Education and the Cult of Efficiency
A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools
References and Quotes
Reference
Frederick W. Taylor
In the preface to the classic study on the effects of scientific management on schooling in America, Education and the Cult of Efficiency,6 Raymond Callahan explains that when he set out to write, his intent was to explore the origin and development of business values in educational administration, an occurrence he tracks to about 1900. Callahan wanted to know why school administrators had adopted business practices and management parameters of assessment when "Education is not a business. The school is not a factory. "[p.11]
Reference
The National Press Attack On Academic Schooling
These article blurbs and many many more are all cited in Chapter 3 of the book Education and the Cult of Efficiency. It's a worthwhile read to get a more comprehensive sense of what the growing press consensus was like.
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Used in: The National Press Attack On Academic Schooling
Is the Public School a Failure? It Is: The Most Momentous Failure in Our American Life Today. (p. 66)
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Used in: The Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools
The character of our education must change with the oncoming of the years of this highly practical age. We have educated the mind to think and trained the vocal organs to express the thought, and we have forgotten or overlooked the fact that in about four times out of five the practical man expresses his thought by the hand rather than by mere words. (p. 25)
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Used in: Frederick W. Taylor
What was unexpected was the extent, not only of the power of the business-industrial groups, but of the strength of the business ideology [...] and the extreme weakness and vulnerability of schoolmen, especially school administrators, on the other. I had expected more professional autonomy and I was completely unprepared for the extent and degree of capitulation by administrators to whatever demands were made upon them. I was surprised and then dismayed to learn how many decisions they made or were forced to make, not on educational grounds, but as a means of appeasing their critics in order to maintain their positions in the school. (p. 11)
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Used in: Frederick W. Taylor
Education is not a business. The school is not a factory. (p. 11)
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Used in: The Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools
the demand of the age is for a practical education. (p. 25)
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Used in: The National Press Attack On Academic Schooling
We desiccate, sterilize, petrify and embalm our youth. Our children learn by rote and are guided by routine. The present school system squanders the resources of the country and wastes the energy and the lives of our children. The school system should be abolished. Our educators are narrow-minded pedants, occupied with the dry bones of textbooks and the sawdust of pedagogics, who are ignorant of the real, vital problems of human interest. (p. 67)
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Used in: The National Press Attack On Academic Schooling
permeated with errors and hypocrisy. (p. 67)
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Used in: The Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools
All over the country our courses are being attacked and the demand for revision is along the line of fitting the mathematical teaching to the needs of the masses (p. 27)
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Used in: The National Press Attack On Academic Schooling
The Danger of Running a Fool Factory (p. 67)
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Used in: The Adoption Of Business Organization By Schools
our universities are beginning to be run as business colleges. (p. 23)
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Used in: Frederick W. Taylor
it does not take profound knowledge of American education to know that educators are, and have been, a relatively low-status, low-power group (p. 11)
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Used in: The National Press Attack On Academic Schooling
Miltonized, Chaucerized, Vergilized, Schillered, physicked and chemicaled the high school [...] should be of no use in the world—particularly in the business world (p. 66)
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Used in: The National Press Attack On Academic Schooling
The Case of Seventeen Million Children — Is Our Public-School System Proving an Utter Failure? (p. 66)