a huge bureaucratic institution with top-down control, the people who are responsible for your learning are not your teachers, but someone farther removed. That farther removed person has no opportunity to interact with you as a human being and personally size up your development. Instead they have to rely on an abstract system of numeric evaluation and ranking reducing your human uniqueness into a single number or letter that says nothing directly about you, but merely how their abstract criteria compare you to others.
If the learning process was just about you, or even just about you and your teacher, then all this extensive testing, grading and ranking would be unnecessary.
But in the process of all that high-stakes evaluation, the intimate internal human process of learning gets torqued into an exercise in competition with others, where your own self-evaluation and internal compass is not as important as how you are viewed by others and in comparison to others. Like myself at many points in my own school experience, students can get caught up in seeing education (and maybe life in general) not as a self-directed voyage of discovery and development, but a stressful negotiation of a maze that depends on impressing others towards getting some hidden “cheese” at the other end.
My Own Experience
I can remember my own experience in fifth and sixth grade with the SRA reading program. One of those “innovative new programs” sold by a big education vendor to school systems including in the town I grew up in. It included all these short essays in shiny color-coded (by degree of difficulty) pamphlets. I remember getting into doing the program like a trained seal, getting excited when I completed each essay, successfully answered the questions, got my little gold star and eventually transitioned (happy day!) to the next more difficult color. The content of what I read I quickly forgot once I had successfully taken the little quiz at the end. All I wanted was to be one of the cool kids who were already reading the purple pamphlets and not the red ones any more.
So instead of giving me the opportunity to sit down with a good, memorable science-fiction book of my choice and set fire to my imagination, I was instead getting addicted to this fabricated reading program that the Ann Arbor school district probably spent tons of money on which was teaching me to read for the joy of “leveling up” rather than the joy of the content of what I was reading. Again, most likely a well-intentioned program to help kids with their reading skills while bringing a handy profit to the company that created it.
A Top-Down Market-Driven & Statistics-Driven Education
The point here was that the SRA program was not designed to meet my needs as an individual learner, but designed instead to address a market need based on statistical data about student reading skill development. The product was crafted by analysts and technicians that had no idea who I was or what I was interested in learning. I was not the customer whose needs were being satisfied by this learning tool, it was the school district, that could say they had a “state-of-the-art” reading program. By being directed by my teachers to use it, my own inner direction and inherent joy of reading was being compromised.
And think of most teachers' experience in this huge bureaucracy. They generally have less and less control of the educational process themselves, and instead have ever-increasing administrative and testing functions, plus more and more scripted curricula they need to follow. And the trend is towards evaluating teachers too using the same sort of reductionist criteria, reducing their professionalism to a number that compares them against others. Again, I see this as a result of the degrees of separation between the decision-makers at the state level and the teachers that are impacted by those decisions.
Both the joy of learning and the art of teaching get lost in the shuffle, replaced by mandates on what, when, by whom and how from above. And again, mandates that are mostly well intentioned and are systemic OSFA (one size fits all) responses to learning issues discovered by looking at testing statistics for large populations of students.