Education: Culture, Economy, Society

Citation

Duhs, L.A. (1998), "Education: Culture, Economy, Society", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 25 No. 11/12, pp. 1574-1577. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.1998.25.11_12.1574.2

Halsey and his co‐editors describe this book as a third attempt to review the scope and trends of sociological writing on education. The book is divided into six parts, on themes including Education, the Global Economy and the Labour Market; Politics, Markets and School Effectiveness; and Knowledge, Curriculum and Cultural Politics. In short, there isn’t much that is not covered. Prominent in the account, however, are such themes as the significance of education for economic development, the implications of constrained educational budgets and the prospect that market systems in education are likely to exacerbate educational inequalities since social classes do not come to the market as equals.

In the midst of sociological writings on postmodernism, feminism, racial stratification and the family are papers of more direct relevance to (social) economists on education, globalisation and economic development; the nature of the way open markets (would) operate in the case of schools; the relationship between education, democracy and the economy; the goals of the education system; and equity issues in higher education. In the main, what is offered is a kind of institutionalist critique of a neoclassical orthodoxy in the context of the education system. In so doing, various authors draw upon public choice theory, issues of market failure, and the influence of Hayek and Buchanan on the one hand as against the positional goods argument of Fred Hirsch and criticism of purely competitive market theory on the other. On occasion, they also draw on something akin to Bruno Frey’s arguments about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, as in Frey’s 1997 Not Just for the Money. Thus the theme of much of the book is rather the reverse of the Chicago School credo, being an affirmation that market failure (in education) may indeed be worse than government failure (in the supply of public education).

Selection for competing schools in a competitive market will be class‐biased, such that initial social and economic advantage is likely to be self‐reinforcing as social inequality is compounded by market forces. Purely competitive neoclassical assumptions will be violated in what is effectively a “positional good” market. The argument is much like Todaro’s Economic Development text in which Todaro argues, on institutionalist grounds, that international “trade, like education, tends to reinforce existing inequalities”. In Part Four, Brown, for example, contends that educational markets are class‐determined, and argues that the commercialisation of education changes the principles of provision and selection away from the ability and effort of the child to the wishes and wealth of the parents i.e. from “meritocracy” to “parentocracy”. In effect Brown asserts that markets will generate a greater social‐class polarisation between school intakes, and that New Right policies of marketisation of education should accordingly be opposed. Likewise, others are sceptical that choice can be used as a mechanism to promote greater equality of opportunity for people of colour in American inner cities. In a New Zealand study, Waslander and Thrupp similarly conclude (p. 455) that the concerns of market critics are justified and that socio‐economic segregation between schools has been exacerbated by market forces. To quote the editors (p. 359) “The assumptions of neoclassical economists are … confounded” in such studies. In Part Six others similarly conclude “that issues of ethnicity remain a major obstacle to the distribution of life chances according to merit” (p. 636). Overall, the papers in Part Four of the book “do not support the frequently expressed view that the marketisation of education is a panacea for raising standards, [albeit] it remains an open question as to whether the degree of polarisation predicted by its critics will eventuate” (p. 361).

While Part Four is introduced by a “classic” paper by Chubb and Moe in favour of choice and competition in schools, their critics argue oppositely that the introduction of choice and competition in public education “represents a crucial shift in the class mechanisms of exclusion” (p. 357). In addressing Buchanan’s theory of Public Choice, Lauder opens other doors and objects to the normative theory of individual freedom (p. 383), and to the replacement of democratic participation by market choice as the touchstone of human freedom (p. 385). In effect Lauder is raising the question that was also implicitly at the root of the Bauer versus Myrdal debate in development economics: does “freedom” mean freedom from external constraint or freedom to consummate human nature and human potential? Lauder objects to the implicit subjugation of polity to economy. He fears that neo‐liberal political economy will ultimately license an authoritarian approach to politics and he objects (p. 385) that there are three specific senses in which public choice theory subjugates a concern for democracy. He does not himself seek to be a “modern Hobbesian” and he certainly does not accept that the constraints of the marketplace are synonymous with Nature’s constraints. Budget constraints are not the only constraints.

Against this background ‐ as against a background of neoclassical economics and its yardsticks ‐ Lauder is adamant (p. 387) that “enough points of contrast can be noted to suggest that the market for public schooling operates in spite of the postulates of perfect competition rather than in conformity with them”. For Lauder, parents pay not for education per se but for the class badge they can cash in on entry to the labour market so that the market for public schooling can only be understood in class cultural terms: “It works precisely because of the nature of the class structure, not because it approximates to the tenets of perfect competition” (p. 388). Lauder makes explicit his deference to Fred Hirsch’s “positional goods” argument in a critique of the links between education and economics in an earlier jointly authored paper (Brown and Lauder, p. 187) and for Lauder ‐ if not for neoclassical economists ‐ “it is most likely that the marketisation of education will lead to a decline in overall educational standards. Schools are likely to become sharply differentiated, with élite schools for the rich and a gradation of…less “successful” schools beneath them. The less successful schools are likely to enter a spiral of decline” (p. 389). Lauder’s conclusion here (together with the editors p. 358 and p. 636) parallels Bob Gregory’s recent argument that more accurate targeting of welfare recipients is likely to entrench welfare ghettoes more deeply in certain suburbs, the consequence of which may be that the unemployed living in these ghettoes will find it increasingly difficult to work their way out of a downward spiral of unemployment, welfare receipts, and poverty. For Lauder, the net effect of a “free market”in education “will be to further polarise the social class mix of schools and, hence, educational attainment” (p. 389; also see p. 177).

In Part Three the editors further criticise the application of the public choice theory approach to the restructuring of education (pp. 256‐8) for reasons including the underlying assumption that individuals are unfailingly self‐seeking, whereas ‐ in a manner consistent with Bruno Frey’s economic psychology ‐ teachers may be as motivated by professional ideals as by income (p. 257). Evoking the spirit of Frey’s argument about the crowding‐out of intrinsic motivation, the editors conclude that market disciplines may be a low‐trust way of motivating teachers, and may fail to provide the autonomy that teachers need in order to perform to the highest levels. They derive a second criticism from the impoverished view of democracy in public choice theory and hence of the role of education in democracy.

Part Five opens with an extract from Bloom’s bestselling The Closing of the American Mind, in which Bloom argues that the way forward in education is to be found in philosophy not in sociology. Needless to say his critics in Part Five take a different view, and in the remainder of Part Five they argue that Bloom’s ideal of universal natural rights is inadequate as the foundation for democracy and education. With the advent of the politics of culture the sociology of education has come to be dominated by issues of gender, race and ethnicity. While Bloom objects that students are thereby taught that truth is relative and that it is undemocratic to be judgemental, Cornel West objects that the problem is that common humanity “is cast in an assimilationist manner that subordinates black particularity to a false universalism”. Bloom’s critics thus continue to find their relativist truths in one particular circumstance or another. The relativist view is that there are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Relativists demand group identity, not universal rights. In Bloom’s terms “relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life”, and nature should be the standard by which we judge our lives. For Bloom, “only dogmatic assurance that thought is culture‐bound, that there is no nature, is what makes our educators so certain that the only way to escape the limitations of our time and place is to study other cultures” (pp. 503, 505).

Sociologist critics object to what they see as Bloom’s tendency to impose a unitary world view which they see as an assault on the integrity and identity of others. Whereas Bloom finds a solution in (natural) rights and reason, sociologists of education take their bearings from power and the particular. The battle lines are drawn clearly enough, and the issues could scarcely be more important, but the battle is joined much less effectively than it would be if Part Five included a response to the sociologist critics by a spokesperson for Bloom. As it stands two paradigms merely talk past each other here.

In terms of the goals an education system might be enjoined to pursue it is apparent that writers on different sides of the privatisation debate recur to different meanings of such keywords as “freedom”, “rationality” and “the nature of humankind” (pp. 383‐90). As Lauder puts it (p. 390) “a market system of education neither intends to, nor can it meet the demands for an education for democratic citizenship”.

Books of 52 papers, some 60 authors and 819 pages are obviously difficult to review in 2,000 words. This book was not written primarily for economists, but there is more of interest to economists than might first seem apparent. By involving public choice theory, Fred Hirsch’s institutionalist critique of the neoclassical orthodoxy, (implicitly) Bruno Frey’s economic psychology, institutionalist class‐race‐power objections to neoclassical economic assumptions and models, questions of market failure, along with the influence of Hayek, Buchanan, Dewey and others, Halsey and his co‐editors manage to invigorate their current sociology of knowledge with sufficient interdisciplinary argument to provoke interest by social economists. They do not refer to Peltzman’s work (1993, 1996) on the political economy of the decline in American public education and they do not resolve the questions raised by Bloom, but they do provide an extensive showcase for sociology of education and sufficient provocation to inspire further work on issues of both means and ends of education systems.