EDUCATION

Why Education Becomes So Pervasive

Education becomes a dominant institution only with industrialization or, as is often the case today,
with concerted efforts by the governments of undeveloped or underdeveloped societies to
encourage industrialization through mass education (and, I should add, political loyalty). For most of
human history, however, education was Informal and consisted of children simply watching their
elders and, for specific skills, being Instructed by their parents and relatives (J. Turner, 1972).
Religious and social elites were perhaps the first to receive formal training; later more formal
education was probably extended to nonelites who showed promise and to apprentices In some
trades. But still, education remained recessive. lodged in kinship; and only for a relative few did
explicit and formal structures exist. In traditional China, however, formal education had a much
longer tradition and was perhaps extended to larger numbers, being the reward for bright children
of respectable families who wanted to place at least one of their children in the Imperial
bureaucracy. Thus, for most of the agrarian era, education was primarily an institution for religious,
military, and governmental elites. It was extended to the masses only with industrialization.

Educational structures expanded because they were needed, and functionalists would argue that
they have become prominent because of their major functions, including (J Tumer, 1972)
socialization of necessary skills, knowledge,

dispositions, and beliefs to the young, social placement of people into the society, on the basis of
educational credentials; cultural storage in libraries and in the

minds of teachers and scholars of knowledge; and, increasingly, cultural innovation in the creation of
new ideas and symbols, most particularly those with technological implications. Other
interpretations of why formal education expands are less benign.

Conflict theories often argue that education in modern capitalist societies like

ours is geared toward indoctrinating people into beliefs (about private property

competition, and individualism, for example) and role-playing skills necessary

for a market-driven economy controlled by economic and political elites (Apple,

1982; Apple and Weis, 1983). Schools also provide the technical and administrative knowledge
necessary for running a capitalist economic system, and so,

education is tied to the economy in ways that perpetuate the existing class system

(Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Apple, 1982).

Other conflict theories stress the importance of education for pacifying those

who do not make it economically in the society; for, if schools are open to all and

are the key to success in getting ahead, failure to do well in school and, hence,
secure a decent job are the person's "own fault." They had their chance and did

not take advantage of it. More generally, schools are seen to indoctrinate children

into the values and beliefs of dominant economic, political, and status groups,

forcing all to define themselves and their successes or failures by the yardstick of elites (Collins,
1976).

Indeed, some have argued that credentialism, or the necessity of securing

degrees to gain access to jobs, forces people like you to accept what the schools

demand, if you want to do well. As Randall Collins (1979) points out, these

credentials often bear little relationship to technical job requirements which, for

the most part, can be learned on the job. Credentials become an easy way to sort

and select potential workers without great effort, and they become a way to

certify that a worker is committed to the system. But credentialism is inherently

inflationary in this sense: The more people who get them, the less their value in

securing desirable jobs, and as a result, the more people must secure additional

credentials to stand out in the job market. A high school diploma was once (and

probably still is in the technical sense) enough for most routine service and

bureaucratic jobs, but now a college degree is often required. And increasingly,

if one wants to stand out from the pack, additional credentials are needed.

However, the more credentials a person receives, the more one certifies the way

the current social order is structured. If you feel that you are on an educational

treadmill which is speeding up, there are good reasons for this feeling. Yet, while

the extra increment of income that comes with each educational credential is

decreasing, a person will still make much more money with these credentials.

For example, among those at their income peak (40 to 65 years old), only 10

percent of families with less than high school degrees made over $50,000 in 1990,

28 percent of those with high school degrees did so;30 percent with some college

accomplish this level of income; 58 percent with a college degree could do it; and

65 percent with a graduate degree managed to secure this kind of income (Stark, 1992, p. 487).

Still other theories combine elements of functional and conflict arguments.

John Meyer (1977), for example, argues that levels of education are the key to
entrance into status groups and to the prestige and honor that they offer. A high

school degree allows you to claim only a certain amount of status, a college

degree somewhat more, a master's degree even more, and an M.D. or a Ph.D.

allows you to be "royal" in some contexts. At each stage, the function of

education is the dissemination of the proper demeanor, attitudes, and dispositions for all the status
groups which will be open to you with a particular

credential.

Meyer also emphasizes that educational structures are hardly passive,

stamping people out so that they can be cogs in the existing system. Educational

structures, especially colleges and universities, create new elite positions in the

occupational sphere. Education generates new knowledge, new credentials, and

new positions in the economy; and the more an economy engages in work that

involves information as opposed to machines, the more the educational structures have power to
dictate to economic and political elites what they need-

whether it be Ph.D. scientists, MBAS, or law school graduates. None of these

credentials served as job requirements during early industrialism; now, they are

indispensable to modern corporations.

Thus, educational systems emerge to do many things in a modern society-

necessary functional things like socialize the young, place people in the economy,

store culture, and innovate; and less obviously functional things like (1) generate

commitments to the existing order as defined by elites, (2) blame people rather

than the order for their lack of success, and (3) keep people on a credential's

treadmill to certify their commitment to the society and its political economy.

Moreover, as education becomes a dominant institution, it also becomes a

powerful force in its own right, and it begins to define what credentials, knowledge, and positions a
society should have

Basic Elements of Education

Educational structures all consist of two basic status positions: teacher and

student. As educational structures become large and complex, processing ever

larger numbers of students, new positions are added--administrators, librarians,

computer-related jobs, research, maintenance, and so on. School structures inevitably become
bureaucratized as they get larger, and they come to form a system

of bureaucracies that constitutes a career for students who move from primary,

to secondary, to college, and to graduate schools. And there is an amazing

consensus over the cultural symbols--beliefs and norms--about how people

should act in, and react to, this system, although in America there is perhaps

more controversy over these symbols than in other societies (there are good

structural reasons for this, as we will see shortly).

We can thus define the institution of education as a system of formal

bureaucratic structures designed to socialize, facilitate the placement of peopleinto the society, to
store knowledge, to generate new systems of culture. At the

same time, education has many additional consequences (some intended, others

not) for creating and perpetuating class and status group boundaries and for

forcing commitments to the existing social order.

Education in America

Like its counterparts in the modern industrial world, the American education

system is hierarchical, composed of three basic levels: the primary, the secondary, and the higher
(college) educational systems; and like its counterparts in

other countries, it uses a combination of grades and standardized examinations

for evaluating and sorting students. But the American system is unique in several

important ways (J. Turner, 1972).

One is that, unlike all other modern systems, the American system is decentralized. There is no
"ministry of education" at the federal level that funds and

sets the curriculum for all the schools. Instead, through a wide variety of federal

programs-from school lunch programs to Operation Head Start-money

comes from the federal government to local school districts, but there is no

coordinated plan for these diverse monies. Moreover, about half the budget for
primary and secondary schools comes from local and state taxes. This fact leads

to the belief-and a very powerful one-that primary and secondary schools are

local and should reflect local needs and interests rather than those of remote state

and federal government. For, Americans believe more than any other people in

the world that community sentiment and pressure should guide educational

policy; and it is for this reason that local school boards are elected and adjunct

organizations like the PTA are so prominent. At the higher-education level, even

more decentralization and autonomy exist. Colleges and universities are funded

by student tuition and fees, state and local tax monies, research grants, private

gifts, interest earned on endowments, and a limited number of federal programs.

A second distinctive feature of the American educational system is that much

of it is private. At the lower level (primary and secondary schools), private elite

schools, schools for problem children, and church schools all exist alongside a

system of public schools. Virtually all the funding for these private schools

comes from tuition, donations, and perhaps interest from an endowment. At the

higher level, many colleges and universities are private, with most if not all of

their budget coming from tuition, gifts, and interest from the endowment. A few

elite, research-oriented universities receive a significant amount of income from

federal, state, and corporate research grants.

A third feature of the American system is that it tracks students within the

school on the basis of grades and standardized exams, whereas in most other

societies, students are sent to different types of secondary schools on separate

campuses. The result is that considerable mixing of students in different tracks

occurs in American schools; indeed, these are usually explicit efforts to force such

mixing. In other societies, college-bound or college-eligible students are sent to

their own schools, with various types of vocational training in separate schools

offered to those who did not make the college grade.

A fourth unique feature of American schools is their lack of rigid barriers to

college. There is a vast system of junior colleges (which do not exist in other

societies) to provide the first two years of college for those who cannot afford,

or who did not qualify the first time around. Moreover, the sheer scale of
American higher education creates opportunities. For example, there are close

to 2000 colleges and universities in America; very few other societies even

approach 100. This volume of options for students with varying levels of skill

and accomplishment creates many more opportunities than in other societies

Indeed, it is not an unreasonable guess that when junior and regular four-year

colleges are combined, there are more higher-education opportunities in America than in the rest of
the world, certainly the modern world, combined.

Higher education is also somewhat unique because much of the basic

research and innovation for the society is conducted in universities, creating a

large number of graduate school opportunities. In many other societies, basic

research is done primarily in separate academies of science or in private industry.

In America, such academies tend to be honorific organizations, with most basic

research being conducted in universities, in research and development departments of large

corporations, and in a few corporate laboratories, such as Bell

Labs, devoted to basic research.

Many problems are perceived to exist in the American system (Tumer and

Musick, 1985). One is the declining test scores of children and adolescents in

American schools, relative to students in the past and to students in other

countries. Whether the school is the blame here ("bad teachers," "ineffective

administrators," and the like) or working parents and perhaps too much television (from cartoons to
MTV) is unclear. Probably all are involved, but no solutions

currently appear viable, especially as tax revenues to schools level off or decline.

Another perceived problem is that the schools do not effectively reach large

categories of students, especially poor and minority students. If these students

cannot do well, they will not have "equal opportunities"; and while programs

exist to overcome the problems (in home and neighborhood) of poor and

minority children, results are mixed. With each year of school, more affluent

children pull away from poorer ones on all standardized test scores, indicating

that family, neighborhood, and peers have powerful effects on school performance. And as poor
students get discouraged, they drop out of high schools at
much higher rates, killing forever their chances for success in the society. How,

then, is the school to overcome these effects? There is no easy answer.

Another dilemma revolves around the class and cultural bias of the schools:

They reflect middle-class and white beliefs about what should occur. And these

biases are built into the whole system of competitive grading and standardized

tests with largely white, Anglo content. Critics charge that children with different

beliefs, language, and life experiences can never do well in a system so rigged

against them. Defenders counter that the schools reflect the nature of skilled jobs

in the society, and if children are to be successful in the real world, they had better

learn to perform in the schools. The dilemma is that both positions are correct,

and how is one or the other side to be weighed in formulating school policy?

Again, there is no easy answer.