The School in Question: an economist's viewpoint

Abstract

Torsten Husen has a remarkable record in the analysis of educational systems. He writes in the light of extensive research, particularly of large-scale and often longitudinal surveys of schoolchildren and students, based largely upon the two disciplines of sociology and pyschology, but drawing also on a wide range of other studies, including some in economics. Like other distinguished Swedish social scientists, notably Professor Gunnar Myrdal, the economist, who is one of Husen's friends and mentors, Husen has two important characteristics which appear to have been denied to many of those who practise the social sciences in Anglo-Saxon countries. The first is a breadth of interests and a sympathy with other disciplines and approaches which enables him to take a very broad view of the work in other areas than his own particular specialities, which enables him to get a much broader perspective of the questions that he seeks answers to. The consequence is that his work is both broader and deeper than is characteristic of much of the work of others who write in education, especially those trained in experimental pyschology. The second of Husen's characteristics which is particularly sympathetic is that he closely follows Myrdal in taking the view that no social sciences can be 'neutral', neutral in the sense in which, say, physics is; because it is concerned with human values and social priorities about which the investigator necessarily has his own views. Objectivity-a characteristic which is not value-free-consists both in stating the investigator's own values as frankly and candidly as he can and also attempting to distance his work to some degree from the particular prejudices with which he is preoccupied. (Of course, at its best, this requires a profound degree of self-analysis, of distancing oneself from oneself, which should be the characteristic of the best education.) The contrast, therefore, of the quality of Husen's work with that of others (and it would perhaps be invidious to name names), is striking. And the distance between his work and that of others is, alas, growing, is it not? This book is in many respects perhaps his most important, and although it is necessary for each contributor to this journal to concentrate on certain aspects of it, in order to appreciate its full flavour the book should be read as a unity, almost as Husen's fullest statement of his opinions. Perhaps it might be said that it marks the culmination of three stages in Husen's career; the first early enthusiasm for the belief that increased educational opportunity in secondary education would enable many children from limited backgrounds to have free access to the broad culture which was the legitimate inheritance of everybody in an abundant and social democratic society (which might be called the R.H. Tawney phase); the second, the point at which he argued that this could only legitimately be fulfilled in a society which offered not only equal opportunities but equal facilities to all children and young people (what might be called the Anthony Crosland-comprehensive school phase); and then there is the third phase, where he has