EDUCATIONAL THEORY Winter 1988, Vol. 38, No. 1 0 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Review Article - Quality of Life in Work and School vis-a-vis lnvesting in Our Children: Business and the Public Schools*

6 y Arthur G. Wirth

America is a business civilization. If there is a shift in corporate ideology, schools will feel the effects. That is what the Committee for Economic Development’s report, Investing in Our Schools: Business and the Public Schools is about. The message is: to meet the challenge of international economic competition, both American work and schooling have to change - from technocratic efficiency toward democratic partici- pation. We know that American corporations historically have favored a technocratic ideology that combines Adam Smith in the marketplace with Frederick Taylor in the workplace. As a result educational policymakers in recent years have felt pressures to define schooling as a production function. This has led to the fragmentation of knowledge into discrete measurable parts and to urges to secure school efficiency through measurable mastery, competence, performance, and accountability.

lnvesting in Our Children seems to reflect a significant shift in corporate values. How much change of heart does it really represent? To provide perspective I want to reflect on the CED’s report in relation to two other calls for social change: Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah et al., and the 1985 World Watch Institute’s The State of the World 1985: A Report on Progress toward a Sustainable Society.

The gist of the argument in Habits of the Heart is that technological modernism, combining a “get mine first” type of individualism with consumerism, threatens the natural and social ecology (”social ecology” being the web of relations and understand- ings that tie people into a community with commitments to the common good). To escape growing disintegration, the authors hold that “a change in the meaning of work and the relation between work and reward is at the heart of any recovery of our social ecology.”’ The argument is similar to the 1985 World Watch’s warning that our present onslaught style is leading to increasing ecological stress which threatens possibilities for a sustainable planet.

If the nature of work is a key element for restoring a natural and social ecology, the chance for successful reform depends significantly on the attitude of corporate leadership.

Investing in Our Children provides an opportunity to get in touch with the latest corporate thinking on work/education relations. The two hundred members of the committee for Economic Development (CED) are drawn from the highest ranks of business and academia. Individuals listed on various committees are people such as Owen Butler, Chairman of Proctor and Gamble; Ralph Lazarus, head of Federated Department Stores; William Woodside, Chairman of American Can Co.; Robert Dav- enport, head of Sheridan Broadcasting Co.; Roger Smith, Chairman of General Motors; and Thomas Vanderslice, President of Apollo Computer, Inc.; from education well-

Correspondence: Department of Education, Washington University, Campus Box 11 83, St. Louis, MO 63130.

Investing in Our Children: Business and the Public Schools. Statement by the Research and Policy Committee of the committee for Economic Development, 477 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022, 1985, 107 pp., $9.50 paper.

1. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart?: individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 289.

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figures like Harold Howe, former U S . Commissioner of Education; Albert Shanker, President, American Federation of Teachers; J. Myron Atkin, Dean, School of Education, Stanford University; and John Brademas, President, New York University.‘ The project on education followed a major CED study of American economic productivity, which came to the conclusion that “economic productivity and the quality of education cannot be separated. Particularly in the modern world, education and economic performance are inseparable.” Studies of Asian and European competitors demonstrated to the CED “that human resources are more important than physical ones. And a well-educated work force with habits of collaboration as well as competition, is the most important asset a nation can posses^."^

The report presents the case of Proctor and Gamble as prototype of how work is changing in America. In the past, workers joined Proctor and Gamble to enter low- skilled tasks in narrowly defined jobs which changed little during a person’s work life. The strong trend now is toward participative work systems. Employees perform a broad range of tasks, including operating and maintaining equipment and performing their own quality controls. They participate in activities such as goal setting and budgeting formerly reserved strictly for management. Increasingly work is organized around self-directed teams where problem solving and decision making are important parts of the job. The company provides retraining in the higher-level skills needed to meet the flow of change. Training is effective only if employees have strong literacy and number skills and above all the ability to learna4

With this view of work in America the report turns to what is needed in the schools. In the committee’s view what is required is ”nothing less than a revolution in the role of the teacher and the management of s~hools.”~

High-tech firms, they say, are not served well by old organizational forms. Cen- tralized, rigid bureaucracies, in schools or industry, are hostile to needed creativity. They stifle it because their goal is to keep control in the hands of centralized authority. The essential obligation of organizations in the new era is “to nurture creativity.” Schools, and previous national reports on schools, they say, have neglected this fact. School policymakers must learn the lesson of industry - to decentralize decision making to the lowest possible level: “Solve the problem where it exists,” give employees a stake in the system by letting them exercise their own creativity and energy in the work at hand.6

More specifically, the report recommends a “bottom-up” policy for school reform. Focus is on the individual school as the key place for meaningful improvements in quality and productivity. The role of the states, they say, is to set clear goals and high standards, then give the schools the maximum freedom to implement them.7

The interaction of teachers, students, and administrators in individual schools becomes the key arena for action. The report assumes that the able, sensitive, highly professional school people now needed will not choose teaching, nor choose to remain in it, if they are stifled by present bureaucratic regimentation or shackled with “teacher- proof” materials.

Teachers as creative actors will respond only if their professional roles are enhanced by maximizing opportunities to exercise judgment, make decisions, and reshape their own working environment. Furthermore, teachers may be surprised, the report says, that contrary to narrow “back-to-basics” emphases of recent years, the CED calls for liberal education for all: for higher-order learning - to think critically and analytically, to cooperate and communicate as well as to compete, to solve problems, to assume responsibility, and to learn to learn. The report advocates strengthening “teacher

2. Investing in Our Children, ix-xx. 3. Denis P. Doyle and Marsha Levine, “Business and the Public Schools;’ Phi Delta Kappan

4. Investing in Our Children, 16. 5. Ibid., 10. 6. Doyle and Levine, ”Business and the Public Schools,” 117. 7. Investing in Our Children, 7 .

67, no. 2 (October 1985): 116-17. (Observation on the Report by its codirectors.)

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centers” where peers can exchange ideas on strategies for advancing learning and for changing “the culture of the school.”

Where teacher evaluation is concerned, committee members shy away from “merit plans” which often undermine collegial relations. Teachers working in a largely com- petitive environment, they say, will be less inclined to support the feeling of community that is essential for effective schools. They advocate experiments with two-tier systems of evaluation. One for decisions on contract renewal, tenure, or dismissals; a second for encouraging professional growth and development, with teachers having an active role in establishing the criteria and the method of use.8

This hasty sketch simply illustrates that these major corporate leaders now assume that a democratic sociotechnical workplace is the way of the future in work and schools.

What are we to make of all of this? Simply welcome powerful, unexpected allies to help challenge the school wasteland of recent years? Welcome corporate executives who will awaken a dormant public to a reformed democratic social ecology and who will initiate policies for a sustainable planet?

It’s too much to expect. The bland, upbeat CED image of American life leaves the ideological goals of corporate America untouched. The message is that we can simply make course corrections to reach the same old objectives of beating the Asiatics so we can individually compete at home in the happy consumer sweepstakes. The new angle is that we need some democratic practice in order to become winners again - not because there is a moral imperative to do so, or because there is a need for a new image of the future.

I am not saying that people in teaching should dismiss these recommendations lightly. There are many positive features that we can welcome. What I am saying is that if we take seriously the goals of BeHah et al. for a renewal of a social democracy and the World Watch goal of a sustainable planet, then we should know the limitations of the CED report.

There is, for instance, the report’s approach to the embarrassment of poverty in the United States. Under the heading “Choosing Wise Educational Investment” the following sentence appears: “Some 46 per cent of all black and 38 per cent of all Hispanic children lived in poverty (1984), compared to 22 per cent for children of all ~aces. ”~ These youngsters, we learn, tend to have the highest rate of school failure.

One might expect shock at the raw reality of such figures in the word’s leading free-market economy. Instead we find the codirectors responding with such statements as “To let large segments of its population fail” is a practice “both wasteful and dangerous”; “All young people need higher order cognitive skills in addition to work habits of self-discipline and initiative”; “In tomorrow’s workplace success will go to those who are flexible and adaptable” -for the person who “can expect multiple careers over his or her productive lifetime.” One senses their relief when they find that research has uncovered a remedy for laggards in the poverty sector: it is successful preschool intervention of “children at risk” (i.e., poor children), which offers “a cost effective strategy for better chances for success in later life.” We are told that “the trustees responded to this finding as they would to a business proposition. They concluded that it costs society more not to intervene than it costs to do so.”’O

As they look out on America from their corporate towers, they nowhere acknowledge that children from the bombed-out streets of the ghettos have life spaces significantly different from the children they know. There is the tendency to assume that poverty in America will lend itself to school-fix solutions: beefed up preschool education, teaching the work ethic and “higher-order learning,” and a job corps for the dropouts. It seems that Proctor-and-Gamble-type work settings beckon for all who prove worthy. Such visions leave minds untroubled by research reports on the kinds of work actually available.

8. Ibid., 60-68. 9. Ibid., 43. 10. Doyle and Levine, “Business and the Public Schools,” 118.

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Bureau of Labor statistics estimate, for example, that only 7 percent of new jobs between 1980 and 1990 will be in high technology. In fact, the five occupations predicted to produce the most new jobs are all in low-skilled areas: janitors, nurse’s aides, waiters and waitresses, sales clerks, and cashiers. The picture becomes more vivid when we find that for the 1978-90 period 150,000 jobs were predicted for computer programmers while 800,000 new jobs were predicted for fast-food workers and kitchen helpers.” In addition, with unemployment at 20 percent plus for nonwhites there is the uncomfortable possibility of an electronic-age permanent underclass not yielding to free-market solutions.

Even in the sections on decentralizing in Westing in Our Children one still finds the tendency to approach school learning with ”the production function” image. Within corporate life, the authors say, various corporate divisions and units are given a great deal of autonomy on how they organize themselves as long as they meet corporate directives - decentralization works because the results can be measured. While acknowledging that schools are not the same as industry, the report insists that outcomes of schooling can and must be measured. States should look to output measures rather than to process requirements to hold schools accountable.’*

The problem with such statements is not that they are devoid of good intentions, but that they slip into the mistaken idea that the productivity in terms of measurable units of production in industry is analogous to measurable units of learning in schools. They ignore the fact, as John Goodlad put it, that there simply does not exist a science of education sufficient to give credence to the “scientism” necessary for these quantifiable accountability m0de1s.l~ We don’t get such a “science” by simply saying we must have one. The complexities of human learning are not the same as, or even analogous to, the complexities of industrial production. By supporting reductionist approaches to learning, those more humane qualities the authors seek in decentrali- zation will be vitiated.

There is another feature of the report that warrants a second look. The report repeatedly asks for higher-level learnings such as problem solving, reasoning, learning how to learn and how to adapt to change. These words, in the holiest of holy category of educators’ vocabulary, would appear to deserve a salaam. But the substance of what should be “problem solved” remains vague. The leaning is toward rational- thinking skills that would be useful for solving technical problems at the work site, supplemented by communications skills to improve teamwork. These are laudable goals and on the face of it represent important advances beyond Taylorism. But as the media remind us, the quality of life in America is affected by business activity unmentioned in the report. To be blunt, corporate behavior, as Time put it, is leading to ”the poisoning of America,” to the abrupt closing of plants that decimate factory communities, and to the dumping in Third World countries of products judged unsafe for U.S. citizens.

There are, indeed, differences between technical problems and quality-of-life problems. Comments by E. F. Schurnacher are useful in clarifying the difference~.‘~ There are, he says, convergent-type problems which lend themselves to solutions by abstract logical reasoning. These are the well-structured problems usually found in school critical-thinking programs or in courses in mathematics and physics. Such skills are enormously useful for the solution of technical/scientific problems. The CED report clearly supports strengthening their place in school curricula.

But there is a dearth of reference to the other category - divergent problems, the type which do not lend themselves to neat logical solutions. Divergent problems are the type people are divided over in politics, economics, education, and family life. They

11. Henry M. Levin and Russel W. Rurnberger, “The Educational Implications of High Technology” (Stanford, Calif.: Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance [IFG], Stanford University, Project Report No. 83-84, February 1982), 2-5.

12. Doyle and Levine. “Business and the Public Schools,” 117. 13. John Goodlad, “Can Our Schools Be Better?” Phi Delta Kappan 60, no. 5 (January 1979). 14. E. F. Schurnacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper

Torchbooks, 1973), 89-90.

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involve the imprecise requirements of weighing conflicts of values and of how to reconcile opposites - for example, struggling to find a tensional balance between the claims of freedom and authority. Divergent problems require lived answers that come from the struggle of involved persons. They might include a questioning of taken-for- granted corporate politics regarding administrative locus of power and societal con- sequences of production. Irving Bluestone of the United Auto Workers Union addressed such an issue when he told GM management that corporate areas now reserved for management were eventually going to be challenged by American unions.15

We cannot be serious about quality-of-life issues if we avoid thorny problems concerning value choices and power shifts, yet the CED report largely neglects them.

The argument that it is urgent to include thinking about quality-of-life choices in work and schools is forcefully made in the World Watch Institute’s Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society: State of the World 7985. Its summary conclusion is that both natural and human life systems are under increasingly severe ecological stress.’6 Stress comes from several extraordinary areas of growth: (1) Population growth - the world’s population has now reached 5 billion. It has doubled since 1950. (2) Economic growth - since 1950 the world’s output of goods and services has nearly quadrupled to an annual $1 2 trillion.

These levels of growth are a testimony to human energy and achievement. But we are just beginning to perceive the damage accruing to interconnected life systems.

World Watch maintains that the years ahead are likely to be traumatic and could be catastrophic. Nothing less is required than whole new orientations to the way economic and social policies relate to deteriorating life systems. The key is broad- based political and educational processes that involve people from all walks of life. Actions of technical elites of themselves cannot coerce uninformed and uninvolved populations. What is needed in education is contextual learning, learning that assists people in seeing the interconnectedness of events and policies. It requires inclusion of reflective ethical judgments.

This kind of learning cannot be left to formal education alone. It must be incorporated into the world of work itself. No one should underestimate the level of difficulty involved.

Denis Goulet, in weighing the impact of technology on global problems in The Uncertain Promise, says that we need to face the fact that the exclusion of “quality- of-life” values has simply w e n built into the profit-maximizing efficiency calculations of the Western socioeconomic system.

According to Goulet, a fundamental question for life in a high-technology era is what concept of efficiency we will choose: Western “engineering-type efficiency” or a new type of “integral efficiency.” Engineering-type efficiency is the kind employed in closed-circuit mechanical systems in which ratios of work done are compared to energy supplied. Efficiency is determined by quantifiable measures of inputs to outputs. “Quality- of-life” dimensions fall outside the system of calculations as “externalities.” This type of efficiency has become dysfunctional in terms of human well-being. It is so deeply engrained in Western thought, however, that it will be extremely difficult to change. The urgent need now, says Goulet, is to create “new modes of operating efficiently. Managers and designers of technology will need to explore ways of becoming integrally efficient, that is, of producing efficiently while optimizing social and human values. This they must do with as much passion, singlemindedness, and practical sense as they now devote to making profits or creating new prod~cts.” ’~

From the perspective of World Watch and Denis Goulet it is clear that the appearance of a democratic sociotechnical philosophy of work is arriving at a propitious time. When people have an opportunity to raise questions about the quality of their life at work,

15. See Arthur G. Wirth, Productive Work in lndustry and Schools (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), 59-60.

16. Lester R. Brown and Edward C. Wolf, eds., State of the World 7985: A World Watch lnstitute Report on Progress toward a Sustainable Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), see chap. 6, “Getting back on Track.”

17. Denis Goulet, The Uncertain Promise (New York: IDOC/North America, 1977). 18-19.

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they are able to become aware of their power to act to change things and are introduced to the habit of raising questions about quality as well as quantity. But to limit such questions to the workplace is clearly inadequate. As Eric Trist and Fred Emery argue in Toward a Social Ecology, democratic work design must be seen as only a first step - a ”leading edge” toward the principle that productive development in an interdependent world depends on policies that promote the well-being of all in the system.18 Increasingly the significant system is seen to be global. In addition to becoming able to compete in the international market, we eventually will need to see that an international economy in which per-capita income ranges from $280 per annum in some southern-hemisphere countries to $11,000 in some northern countries has an inherent instability which endangers the welfare of the whole. The point becomes even clearer when we note that in 1984 $647 billion went for world-wide military expenditures and only $39 billion for development assi~tance.’~

Even more basic than the question of “how to work” is the question of “what work to do.” The barest beginnings have been made in raising questions about “what will be produced.”

Under fear of economic survival both labor and management have shied away from the troublesome question of whether they are engaged in socially useful or harmful work. An exception was the action of the Combine Shop Steward Committee of Lucas Aerospace Industries in England. When confronted with layoffs in a technologically advanced corporation, the unions raised a new order of questions. They identified the paramount contradiction of our time as the growing gap between what technology could provide for society and what it actually does provide. They demanded that the advanced technology and human skills of Lucas plants be employed to produce a long list of socially useful products which they identified. They asserted that they had the right to be engaged in socially useful work.20

We may hope that such isolated actions, combined with the more general awareness of the need for workplace reform, may be beginning steps toward the creation of a new business paradigm: a paradigm complete with values and ethics consistent with demands for a just and healthy society. The basic goal is to return to the early nineteenth-century tradition that incorporation is a concession of public authority to a private group in return for service to the public good. Management then becomes responsible not only for technical competence but also for meeting standards of public obligation.’’

If the goal is a sustainable planet, neither workplaces nor schools can do it alone. Schools, of themselves, do not have the power for social reform that the early progressives assumed. In a business civilization they cannot avoid being affected by values of the corporate work culture. Teachers then can take advantage of a new situation when the Taylorist efficiency tradition is challenged within corporate life itself. Educators can take a proactive role in exploring the meaning of democratic sociotech- nical philosophy for their own workplaces. They can take advantage of support for such ideas as creating small participative learning communities, either within large school units or as autonomous entities; creating administrative leadership that ”taps the brains” of everyone in educative settings; creating learning strategies that give priority to distinctive human capacities for individual and group inquiry and problem solving, and nurturing personal creativity and enthusiasms (remembering that enthu- siasm comes from the Greek en-theos -the personal God within).

Educators may find support from those “leading-edge” sectors of management

18. Fred E. Emery and Eric L. Trist, Towards a Social Ecology (New York: Plenum-Rosetta,

19. Report of the Twentieth United Nations of the Next Decade Conference, Rethinking The

20. Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee? (Boston: South End Press, 1981). See also Wirth, Productive

21. Alan Trachtenberg, The lncorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age

1973), see chap. 14 and appendix.

NorthSouth Relationship (Muscatine, Iowa: The Stanley Foundation, 1985). 7.

Work, 232-41.

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 5-6.

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and labor interested in democratic-inquiry forms of learning. But educators also have an obligation to reverse the usual question asked by industry: Are the schools producing students prepared for corporate work? Educators must insist that an equally relevant question is whether American business and labor leaders are designing places of work worthy of students coming from creative, intellectually stimulating learning settings - for those in lower- as well as high-paying jobs.

Furthermore, teachers must be prepared to resist rationales of industry, new or old, which interfere with their central educative obligation. Teachers have a primary task that transcends the needs of beleaguered industry. Teachers are carriers of liberal culture - of the liberalizing skills of citizens of a free society; of the skills of verbal and computational literacy; of the skills of critical thinking; of ways of understanding the evolution of values of a democratic culture and the complexities of living in a society of plural and conflicting world views; of ways of weighing policy choices in terms of whether they nurture or are destructive of social well-being; of assessing where we have fulfilled the vision of a just society and where we have failed; of gaining insight into the unique opportunities and dangers in an electronic nuclear era in which humans reach out beyond the planetary home.

To overcome the dualisms in work and education that betray the democratic traditions of American culture we face a two-fold problem: how to create more work that is personally fulfilling and socially useful and how to educate Americans so that they will struggle to realize such a goal.

There is little sentiment in America, with its pioneer past and skepticism toward central government, to turn toward West European democratic socialism. The question for the near future is whether we can create a third alternative that combines the innovative entrepreneurial drives of a capitalist economy without the amoral destruc- tiveness of an unchecked profit imperative.

Investing in Our Children: Business and the Public Schools opens the door a crack. It backs away, however, from entering discussion about what will be required to secure a natural and social ecology for a sustainable world in the twenty-first century.

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