Knee-jerk formalism: The higher education reports

Abstract

The United States has made a major effort to understand and improve its schools over the past few years. In 1983, The National Commission on Excellence in Education alleged that the decline in the quality of education “had put the nation at risk.” This was followed by a half dozen reports telling us how to rejuvenate American education, and through it, American society. At first the reports focused on primary and secondary education, but late in 1984 the first of a number of reports on higher education appeared (Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984). Though all reports touched on a variety of education issues and had different emphases, they shared a deep faith in the power of education to improve society. Anyone familiar with the research in education over the past fifty years knows how misplaced this faith is. Study after study has revealed that education has little causal impact in its own right. The main finding in educational research is that causation flows from society to education not the other way around. This does not mean that education does not count or that it does not have potential for improving itself or society. Education certainly helped American power groups create the American nation state, diffuse ethnicreligious tension, and provide mobility and legitimation for America’s middle and upper middle classes (Tyack, 1976). But however useful to America’s various elites, education has consistently failed to solve such problems as unemployment, poverty, delinquency, and declining industrial competitiveness. This perspective on education can be illustrated by the relation between health and medicine. The medical establishment did not cause the better health of the American people, which came from better food, water, and sanitation (McKeown, 1976; Powles, 1980). This does not mean that doctors are not useful nor that we should stop trying to improve our health-care system. And medical education can certainly be improved (fewer years, fewer specialists, more attention to the patient as a total being). But if we