Education and its Effects

Over at OrgTheory.net, one of my favorite WordPress blogs, Omar Lizardo recently posted on John W. Meyer’s “Effects of Education as an Institution” - one of my favorite articles by this inimitable social theorist. I don’t always or often agree with what Meyer has to say, and a lot of the writings on education and globalization that he’s done with Francisco Ramirez and others at Stanford and elsewhere under the rubric of world polity theory / world culture theory seems to me misleading in basic respects. More about that, though, for some future, more laborious post. But the classic pieces from the 1970s continue to be thought-provoking contributions to the sociology of education and the sociology of organizations, and are worthy of periodic revisits - this is what makes them classics, I suppose.

By now the basic argument of “Effects” familiar enough: according to Meyer, traditional socialization and allocation theories don’t adequately account for the broad legitimation effects that education has upon society. Socialization theories assume that education’s ‘role’ is to equip students with knowledge, skills, and competencies. Evidence indicates that education does a fairly poor job at this. Allocation theories argue, often in a critical or ‘conflict’ theoretical vein, that what education really does is to slot people into particular roles, positions, and ranks in the occupational/social strata. There’s stronger evidence to back this up, and Meyer certainly doesn’t dispute this. But this perspective too misses the point: what modern educational systems really do is to create and legitimate categories of knowledge and categories of personnel who are authorized or ‘credentialized’ to speak on behalf of that knowledge. Thus education brings into being not only pscyhology but also psychologists, not only business economics but also MBAs, and so on. It’s important to note that this is a dynamic process: there are no pre-determined limits which specify what can be rendered into fodder for the educational system. The set of occupational categories or roles isn’t necessarily fixed but is rather highly susceptible to differentiation and expansion. New fields of expertise, new degrees, new professional categories are all part of an ongoing system of legitimation that’s central to the reproduction of modern society. Thus, an ever-wider range of social domains come to be organized around a formal structure of sorts that is determined not by content but by the visible markers of education (years of education, degrees, etc.) that legitimate actors to engage in certain types of activity.

It’s perahps the case this system of legitimation has become dangerously inflationary, as David Labaree and others have argued. Certainly, although Meyer doesn’t make this claim, the essay suggests a very expansive role for education in modern society: it’s not just that we moderns place a ‘greater emphasis’ upon education and the enlightenment of the mind and so on and so forth, but (1) without education the legitimacy and cognitive coherence of vast domains of social activity would disappear and (2) the attractions in terms of a legitimacy surplus that one accrues by ‘educationalizing’ a particular domain and turning it into a course of study leading to this-or-that degree, etc., are too great to pass up. Thus now we have prestigious and expensive culinary schools, astrology institutes, and so on, all attracting students at premium prices so that they can gain the necessary credentials and formal trappings that reflect an ‘appropriate’ level of education.

Well, my own interests are focused on somewhat more modest concerns. It revolves around what Meyer has had to say about observation and inspection in educational systems. I’ve always been somewhat taken by the following statement: ”If one hires an executive, a civil servant, or a teacher one must inspect educational credentials—it is optional whether one inspects the person’s competence”(66). It’s perhaps intuitive obvious that we often really don’t know much about a person’s competence. We just know whether and where she went to school, if she got a degree, etc. That’s what we observe - that’s what we inspect. Likewise, as Meyer and Rowan pointed out (I think it was in the “Structure of Educational Organizations,” from 1978), schools often know exactly what grade and classroom a student is in, what subjects she is studying, and how ’qualified’ her teacher is. But what actually goes on in the classroom - how learning takes place - is still something of a mystery. It’s not that we can’t inspect or observe the ‘technical core’ (to use by-now somewhat outdated terminology), it’s just that we can’t do it on a systematic basis, and even if we did, we might lack the cognitive and normative frameworks for processing what we observe usefully.

That’s what makes me skeptical of NCLB and other ‘accountability’ measures. We still aren’t inspecting educational process, we’re still looking for formal criteria or external points which we can then observe and promote as evidence of ’success’ or ‘failure.’ Perhaps that the best that can be done within educational systems. But it’s a hard sell for me to say that this is evidence that we’re achieving a tighter grasp over the process of education itself.