Peter Drucker
1968
IN THE late 1960’s the United States, despite the Vietnam war, spent quite a bit more on education than on defense. Education took annually about $70 to $75 billion of which $50 billion was spent by the school and university systems (public and private) and perhaps half as much again by industry, governments, and the armed forces for all kinds of schooling and training. This was twice what the United States had spent in a year in the mid-fifties, and four times the amount spent annually in the years after World War II when the “educational explosion” first started.
Education has become by far the largest community expenditure in the American economy. We spend more on education than on all other nondefense community services together—health care, welfare, farm subsidies, and so on. Teachers of all kinds, now the largest single occupational group in the American labor force, outnumber by a good margin steelworkers, teamsters, and salespeople, indeed even farmers.
These are but the quantitative symptoms of a major change in values by no means confined to the United States. Education has become the key to opportunity and advancement all over the modem world, replacing birth, wealth, and perhaps even talent. Education has become the first value choice of modern man. This is success such as no schoolmaster through the ages would have dared dream of. But can education live with this success? Or, to paraphrase the title of a popular play of a few years ago, “Has Success Spoiled the Schools?”
Signs abound that all is far from well with education. While expenditures have been skyrocketing—and will keep on going up—the taxpayers are getting visibly restless. In community after community across the United States they have voted down, in the last few years, proposals for new school taxes or new school bonds or higher teachers’ salaries. These may be futile gestures: in the end the school taxes do go up, the money for new buildings is provided—if not out of school bonds, then out of federal subsidies—and the teachers’ salaries are adjusted by competitive pressure. But the growing resistance to the cost of education indicates that the public is beginning to be concerned with what it gets for its money.
The ambivalence between faith in education and resistance to its costs is present everywhere. The British Labour government, committed to rapid expansion of general education accessible to everyone, still resists teachers’ demands for higher salaries and tries to postpone the building of badly needed teacher-training colleges. Japanese students, fully aware that education controls what opportunities they will enjoy, still riot against an increase in fees. De Gaulle is willing to spend scarce francs sending teachers to French Canada. But until the students rose up in May 1968 and all but tore down French society, de Gaulle had been resisting all demands to expand the badly eroded and totally inadequate facilities of Paris’ famous old university, the Sorbonne. We all love education and want more of it. But we clearly are not at all convinced that we are getting our money’s worth for what we spend on it—and with good reason.
Important, if only as a symptom, is the alienation from die school of today’s adolescent rebels, the beats and hippies. Adolescent rebellion, almost without exception, has in the past been organized in and around the school, and especially in and around the university. The left-wing radicals of the thirties in Britain and the United States, for instance, and their imitators, the left-wing students in Latin America today, had the university for their base and considered it their own institution. The beats and hippies, however, rebel today against school even more than against their parents.
To find a parallel, one has to go back a good many centuries to the goliards, the beats and dropouts from the university of the early Renaissance. That the goliards achieved very' little, except a few rowdy songs, does not matter. They bespoke the senility and obsolescence of the traditional university as it had come down from the Middle Ages. They heralded its breakup and replacement by the “modern” university', a very different school, with different educational goals, different values, and entirely different content and curriculum. A hundred years hence, today’s beats and hippies may well come to be seen as the goliards of the twentieth century who, without achieving much of their own, heralded the breakdown of the traditional “humanist” education, which arose in the seventeenth century as education for the new tiny minority of lay scribes, and which by now has been extended uncritically to education for everyone everywhere.
Education has become too important to be left to the educators. In modern society everybody has a right to consider himself an “expert” on schools, for everybody during his formative years spends more waking hours in school than in any one other institution. Moreover, education is far too big a cost to be accepted without questioning. To ask whether it is fruitful investment or simply expense is a legitimate question. Education has also become too powerful to go unchallenged, for schooling increasingly controls access to careers, opportunities, and advancement. For all these reasons education must become a public issue in all advanced countries—and perhaps even more in the developing countries where the costs of education have become a major barrier to economic and social development.
The schools, their structure, their role, their objectives, and, above all, what they teach will, therefore, become increasingly a major concern. What do the schools produce in return for what we spend on them? What do we get out of all tire years we sit in schools?
In the early years of this century there was, for instance, no pressure for education in the colonial areas. On the contrary, British attempts to introduce universal primary education in India were steadily resisted by the incipient anticolonial movement of the day, the early Indian Congress party. Schools were a shocking waste of the taxpayer’s money, from which the country would not derive any benefit. The felt need in the poorer countries was for irrigation works, roads, and lower taxes. And the number of educated people who could be usefully employed was so small that the need was easily satisfied by the sons of the wealthy who could well afford to pay for school out of their own pockets. Until recently, economists were severely critical of the Japanese drive for universal literacy after 1870 as a wasteful diversion of badly needed economic resources to an unproductive "prestige” project.
The greatest sin of "colonialism” today is that it did not introduce universal schooling and therefore did not produce an educated society in the colonial countries. And no achievement of the Japanese reforms of the Meiji Period after 1867 was so universally acclaimed during the Meiji Centennial celebrations in 1967-68 as the priority given to education as the foundation of a modern productive economy and society.
That education was not seen as economically productive but rather as a luxury the rich could afford, explains in large measure the manner in which the years of schooling were extended. Responding primarily to the increase of working lifespan, the schools put more and more youngsters into "advanced education,” that is, into what had been designed as vocational training for a small number of scribes. What had been highly specialized training became, by default, everybody’s general education.
This was not planned; it happened. The last unit of school that was planned and thought through at all was what is known in the United States as "junior high school,” that is, school for tire pre-adolescent from age twelve to fifteen. Junior high school, however, was designed in Europe well over a century ago when in some countries it first became economically possible to keep substantial numbers of children in school beyond the elementary grades (The first country to develop this school type on a broad basis was Austria (around 1820). The name it then received, Buergerschule, that is, “school for citizens," was meant as a political manifesto by the liberal educators who designed it. Educated people are “citizens" rather than “subjects.”). Conceived as terminal school for the great majority, it was designed to a large extent to blend in with the first years of apprenticeship in a craft. Beyond this, however, the new additional students were simply put into existing schools that had been created originally to train clergymen, lawyers, or civil servants, such as the English public school, the German Gymnasium, the American high school, or the French lycée. We repeated this process once more when going to college became common during the last twenty or thirty years.
This process shows best perhaps in the way the arguments for teaching Latin in secondary school have changed—while the teaching of Latin itself has not changed one bit. In 1700 or 1750 no one would have argued that teaching Latin taught anything but Latin. No one spoke of it as "forming the mind,” no one praised it as a “discipline,” no one asserted that knowing Latin was the key to learning the other European languages more easily. One learned Latin because Latin was the “communications medium” of educated people. Until the mid-eighteenth century when French cultural imperialism tried unsuccessfully to put the language of Louis XIV into the place of the language of Augustus, books for the educated and documents of importance were normally written in Latin. Latin was taught as a tool of high utility without which a scribe could not properly function. When this came to an end—in the early nineteenth century —all the other virtues of Latin were suddenly discovered. Now, for the last fifty or hundred years, Latin is being defended because it has no usefulness whatever; that is, it is an ornament. An “educated man,” it is argued, should not learn subjects of utility but subjects such as Latin which are ‘liberal” and “general education” precisely because no one can do anything with them.
This is not an argument against Latin; it is an illustration of the fundamental character of our higher education, a character grounded in its history and original purpose. As a vocational school for the professions that require ability to write—and this is what “learned” originally meant—higher education quite properly stressed the verbal skills. The apprenticeship of the carpenter stressed plane and hammer and saw. The apprenticeship of the clergyman, the lawyer, the teacher, the government servant—that is, higher education as it emerged out of Renaissance and Reformation—stressed reading, writing, and enough mathematics to be an accountant, a lawyer administering estates, and a surveyor. The school could therefore leave to the other apprenticeships concern with everything that was not verbal skill. Life taught to most people anyhow free of cost the nonverbal: experience and performance.
For employments other than as a scribe, formal education was considered a handicap rather than an asset.
When I started work as an apprentice clerk in an export firm, only forty years ago, I was considered distinctly “overeducated.” I had finished secondary school, and no apprentice before me, including the owners of the firm and their sons, had entered work that late. They had all started at age fourteen, and yet considered themselves fully educated and were considered so by the community.
But today the school has become the universal growing-up process for everybody. For this purpose, however, verbal training is not adequate, let alone productive. We can no longer assume that the great majority will have enough nonverbal experiences outside of school; the great majority receives its most important learning exposure during its formative years by sitting in the classroom and receiving there the scribe’s education. That is much too one-sided, much too restricted, much too narrowly vocational—and, above all, not ‘ liberal” or “general,” and not truly "educational.” The greatest weakness of the schools today, and the one youngsters most suffer from, is this verbal straitjacket. Of course, there are also sports—and we need diem. But man is more than verbal skills and muscle.
Few things are as badly needed in growing up as the sense of achievement, which only performance can give. But the schools do not permit achievement. In the “academic disciplines’ a student cannot perform. He can only show promise. All he can do in schools in the verbal areas is to repeat what somebody has already done or said.
Yesterday's educators had no choice but to extend the only school they had, the only school they knew. Their customers would have resented it had they been offered anything but the school they had come to envy as the mark of privilege. But the result is a school that deforms rather than forms. It is a school of boredom, of lack of stimulation, of lack of achievement, and of lack of satisfaction. I am not surprised that the kids riot. I am surprised at their patience, considering how bored most of them are in school most of the time (A frightening picture of the frustrating boredom that school tends to be even for bright children from educated white middle- and upper class homes is given in the moving book How Children Fail by John Holt (New York: Pitman Publishing, 1965).
The problem of the school is not a matter of “standards” as schoolmasters tend to define them. It is not a matter, in other words, of “working harder” and of “doing more” of what is being done today. What we have learned in respect to all work applies to the work of the school as well. We need to “work smarter.” We need to do different things and to do them differently.
History shows a frightening parallel to the way our education is going everywhere in the world today. It is the decline of the world’s most creative, most advanced, and most exciting civilization, that of China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Until then, China had led the world in the arts and in the sciences, in medicine and in mathematics, in technology and in statecraft. The reaction against independent thinking and artistic creativity that followed the invasion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century imposed the Confucian system of purely literary and purely imitative “liberal education” to the exclusion of everything else. Within a century China had become sterile and had lost her capacity to do anything new, to imagine anything new, to perceive anything new. We are, I am afraid, on the same road—and we have traveled very far along it.
This is not a plea for what is known today as “vocational education,” that is, for teaching traditional craft skills the traditional way, only in a classroom instead of in the shop. On the contrary, nothing is deader than traditional “vocational education”—assuming (against all evidence) that it ever was alive.
The skills that “vocational education” teaches are obsolete. They are the craft skills of yesterday. The one tiring that is predictable is that by the time the students graduate into a job, automobile maintenance or woodworking—or even cooking—will no longer be done the way we are teaching these crafts in our vocational schools. This is not the way to teach skill anyhow. The way to teach a skill today is by putting it on a knowledge foundation and teaching it through a systematic course of studies, that is, through a “program.”
The worst part of “vocational education” is, however, that it is being administered as training of the “second-rate.” The youngsters who are “not good enough” to go through the “academic” course of studies are being pushed into “vocational education” as a means of keeping them off the streets and out of mischief until they are old enough to quit school.
What we need in modern society are people who can acquire skills by having a knowledge foundation. We need only a fairly small number of people who are purely theoretical. But we need an infinite number of people capable of using theory as the basis of skill for practical application in work. These have to be “technologists” rather than “skilled craftsmen.” Tire ablest of the young, the most gifted intellectually, the most brilliant ones need, even more than the dimwits, the ability of the "technologist” to apply knowledge to work through a knowledge-based skill. At the same time, the academically slow student needs tire knowledge foundation to have any skill worth having.
In other words, we will have to replace today’s “vocational training” by the education of technologists. This will have to be “general education, indeed in the true sense a “liberal” education. It should be a cornerstone of tomorrow’s education for everybody (On tin's point, the recent studies of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) are highly instructive. In analyzing the technology gap between the United States and Europe, these studies found that Europe has proportionately more scientists than the United States. What it lacks arc educated managers at lower and middle levels).
Equally important is the training and formation of perception and emotion in school. This is needed, however we conceive the ends of education. The trained perception and the disciplined emotion are as pertinent to the ability to earn a livelihood as they are to the mature human personality. They are man, above all. Indeed it is perception, especially tactile perception through the hand, that largely forms the mind of the child (as the great contemporary psychologist, Jean Piaget of Geneva, has proved in countless observations). Perception and emotion are trained, developed, and disciplined only in the experience of performance, that is, only under the challenge of objective standards that exist no matter what the individual’s ability, inclinations, or proficiency.
Such standards exist for the beginner only in the arts. There alone applies what my piano teacher used to say to me when I was a child: "You will never play Mozart like the virtuosi, the real musicians; but there is no reason why you should not play your scales like them.” In playing an instrument or in painting—in fact, in all the arts—there are absolute standards even for the lowliest beginner. There is direct experience of what performance demands. There is achievement. (Writing poetry or a short story makes performance demands too. But because the level of abstraction is so much higher in the verbal area, achievement is hardest to obtain and performance more difficult to perceive for the beginner than in the performing or graphic arts with their immediacy of experience.)
Today music appreciation is a respected academic discipline (even though it tends to be a deadly bore for the kids who have to memorize a lot of names when they have never heard the music). Playing an instrument or composing are considered, however, amateurish or “trade school.” This is not very bright, even if school is considered vocational preparation for the scribe. When school be- comes general education for everyone, it is lunacy.
I am talking about a good deal more than new subjects. I am talking about the approach that is needed to design education on different assumptions. In the past, every segment of our school system was looked upon as an entity in itself, as the last school for the great majority of its pupils and as the only place where specific subjects or vocational skills could be acquired during the student’s lifetime. Today the correct assumption is, however, that the great majority of students will proceed from each level of the school system to the next higher one—and then come back as adults more than once. We need variety and diversity, to be sure; but we need no longer start out with the question: “What do the youngsters have to know at age twelve—or age fifteen—or age seventeen—when they will stop going to school for the rest of their lives?” We can assume that they will stay for at least ten and probably twelve or more years. At the same time, we now know that the most important thing they will have to learn is not this or that subject matter. The most important thing they will have to learn is how to learn. The most important thing, in other words, is not specific skills, but a universal skill—that of using knowledge and its systematic acquisition as the foundation for performance, skill, and achievement.
Educators have always known that this is the proper purpose of education. In the past they never had a chance to try to accomplish it. Now they have reached what they have hoped for for so many centuries: universal education for many years. Now they can use it for what they wanted to do all along. But the result will be a very different school and a very different education from anything we now have or envision.
Educators can no longer assume that somebody else will do the educational job for them. With everybody going to school till adulthood, school has become the place for learning whatever one needs in order to be both human being and effective.
A different challenge to the content and structure of education will be posed by the imminent conflict between extended schooling and continuing education.
As long as work was primarily experience, that is, until the last decades, “school” and “work” were on different planes. One started to “work” when one stopped “going to school.” And conversely, what one had learned in school had to last throughout the rest of ones working life. Everything the youngster might have to know in the way of general, theoretical concepts and knowledge had, therefore, to be crammed into the early years of schooling, before he went to work. There never was enough time. The result was unrelenting pressure to extend the years of schooling, that is, to keep the young in school even longer.
But when knowledge is applied to work, we need continuing education, that is, the frequent return of the experienced and accomplished adult to formal learning. Then it makes absolutely no sense to attempt to give the youngster everything he will need. Indeed it becomes absurd. He does not yet know what knowledge he will need ten or fifteen years hence. What he does know increasingly is that he will need things that are not yet available. It is commonplace today that every engineer is obsolete ten or fifteen years after graduation, and has to go back to school to be “retrained.” The same applies to the physician and the mathematician, to the accountant and the teacher, in short to anyone who is expected to apply knowledge to work. The very fact that we are using knowledge rather than experience makes change inevitable. For knowledge by definition innovates, searches, questions, and changes.
The more people know the more often they will go back to school throughout their working life. The more people have learned, the more they have come to rely on organized learning, the more they get into the habit of going to school. But also, the more they know, the more conscious they are of their ignorance and the more aware of new capacity to perform, of new knowledge, and of the need to hone their knowledge again and again.
We have had “adult education” for a century or more, but formerly it was schooling for the poorly educated. It aimed at giving the bright but poor the education their wealthy contemporaries had received as youngsters. Continuing education of highly educated people was confined to the military until World War II. Today, however, it is the fastest growing part of our educational system, and pretty general throughout the professions. The academic community is still somewhat suspicious of anyone past adolescence who wants to learn. Yet at least there is no longer open resistance to continuing education.
But its implications are not yet fully seen.
One implication is that we can now recognize the period in a person’s life and career when a given subject matter is learned best. We can now decide when the student should be exposed to this or that topic, rather than insist that he get it while he is under the thumb of the school, that is, in his early years. If a subject is learned to greater advantage after a man has gathered experience, we can postpone its study until he comes back as an accomplished practitioner. For we can now be increasingly certain that the accomplished practitioners will indeed come back.
Many subjects are better learned by experienced older men. Management is one of them; in the law, in medicine, in engineering, in education, in architecture, and in many other fields, there are, equally, areas that the inexperienced youngster can hardly learn and the beginner rarely needs. The most important areas in any practice are, as a rule, accessible most easily to the man of experience, and are most meaningful to him.
Today we try to enable the youngster without experience to understand such areas by “simulating" real-life experience. This is the essence of “case study.” But how much better and easier it would be to use genuine direct experience as the foundation for work in these areas.
These are also the areas where only the advanced practitioner needs much knowledge. To know a great deal about organization planning is essential to a manager. But it is not particularly helpful or meaningful to the young engineer. By waiting until a man has advanced, we make sure that we direct our efforts where they are likely to do some good. Most of the young, into whose skulls we try to cram these topics with great effort, will either not reach a position where they can use the knowledge, or will have forgotten it anyhow by tire time they get far enough along to use it.
Continuing education need not be education in specialized subjects of use only to the highly advanced professional. The most general subjects—philosophy, perhaps, or history—also make more sense as education for the experienced adult. Specialties are what the young learn best and need most. The “specialties” needed today are not, however, Biology or Modern History. They are fields of application, e.g., Environmental Control or Far-Eastern Area Studies in which a good many of the traditional specialized disciplines come together and become effective knowledge.
After all, the natural progression is not from generalist to specialist, but the other way around. For what makes a generalist is the ability to hold a specialty against the sum total of experience, that is, to relate it to the general. To be sure, the young need a foundation in the general, and they need the big vision, but the synthesis which is the true generalization is largely meaningless to them.
For this reason, continuing education may be where the true generalist will come into being. It may be the stage where we look at the whole, the “big picture,” where we can take the “philosophical view” and where we can ask: “What does it all mean?”
If educators give any thought to the question, they assume that we should have both ever-extended schooling and continuing education. But the two are actually in opposition. Extended schooling assumes that we will cram more and more into the preparation for life and work. Continuing education assumes that school becomes integrated with life. Extended schooling still assumes that one can only learn before one becomes an adult. Continuing education assumes that one learns certain things best as an adult. Above all, extended schooling believes that the longer we keep the young away from work and life, the more they will have learned. Continuing education assumes, on the contrary, that the more experience in life and work people have, the more eager they will be to learn and the more capable they will be of learning.
To the extent that continuing education becomes the norm, we will actually raise the question whether all these years of sitting in school as a youngster are necessary and useful. We will become impatient at keeping the young in school until they are almost middle aged, as is now the fashion. We will, in other words, rediscover experience—but order it on a knowledge basis.
Experience argues strongly that the assumptions of continuing education are a good deal more valid than those of extended schooling. Any teacher who has worked with students with adult experiences has been surprised by their eagerness, their motivation and, above all, by their superior performance in studying. This has been the common experience in every one of the programs in which students take ordinary jobs in the community and away from school during part of the year (Examples are the “cooperative program” at Antioch, Yellow Springs, Ohio; the program for engineering students at the University of Cincinnati; and the “nonresident” program at Bennington College, Vermont).
The most impressive evidence of the impact of experience on the capacity and willingness to learn was, of course, the returning veterans after World War II who flooded the American campuses under the G.I. Bill of Rights. Every educator then “knew” that these large masses of students would inevitably “debase” academic standards. Instead, every teacher found out that the real problem was that these students were so incredibly superior that they made demands the faculty could not satisfy. Similarly every one of the continuing-education programs for highly educated adults has revealed that the learning performance of these people is far above that of even the most brilliant of the younger students. Maybe they need a little time to get used to systematic studying again. But they make up for this in superior drive, in the ability to grasp the meaning of what they are being taught, and in the ability to use a theoretical concept to organize their own experience.
Continuing education is a big step beyond traditional education Such as extended schooling still represents. It draws the necessary conclusions from the great shift that is making knowledge the foundation for work. It makes school a continuing part of life and work. For surely if knowledge is to be our foundation for organizing experience, then experience in turn must continuously be projected on knowledge to make us see the meaning of what we know as well as the meaning of what we do. In a knowledge society, school and life can no longer be separate. They have to be linked in an organic process in which the one feeds back on the other. And this continuing education attempts to do.
As continuing education advances, we can therefore expect it to collide with extended schooling. Then we will have to face a policy decision: Do we want to continue to have more years of schooling for the young? Or would we rather have more years of schooling throughout life, which then would mean fewer years of schooling (or at least no more of them) for the young who have not yet started to work.
This is an issue educators have not yet faced up to—in fact, most of them do not suspect its existence. That it will have to be faced is, however, guaranteed by the social impacts of the “educational explosion.”
1. To keep everyone in school until the age of eighteen or twenty greatly extends the years of adolescence. Adolescence is not a natural "stage." It is a man-made, cultural condition. Tire adolescent lives simultaneously on two age levels; his “cultural age” is lower than his chronological age.
Chronological age is determined by the years one has already lived. It is physiological and controls physical and mental maturity, independent, on the whole, of society or culture.
Nutrition, however, is important. Because we are so much better fed, we actually mature physically and mentally earlier than our ancestors did, even though we live so much longer. The stories of the earlier sexual maturity of our ancestors are myth. Both boys and girls in the West (and in Japan) mature sexually several years earlier these days than they did a century or two ago.
But cultural age is determined by the number of years an individual can expect to live, or at least to be productive. Cultural age, in large measure, determines what behavior is expected of the individual and what emotional maturity he attains. Tire more we expand life expectancy and lifespan, therefore, the younger people are culturally. A young man of twenty-five today, who can expect to be still in good health at age sixty-five, is culturally younger than a young man was a hundred years ago at age fifteen, when he could not expect to last much beyond age thirty-five. As a result, the young man of twenty-five is expected to seem younger and to be emotionally less mature than the young man of fifteen was a century ago. Yet physically (and perhaps even mentally) the boy of fifteen today is more mature than the boy of fifteen was then. Tins gap between the attainment of physical and mental maturity at age fifteen and of cultural maturity which now does not occur until age twenty-five is adolescence.
Adolescence is a recent invention. It was unknown until Goethe published his first book, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when himself just barely twenty. It is no accident that this book appeared in 1770 and is thus a contemporary of Watt’s steam engine, of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and of the rise of the first class that had a substantially higher-than-traditional life expectancy, the urban middle classes of the commercial revolution in the West.
Adolescence is of necessity a time of conflict between one’s capabilities and what one is expected and permitted to do. It is a time of ambiguity. The adolescent is forever being told by the adult world to “act his age,” that is, to behave according to his chronological maturity. But he is also being told to stay out of adult concerns, that is, to behave according to his cultural age. Whatever he does, he is wrong. He does violence either to his chronological or to his cultural age. He is, therefore, inevitably a problem to himself as well as to society.
In traditional society, right up to the eighteenth century, there was no problem of this sort because there was no adolescence. Tire child became a young adult through an initiation rite—whether the circumcision rite of a primitive tribe, or the rite of knighthood, or being sent away from home to his apprenticeship. From that moment on, he was expected to put childish ways behind him and to be a young adult in an adult world.
Extending the years of schooling inevitably extends adolescence. Schools have become, by design, institutions for tire preservation of adolescence. They keep the young person in tire most unnatural society, a society composed exclusively of his contemporaries. School, even if it builds performance and experience into its curriculum to the fullest extent possible, is finite, certain, predictable. The student who decides to major in Oriental languages rather than in mathematics knows what this means in the way of courses, studies, examinations, and prerequisites. In school one cannot become an adult.
The best example is the delayed adolescence so common among highly trained young physicians. They have a great deal of knowledge. They have seen death and suffering, human stupidity, greed and cowardice and also dedication and courage—among patients as well as among colleagues. Yet they may remain callow adolescents well into their thirties, that is, until they have been out in practice five years or so. As long as they are in training, the loudspeaker or the telephone wakes them up, the schedule tells them what to do, and the attending physician or chief of service makes the final decisions. They simply are not allowed to become adults. The same delayed adolescence is only too noticeable among graduate students who stay on year after year in an environment in which all the emphasis is on their being "promising” and almost none on their performing.
Whether it was wise or not to extend adolescence by extending years of schooling is not relevant. We have done it. But we surely do not want to prolong it unnecessarily. Most people recover (though there are indications that prolonged adolescence can become a chronic disease). Yet it is not a healthy condition for society and even less so for the individual. A society in which a large part of the young, the physically healthy, the well educated, and the promising live in the limbo of adolescence, neither grown up nor productive nor yet still children, is a society plagued by juvenile delinquency, hasty marriage, and excessive divorce. Adolescents are beset alike by fear of taking responsibility and by bitter frustration at being kept out of power and opportunity. Above all, the society is ruled by the old—for all its appearances of being dominated by teenagers. If the young feel that they cannot trust anyone over thirty—as tire slogan of today’s teen-agers has it—they have, in fact, abdicated. They have admitted that they can neither become partners of those in power nor overthrow them.
The adolescents, in other words, have a perfectly legitimate grievance. But nothing much can be done about it. The only remedy is to enable the individual to break out of adolescence as soon as possible rather than be confined to it indefinitely by a rigid, unimaginative, and uniform system of education. What the adolescent needs are opportunities for experience and performance throughout the years of school. What he needs are opportunities to do what the child of yesterday did without special efforts: to work with adults as a young adult.
The student needs to get a little experience in school, a little achievement, a little performance. The problem of adolescence demands that we build exposure to areas of experience and performance (especially in the arts) into the normal process of growing up and going to school. We must make it possible for the young person to test himself in work, to spend a few years as an adult worker, and then, if he so desires, go back to school.
We badly need, for instance, to reverse the recent tendency of the American graduate school to clamp down on the night student who goes out for an advanced degree while working during the day. Of course, the young man or woman who holds a job and comes to school in the evenings is an administrative problem. He is a little more likely to drop out without completing the master’s or doctor’s degree than is the full- time student who has nothing else to do. The part-time student may also be a less docile pupil—and no teacher, no matter what he may say, really likes having people in his class who know more about the subject than he does. But to sacrifice the self-motivated adult student to the administrative convenience of the educators is antisocial and should not be tolerated.
For hundreds of years the educators quite properly pleaded and cajoled for a few more years of schooling. They saw their brightest pupils leaving school just when they were beginning to learn something. They saw even more of the brightest not going to school at all. For centuries the educators fought, with good reason, to make a little education universal and a lot of education accessible.
They have achieved these goals. Only the United States has so far committed herself to higher education as a “right.” But this will sooner or later become general in the advanced countries. But now that we have, or are going to have, all the years of schooling one can possibly ask for, there is no point in pushing for more years of schooling. Now the goal of the educator has to be to make the years of schooling fully productive, rather than to get more of them. Now, above all, it is his job to think through how one can acquire adequate knowledge in less time rather than how one can justify more time for school. Tire job today is to prevent an unnecessary extension of adolescence.
2. Long years of schooling create another new problem: the young man (or less commonly the young woman) who is no longer in school even though below the age when we expect young people to stop their formal education. He is increasingly "unemployable.”
American statistics still include in the “working population” any- one above the age of fourteen. But no one under eighteen or nineteen in this country is really considered employable. He should, public opinion believes, be in school. If he works, it cannot be in a “real job.” It is a “summer job” or a “week-end job,” but not a job which has anything to do with his future work or indeed with the working world of adults. This was vividly expressed in a recent “public service advertisement” in the New York subways. It showed a husky teenager with the legend: “Boy. That’s what they’ll call you all your life if you drop out of school now.”
In the United States, this development has gone the farthest. But it occurs whenever or wherever the years of schooling are being prolonged. It is, according to all reports, appearing in the Russian cities. It is also appearing in Japan.
The teenage jobs in Japan are still there. The traditional industries of preindustrial Japan, the small shop, the lacquer maker or the silk weaver still want boys of fifteen who have graduated from middle school. But except in the remote villages in the poor north—an area culturally and economically somewhat akin to America’s Deep South—the middle-school graduate is no longer considered employable. The traditional industries of Japan, therefore, are drying up for lack of employable manpower. This explains why the young apprentices who, by all Japanese traditions, are in honorable and secure work, and who can aspire to becoming independent craftsmen and artisans themselves (if not to being adopted by their master and becoming his successor) feel uprooted, dispossessed, and lost. They tend to join the Sokka Gakai, the sect of the alienated and uprooted.
In this country it is the urban, young Negro who is threatened most by this development. To jump from rural illiteracy to twelve years of schooling in one generation is more of a jump than any group can be expected to make, more of a jump than any other group has ever made in the United States or elsewhere (the same problem and for the same reason exists for the Oriental Jew in Israel).
Yet if the Negro boy in the American city drops out of school before he is eighteen, he is a “boy” and not a young adult. The traditional laborer’s jobs—handyman, deliveryman, garage attendant, gardener—still exist; their number is probably growing. Their pay is low, to be sure, and job security tenuous. But the pay is a good bit better, both absolutely and relative to other wages, than traditionally given to unskilled, casual workers. And young Negroes need the jobs, economically and psychologically. But the jobs go unfilled. For culturally the dropout is “not employable.” There is something the matter with him, even in his own eyes.
The dropout is a failure of society. He is a failure of the educator who does not know' how to attract and hold young people in school till they have reached the age at which our society is willing to let them go to work. The educator has defaulted on his first duty, the duty to tire student. We will indeed come to measure the schools by their ability to attract and hold the potential dropout—not by compulsion or by lowering standards, but by making school more meaningful, more exciting, and more rewarding.
Tire dropout is the quality control of education. Today few schools, and few teachers, would pass this test. The majority of those who do not drop out stay in school not because they want to, but because they are made to—by their parents and by their community. In spirit most of the white, middle-class youngsters are dropouts, too, kept in school only by parental and community pressure.
Tire twin problems of adolescence and dropouts indicate that we will have to learn to build school curricula that serve the individual, that is, school curricula composed of standard units that can be put together to serve individual needs, to satisfy individual aspirations, and to conform to tire one fact we really know about growing up: that no two people ever grow up exactly alike.
3. The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history. We are in danger of confining access to opportunity to those—still less than half of our young people—who have stayed in school beyond high school, and particularly to those who have finished college. Even ordinary jobs are increasingly reserved for those who have at least finished high school. We thus are denying full citizenship in the knowledge society to the large group—15 to 20 per cent perhaps—who stopped before they could get a high school diploma. And we are sharply curtailing access to opportunities for half the population—the ones who don’t attend college.
This is not only new in American history. It is singularly stupid. The great strength of American society throughout our history lay in our willingness to use human resources, in our willingness to put ability, ambition, and dedication to productive use wherever it arose. We never fully lived up to this principle. We certainly did not live up to it with respect to women. And we disregarded it entirely in the case of the black man. But never before did we deny it explicitly as we are now doing.
By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve. There is not much correlation between ability to do well in school and ability to perform in life and work (except perhaps in purely academic work). There is no reason to believe that the diploma certifies too much more than that the holder has sat a long time. Human beings mature much too unevenly to put trust in a diploma as a final test of a young man’s “potential” and future performance and capacity. Even if the diploma, or its absence, mismeasures only a fraction of our young people (say, one out of four) we cannot afford to lose those that have been unjustly or wrongly cast out. Actually the percentage must be much higher. For going to school beyond high school is still, even among our white population, in large part a matter of accident, family tradition, wealth, local mores, or the luck of being taught by a good teacher. To be sure, three-quarters or more of our present college graduates each year have parents without college education. But conversely a large proportion, a good half or so, of the children of parents without college education only go to college if there is special encouragement.
Limiting access to opportunity to those with a diploma is a crass denial of all fundamental American beliefs—beliefs, by the way, that have been amply validated by experience. Maybe such a diploma curtain can be justified in a country where tire diploma only controls access to a minority of opportunities, as it used to do. Maybe in a country with a tradition of rigid classes, “meritocracy” (to use the particularly ugly word the British have invented for control of access to life’s opportunities by the diploma) can be defended as broadening individual opportunities—though the new rigidities will, I predict, be as stultifying and oppressive as the old class barriers ever were. But in the United States, where class never controlled, the substitution of the diploma for performance as the key to opportunity and advancement, restricts, oppresses, and injures individual and society alike.
I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status—just as questions regarding race, religion, sex, or age are now banned in a good many states. I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can. “Academic ability” is also an accident of birth, and not a very meaningful one at that.
Outlawing the question on the application blank will, of course, do as little as outlawing similar questions regarding race has done for the employment opportunities of the Negro. We need to punch big holes in the diploma curtain through which the able and ambitious can move even though they have not sat long enough on school benches to satisfy the schoolmasters’ requirements. Employers, and especially large companies, need to look in their work force for the people of proven performance and willingness to achieve, though they lack the formal requirements. Indeed, to spend on this part of the money now spent on college recruitment would be highly profitable. With everyone trying to get the same college graduates, no one can hope to get anyone particularly outstanding, or indeed anything but mediocrity. All one can do is bid up the entrance salary. Perhaps there are fewer big fish in the pond of those who have not gone to college. But the individual employer’s chance of landing one of these big fish is infinitely greater in the pond where nobody else fishes than it is among college graduates where be competes even for the minnows with every other employer in the land (The one program of this kind of which I know is governmental and operates within a civil service. It is the Public Employment Career Development Program which the State of New Jersey has been running with considerable success since 1966).
Once we have identified those performers who lack the formal credentials issued by the schoolmaster, we can give them access to knowledge easily enough. There are few cities in the United States today where continuing education in almost any area is not easily available.
The schools will also have to develop an “earned degree” for those who have proved their ability in performance even though they lack the hours on the school bench and the credits for courses that would have entitled them to the normal diploma. The schools have to accept the fact that the diploma has become the passport to outside opportunities and that therefore it behooves them to acknowledge parallel paths of achievement. And the path of the “loner” who gets there his own way and without benefit of required courses is at least as good and honorable and worth at least as much, as the mapped and charted path of the orthodox school curriculum. The standards for this “earned degree” would, of course, be high—but so they should be for any distinction, including the diploma one gets for attending school.
If we do not eliminate the diploma curtain, it will turn the opportunity of knowledge into a nightmare. It will make the diploma into a symbol of discrimination—-which is what it has already become to the poor Negro in the ghetto. It will impoverish our society and economy, and deprive us of a great reservoir of human energies. It will corrode our ideals and make mockery of our professions. Perhaps worst of all, it will substitute the arrogance of title for the pride of accomplishment as the ruling passion of the knowledge society.
Source
1968
IN THE late 1960’s the United States, despite the Vietnam war, spent quite a bit more on education than on defense. Education took annually about $70 to $75 billion of which $50 billion was spent by the school and university systems (public and private) and perhaps half as much again by industry, governments, and the armed forces for all kinds of schooling and training. This was twice what the United States had spent in a year in the mid-fifties, and four times the amount spent annually in the years after World War II when the “educational explosion” first started.
Education has become by far the largest community expenditure in the American economy. We spend more on education than on all other nondefense community services together—health care, welfare, farm subsidies, and so on. Teachers of all kinds, now the largest single occupational group in the American labor force, outnumber by a good margin steelworkers, teamsters, and salespeople, indeed even farmers.
These are but the quantitative symptoms of a major change in values by no means confined to the United States. Education has become the key to opportunity and advancement all over the modem world, replacing birth, wealth, and perhaps even talent. Education has become the first value choice of modern man. This is success such as no schoolmaster through the ages would have dared dream of. But can education live with this success? Or, to paraphrase the title of a popular play of a few years ago, “Has Success Spoiled the Schools?”
Signs abound that all is far from well with education. While expenditures have been skyrocketing—and will keep on going up—the taxpayers are getting visibly restless. In community after community across the United States they have voted down, in the last few years, proposals for new school taxes or new school bonds or higher teachers’ salaries. These may be futile gestures: in the end the school taxes do go up, the money for new buildings is provided—if not out of school bonds, then out of federal subsidies—and the teachers’ salaries are adjusted by competitive pressure. But the growing resistance to the cost of education indicates that the public is beginning to be concerned with what it gets for its money.
The ambivalence between faith in education and resistance to its costs is present everywhere. The British Labour government, committed to rapid expansion of general education accessible to everyone, still resists teachers’ demands for higher salaries and tries to postpone the building of badly needed teacher-training colleges. Japanese students, fully aware that education controls what opportunities they will enjoy, still riot against an increase in fees. De Gaulle is willing to spend scarce francs sending teachers to French Canada. But until the students rose up in May 1968 and all but tore down French society, de Gaulle had been resisting all demands to expand the badly eroded and totally inadequate facilities of Paris’ famous old university, the Sorbonne. We all love education and want more of it. But we clearly are not at all convinced that we are getting our money’s worth for what we spend on it—and with good reason.
Important, if only as a symptom, is the alienation from die school of today’s adolescent rebels, the beats and hippies. Adolescent rebellion, almost without exception, has in the past been organized in and around the school, and especially in and around the university. The left-wing radicals of the thirties in Britain and the United States, for instance, and their imitators, the left-wing students in Latin America today, had the university for their base and considered it their own institution. The beats and hippies, however, rebel today against school even more than against their parents.
To find a parallel, one has to go back a good many centuries to the goliards, the beats and dropouts from the university of the early Renaissance. That the goliards achieved very' little, except a few rowdy songs, does not matter. They bespoke the senility and obsolescence of the traditional university as it had come down from the Middle Ages. They heralded its breakup and replacement by the “modern” university', a very different school, with different educational goals, different values, and entirely different content and curriculum. A hundred years hence, today’s beats and hippies may well come to be seen as the goliards of the twentieth century who, without achieving much of their own, heralded the breakdown of the traditional “humanist” education, which arose in the seventeenth century as education for the new tiny minority of lay scribes, and which by now has been extended uncritically to education for everyone everywhere.
Education has become too important to be left to the educators. In modern society everybody has a right to consider himself an “expert” on schools, for everybody during his formative years spends more waking hours in school than in any one other institution. Moreover, education is far too big a cost to be accepted without questioning. To ask whether it is fruitful investment or simply expense is a legitimate question. Education has also become too powerful to go unchallenged, for schooling increasingly controls access to careers, opportunities, and advancement. For all these reasons education must become a public issue in all advanced countries—and perhaps even more in the developing countries where the costs of education have become a major barrier to economic and social development.
The schools, their structure, their role, their objectives, and, above all, what they teach will, therefore, become increasingly a major concern. What do the schools produce in return for what we spend on them? What do we get out of all tire years we sit in schools?
What is School For?
Skilled craftsmen, everyone had known for centuries, were a great economic asset. But until recently going to school was, economically speaking, a luxury. Literacy had long been preached among Protestants and Orthodox Jews as necessary for effective religious performance. From the eighteenth century on, it had become a foundation for citizenship. Elementary education had, by 1850 or so, come to be accepted as necessary to the individual's ability to "better himself.” But only a tiny minority needed more than the bare minimum; only a tiny minority was expected to use knowledge in its work at all.In the early years of this century there was, for instance, no pressure for education in the colonial areas. On the contrary, British attempts to introduce universal primary education in India were steadily resisted by the incipient anticolonial movement of the day, the early Indian Congress party. Schools were a shocking waste of the taxpayer’s money, from which the country would not derive any benefit. The felt need in the poorer countries was for irrigation works, roads, and lower taxes. And the number of educated people who could be usefully employed was so small that the need was easily satisfied by the sons of the wealthy who could well afford to pay for school out of their own pockets. Until recently, economists were severely critical of the Japanese drive for universal literacy after 1870 as a wasteful diversion of badly needed economic resources to an unproductive "prestige” project.
The greatest sin of "colonialism” today is that it did not introduce universal schooling and therefore did not produce an educated society in the colonial countries. And no achievement of the Japanese reforms of the Meiji Period after 1867 was so universally acclaimed during the Meiji Centennial celebrations in 1967-68 as the priority given to education as the foundation of a modern productive economy and society.
That education was not seen as economically productive but rather as a luxury the rich could afford, explains in large measure the manner in which the years of schooling were extended. Responding primarily to the increase of working lifespan, the schools put more and more youngsters into "advanced education,” that is, into what had been designed as vocational training for a small number of scribes. What had been highly specialized training became, by default, everybody’s general education.
This was not planned; it happened. The last unit of school that was planned and thought through at all was what is known in the United States as "junior high school,” that is, school for tire pre-adolescent from age twelve to fifteen. Junior high school, however, was designed in Europe well over a century ago when in some countries it first became economically possible to keep substantial numbers of children in school beyond the elementary grades (The first country to develop this school type on a broad basis was Austria (around 1820). The name it then received, Buergerschule, that is, “school for citizens," was meant as a political manifesto by the liberal educators who designed it. Educated people are “citizens" rather than “subjects.”). Conceived as terminal school for the great majority, it was designed to a large extent to blend in with the first years of apprenticeship in a craft. Beyond this, however, the new additional students were simply put into existing schools that had been created originally to train clergymen, lawyers, or civil servants, such as the English public school, the German Gymnasium, the American high school, or the French lycée. We repeated this process once more when going to college became common during the last twenty or thirty years.
This process shows best perhaps in the way the arguments for teaching Latin in secondary school have changed—while the teaching of Latin itself has not changed one bit. In 1700 or 1750 no one would have argued that teaching Latin taught anything but Latin. No one spoke of it as "forming the mind,” no one praised it as a “discipline,” no one asserted that knowing Latin was the key to learning the other European languages more easily. One learned Latin because Latin was the “communications medium” of educated people. Until the mid-eighteenth century when French cultural imperialism tried unsuccessfully to put the language of Louis XIV into the place of the language of Augustus, books for the educated and documents of importance were normally written in Latin. Latin was taught as a tool of high utility without which a scribe could not properly function. When this came to an end—in the early nineteenth century —all the other virtues of Latin were suddenly discovered. Now, for the last fifty or hundred years, Latin is being defended because it has no usefulness whatever; that is, it is an ornament. An “educated man,” it is argued, should not learn subjects of utility but subjects such as Latin which are ‘liberal” and “general education” precisely because no one can do anything with them.
This is not an argument against Latin; it is an illustration of the fundamental character of our higher education, a character grounded in its history and original purpose. As a vocational school for the professions that require ability to write—and this is what “learned” originally meant—higher education quite properly stressed the verbal skills. The apprenticeship of the carpenter stressed plane and hammer and saw. The apprenticeship of the clergyman, the lawyer, the teacher, the government servant—that is, higher education as it emerged out of Renaissance and Reformation—stressed reading, writing, and enough mathematics to be an accountant, a lawyer administering estates, and a surveyor. The school could therefore leave to the other apprenticeships concern with everything that was not verbal skill. Life taught to most people anyhow free of cost the nonverbal: experience and performance.
For employments other than as a scribe, formal education was considered a handicap rather than an asset.
When I started work as an apprentice clerk in an export firm, only forty years ago, I was considered distinctly “overeducated.” I had finished secondary school, and no apprentice before me, including the owners of the firm and their sons, had entered work that late. They had all started at age fourteen, and yet considered themselves fully educated and were considered so by the community.
But today the school has become the universal growing-up process for everybody. For this purpose, however, verbal training is not adequate, let alone productive. We can no longer assume that the great majority will have enough nonverbal experiences outside of school; the great majority receives its most important learning exposure during its formative years by sitting in the classroom and receiving there the scribe’s education. That is much too one-sided, much too restricted, much too narrowly vocational—and, above all, not ‘ liberal” or “general,” and not truly "educational.” The greatest weakness of the schools today, and the one youngsters most suffer from, is this verbal straitjacket. Of course, there are also sports—and we need diem. But man is more than verbal skills and muscle.
Few things are as badly needed in growing up as the sense of achievement, which only performance can give. But the schools do not permit achievement. In the “academic disciplines’ a student cannot perform. He can only show promise. All he can do in schools in the verbal areas is to repeat what somebody has already done or said.
Yesterday's educators had no choice but to extend the only school they had, the only school they knew. Their customers would have resented it had they been offered anything but the school they had come to envy as the mark of privilege. But the result is a school that deforms rather than forms. It is a school of boredom, of lack of stimulation, of lack of achievement, and of lack of satisfaction. I am not surprised that the kids riot. I am surprised at their patience, considering how bored most of them are in school most of the time (A frightening picture of the frustrating boredom that school tends to be even for bright children from educated white middle- and upper class homes is given in the moving book How Children Fail by John Holt (New York: Pitman Publishing, 1965).
The problem of the school is not a matter of “standards” as schoolmasters tend to define them. It is not a matter, in other words, of “working harder” and of “doing more” of what is being done today. What we have learned in respect to all work applies to the work of the school as well. We need to “work smarter.” We need to do different things and to do them differently.
History shows a frightening parallel to the way our education is going everywhere in the world today. It is the decline of the world’s most creative, most advanced, and most exciting civilization, that of China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Until then, China had led the world in the arts and in the sciences, in medicine and in mathematics, in technology and in statecraft. The reaction against independent thinking and artistic creativity that followed the invasion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century imposed the Confucian system of purely literary and purely imitative “liberal education” to the exclusion of everything else. Within a century China had become sterile and had lost her capacity to do anything new, to imagine anything new, to perceive anything new. We are, I am afraid, on the same road—and we have traveled very far along it.
This is not a plea for what is known today as “vocational education,” that is, for teaching traditional craft skills the traditional way, only in a classroom instead of in the shop. On the contrary, nothing is deader than traditional “vocational education”—assuming (against all evidence) that it ever was alive.
The skills that “vocational education” teaches are obsolete. They are the craft skills of yesterday. The one tiring that is predictable is that by the time the students graduate into a job, automobile maintenance or woodworking—or even cooking—will no longer be done the way we are teaching these crafts in our vocational schools. This is not the way to teach skill anyhow. The way to teach a skill today is by putting it on a knowledge foundation and teaching it through a systematic course of studies, that is, through a “program.”
The worst part of “vocational education” is, however, that it is being administered as training of the “second-rate.” The youngsters who are “not good enough” to go through the “academic” course of studies are being pushed into “vocational education” as a means of keeping them off the streets and out of mischief until they are old enough to quit school.
What we need in modern society are people who can acquire skills by having a knowledge foundation. We need only a fairly small number of people who are purely theoretical. But we need an infinite number of people capable of using theory as the basis of skill for practical application in work. These have to be “technologists” rather than “skilled craftsmen.” Tire ablest of the young, the most gifted intellectually, the most brilliant ones need, even more than the dimwits, the ability of the "technologist” to apply knowledge to work through a knowledge-based skill. At the same time, the academically slow student needs tire knowledge foundation to have any skill worth having.
In other words, we will have to replace today’s “vocational training” by the education of technologists. This will have to be “general education, indeed in the true sense a “liberal” education. It should be a cornerstone of tomorrow’s education for everybody (On tin's point, the recent studies of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) are highly instructive. In analyzing the technology gap between the United States and Europe, these studies found that Europe has proportionately more scientists than the United States. What it lacks arc educated managers at lower and middle levels).
Equally important is the training and formation of perception and emotion in school. This is needed, however we conceive the ends of education. The trained perception and the disciplined emotion are as pertinent to the ability to earn a livelihood as they are to the mature human personality. They are man, above all. Indeed it is perception, especially tactile perception through the hand, that largely forms the mind of the child (as the great contemporary psychologist, Jean Piaget of Geneva, has proved in countless observations). Perception and emotion are trained, developed, and disciplined only in the experience of performance, that is, only under the challenge of objective standards that exist no matter what the individual’s ability, inclinations, or proficiency.
Such standards exist for the beginner only in the arts. There alone applies what my piano teacher used to say to me when I was a child: "You will never play Mozart like the virtuosi, the real musicians; but there is no reason why you should not play your scales like them.” In playing an instrument or in painting—in fact, in all the arts—there are absolute standards even for the lowliest beginner. There is direct experience of what performance demands. There is achievement. (Writing poetry or a short story makes performance demands too. But because the level of abstraction is so much higher in the verbal area, achievement is hardest to obtain and performance more difficult to perceive for the beginner than in the performing or graphic arts with their immediacy of experience.)
Today music appreciation is a respected academic discipline (even though it tends to be a deadly bore for the kids who have to memorize a lot of names when they have never heard the music). Playing an instrument or composing are considered, however, amateurish or “trade school.” This is not very bright, even if school is considered vocational preparation for the scribe. When school be- comes general education for everyone, it is lunacy.
I am talking about a good deal more than new subjects. I am talking about the approach that is needed to design education on different assumptions. In the past, every segment of our school system was looked upon as an entity in itself, as the last school for the great majority of its pupils and as the only place where specific subjects or vocational skills could be acquired during the student’s lifetime. Today the correct assumption is, however, that the great majority of students will proceed from each level of the school system to the next higher one—and then come back as adults more than once. We need variety and diversity, to be sure; but we need no longer start out with the question: “What do the youngsters have to know at age twelve—or age fifteen—or age seventeen—when they will stop going to school for the rest of their lives?” We can assume that they will stay for at least ten and probably twelve or more years. At the same time, we now know that the most important thing they will have to learn is not this or that subject matter. The most important thing they will have to learn is how to learn. The most important thing, in other words, is not specific skills, but a universal skill—that of using knowledge and its systematic acquisition as the foundation for performance, skill, and achievement.
Educators have always known that this is the proper purpose of education. In the past they never had a chance to try to accomplish it. Now they have reached what they have hoped for for so many centuries: universal education for many years. Now they can use it for what they wanted to do all along. But the result will be a very different school and a very different education from anything we now have or envision.
Educators can no longer assume that somebody else will do the educational job for them. With everybody going to school till adulthood, school has become the place for learning whatever one needs in order to be both human being and effective.
A different challenge to the content and structure of education will be posed by the imminent conflict between extended schooling and continuing education.
As long as work was primarily experience, that is, until the last decades, “school” and “work” were on different planes. One started to “work” when one stopped “going to school.” And conversely, what one had learned in school had to last throughout the rest of ones working life. Everything the youngster might have to know in the way of general, theoretical concepts and knowledge had, therefore, to be crammed into the early years of schooling, before he went to work. There never was enough time. The result was unrelenting pressure to extend the years of schooling, that is, to keep the young in school even longer.
But when knowledge is applied to work, we need continuing education, that is, the frequent return of the experienced and accomplished adult to formal learning. Then it makes absolutely no sense to attempt to give the youngster everything he will need. Indeed it becomes absurd. He does not yet know what knowledge he will need ten or fifteen years hence. What he does know increasingly is that he will need things that are not yet available. It is commonplace today that every engineer is obsolete ten or fifteen years after graduation, and has to go back to school to be “retrained.” The same applies to the physician and the mathematician, to the accountant and the teacher, in short to anyone who is expected to apply knowledge to work. The very fact that we are using knowledge rather than experience makes change inevitable. For knowledge by definition innovates, searches, questions, and changes.
The more people know the more often they will go back to school throughout their working life. The more people have learned, the more they have come to rely on organized learning, the more they get into the habit of going to school. But also, the more they know, the more conscious they are of their ignorance and the more aware of new capacity to perform, of new knowledge, and of the need to hone their knowledge again and again.
We have had “adult education” for a century or more, but formerly it was schooling for the poorly educated. It aimed at giving the bright but poor the education their wealthy contemporaries had received as youngsters. Continuing education of highly educated people was confined to the military until World War II. Today, however, it is the fastest growing part of our educational system, and pretty general throughout the professions. The academic community is still somewhat suspicious of anyone past adolescence who wants to learn. Yet at least there is no longer open resistance to continuing education.
But its implications are not yet fully seen.
One implication is that we can now recognize the period in a person’s life and career when a given subject matter is learned best. We can now decide when the student should be exposed to this or that topic, rather than insist that he get it while he is under the thumb of the school, that is, in his early years. If a subject is learned to greater advantage after a man has gathered experience, we can postpone its study until he comes back as an accomplished practitioner. For we can now be increasingly certain that the accomplished practitioners will indeed come back.
Many subjects are better learned by experienced older men. Management is one of them; in the law, in medicine, in engineering, in education, in architecture, and in many other fields, there are, equally, areas that the inexperienced youngster can hardly learn and the beginner rarely needs. The most important areas in any practice are, as a rule, accessible most easily to the man of experience, and are most meaningful to him.
Today we try to enable the youngster without experience to understand such areas by “simulating" real-life experience. This is the essence of “case study.” But how much better and easier it would be to use genuine direct experience as the foundation for work in these areas.
These are also the areas where only the advanced practitioner needs much knowledge. To know a great deal about organization planning is essential to a manager. But it is not particularly helpful or meaningful to the young engineer. By waiting until a man has advanced, we make sure that we direct our efforts where they are likely to do some good. Most of the young, into whose skulls we try to cram these topics with great effort, will either not reach a position where they can use the knowledge, or will have forgotten it anyhow by tire time they get far enough along to use it.
Continuing education need not be education in specialized subjects of use only to the highly advanced professional. The most general subjects—philosophy, perhaps, or history—also make more sense as education for the experienced adult. Specialties are what the young learn best and need most. The “specialties” needed today are not, however, Biology or Modern History. They are fields of application, e.g., Environmental Control or Far-Eastern Area Studies in which a good many of the traditional specialized disciplines come together and become effective knowledge.
After all, the natural progression is not from generalist to specialist, but the other way around. For what makes a generalist is the ability to hold a specialty against the sum total of experience, that is, to relate it to the general. To be sure, the young need a foundation in the general, and they need the big vision, but the synthesis which is the true generalization is largely meaningless to them.
For this reason, continuing education may be where the true generalist will come into being. It may be the stage where we look at the whole, the “big picture,” where we can take the “philosophical view” and where we can ask: “What does it all mean?”
If educators give any thought to the question, they assume that we should have both ever-extended schooling and continuing education. But the two are actually in opposition. Extended schooling assumes that we will cram more and more into the preparation for life and work. Continuing education assumes that school becomes integrated with life. Extended schooling still assumes that one can only learn before one becomes an adult. Continuing education assumes that one learns certain things best as an adult. Above all, extended schooling believes that the longer we keep the young away from work and life, the more they will have learned. Continuing education assumes, on the contrary, that the more experience in life and work people have, the more eager they will be to learn and the more capable they will be of learning.
To the extent that continuing education becomes the norm, we will actually raise the question whether all these years of sitting in school as a youngster are necessary and useful. We will become impatient at keeping the young in school until they are almost middle aged, as is now the fashion. We will, in other words, rediscover experience—but order it on a knowledge basis.
Experience argues strongly that the assumptions of continuing education are a good deal more valid than those of extended schooling. Any teacher who has worked with students with adult experiences has been surprised by their eagerness, their motivation and, above all, by their superior performance in studying. This has been the common experience in every one of the programs in which students take ordinary jobs in the community and away from school during part of the year (Examples are the “cooperative program” at Antioch, Yellow Springs, Ohio; the program for engineering students at the University of Cincinnati; and the “nonresident” program at Bennington College, Vermont).
The most impressive evidence of the impact of experience on the capacity and willingness to learn was, of course, the returning veterans after World War II who flooded the American campuses under the G.I. Bill of Rights. Every educator then “knew” that these large masses of students would inevitably “debase” academic standards. Instead, every teacher found out that the real problem was that these students were so incredibly superior that they made demands the faculty could not satisfy. Similarly every one of the continuing-education programs for highly educated adults has revealed that the learning performance of these people is far above that of even the most brilliant of the younger students. Maybe they need a little time to get used to systematic studying again. But they make up for this in superior drive, in the ability to grasp the meaning of what they are being taught, and in the ability to use a theoretical concept to organize their own experience.
Continuing education is a big step beyond traditional education Such as extended schooling still represents. It draws the necessary conclusions from the great shift that is making knowledge the foundation for work. It makes school a continuing part of life and work. For surely if knowledge is to be our foundation for organizing experience, then experience in turn must continuously be projected on knowledge to make us see the meaning of what we know as well as the meaning of what we do. In a knowledge society, school and life can no longer be separate. They have to be linked in an organic process in which the one feeds back on the other. And this continuing education attempts to do.
As continuing education advances, we can therefore expect it to collide with extended schooling. Then we will have to face a policy decision: Do we want to continue to have more years of schooling for the young? Or would we rather have more years of schooling throughout life, which then would mean fewer years of schooling (or at least no more of them) for the young who have not yet started to work.
This is an issue educators have not yet faced up to—in fact, most of them do not suspect its existence. That it will have to be faced is, however, guaranteed by the social impacts of the “educational explosion.”
The Social Impacts of Education
Advanced education for everyone is a great achievement. But the greater the achievement, the higher the price to be paid for it. The price for universal advanced education was, therefore, bound to be high. Indeed the social impacts of long years of schooling present us with problems we have never faced before, problems we are not yet equipped to handle.1. To keep everyone in school until the age of eighteen or twenty greatly extends the years of adolescence. Adolescence is not a natural "stage." It is a man-made, cultural condition. Tire adolescent lives simultaneously on two age levels; his “cultural age” is lower than his chronological age.
Chronological age is determined by the years one has already lived. It is physiological and controls physical and mental maturity, independent, on the whole, of society or culture.
Nutrition, however, is important. Because we are so much better fed, we actually mature physically and mentally earlier than our ancestors did, even though we live so much longer. The stories of the earlier sexual maturity of our ancestors are myth. Both boys and girls in the West (and in Japan) mature sexually several years earlier these days than they did a century or two ago.
But cultural age is determined by the number of years an individual can expect to live, or at least to be productive. Cultural age, in large measure, determines what behavior is expected of the individual and what emotional maturity he attains. Tire more we expand life expectancy and lifespan, therefore, the younger people are culturally. A young man of twenty-five today, who can expect to be still in good health at age sixty-five, is culturally younger than a young man was a hundred years ago at age fifteen, when he could not expect to last much beyond age thirty-five. As a result, the young man of twenty-five is expected to seem younger and to be emotionally less mature than the young man of fifteen was a century ago. Yet physically (and perhaps even mentally) the boy of fifteen today is more mature than the boy of fifteen was then. Tins gap between the attainment of physical and mental maturity at age fifteen and of cultural maturity which now does not occur until age twenty-five is adolescence.
Adolescence is a recent invention. It was unknown until Goethe published his first book, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when himself just barely twenty. It is no accident that this book appeared in 1770 and is thus a contemporary of Watt’s steam engine, of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and of the rise of the first class that had a substantially higher-than-traditional life expectancy, the urban middle classes of the commercial revolution in the West.
Adolescence is of necessity a time of conflict between one’s capabilities and what one is expected and permitted to do. It is a time of ambiguity. The adolescent is forever being told by the adult world to “act his age,” that is, to behave according to his chronological maturity. But he is also being told to stay out of adult concerns, that is, to behave according to his cultural age. Whatever he does, he is wrong. He does violence either to his chronological or to his cultural age. He is, therefore, inevitably a problem to himself as well as to society.
In traditional society, right up to the eighteenth century, there was no problem of this sort because there was no adolescence. Tire child became a young adult through an initiation rite—whether the circumcision rite of a primitive tribe, or the rite of knighthood, or being sent away from home to his apprenticeship. From that moment on, he was expected to put childish ways behind him and to be a young adult in an adult world.
Extending the years of schooling inevitably extends adolescence. Schools have become, by design, institutions for tire preservation of adolescence. They keep the young person in tire most unnatural society, a society composed exclusively of his contemporaries. School, even if it builds performance and experience into its curriculum to the fullest extent possible, is finite, certain, predictable. The student who decides to major in Oriental languages rather than in mathematics knows what this means in the way of courses, studies, examinations, and prerequisites. In school one cannot become an adult.
The best example is the delayed adolescence so common among highly trained young physicians. They have a great deal of knowledge. They have seen death and suffering, human stupidity, greed and cowardice and also dedication and courage—among patients as well as among colleagues. Yet they may remain callow adolescents well into their thirties, that is, until they have been out in practice five years or so. As long as they are in training, the loudspeaker or the telephone wakes them up, the schedule tells them what to do, and the attending physician or chief of service makes the final decisions. They simply are not allowed to become adults. The same delayed adolescence is only too noticeable among graduate students who stay on year after year in an environment in which all the emphasis is on their being "promising” and almost none on their performing.
Whether it was wise or not to extend adolescence by extending years of schooling is not relevant. We have done it. But we surely do not want to prolong it unnecessarily. Most people recover (though there are indications that prolonged adolescence can become a chronic disease). Yet it is not a healthy condition for society and even less so for the individual. A society in which a large part of the young, the physically healthy, the well educated, and the promising live in the limbo of adolescence, neither grown up nor productive nor yet still children, is a society plagued by juvenile delinquency, hasty marriage, and excessive divorce. Adolescents are beset alike by fear of taking responsibility and by bitter frustration at being kept out of power and opportunity. Above all, the society is ruled by the old—for all its appearances of being dominated by teenagers. If the young feel that they cannot trust anyone over thirty—as tire slogan of today’s teen-agers has it—they have, in fact, abdicated. They have admitted that they can neither become partners of those in power nor overthrow them.
The adolescents, in other words, have a perfectly legitimate grievance. But nothing much can be done about it. The only remedy is to enable the individual to break out of adolescence as soon as possible rather than be confined to it indefinitely by a rigid, unimaginative, and uniform system of education. What the adolescent needs are opportunities for experience and performance throughout the years of school. What he needs are opportunities to do what the child of yesterday did without special efforts: to work with adults as a young adult.
The student needs to get a little experience in school, a little achievement, a little performance. The problem of adolescence demands that we build exposure to areas of experience and performance (especially in the arts) into the normal process of growing up and going to school. We must make it possible for the young person to test himself in work, to spend a few years as an adult worker, and then, if he so desires, go back to school.
We badly need, for instance, to reverse the recent tendency of the American graduate school to clamp down on the night student who goes out for an advanced degree while working during the day. Of course, the young man or woman who holds a job and comes to school in the evenings is an administrative problem. He is a little more likely to drop out without completing the master’s or doctor’s degree than is the full- time student who has nothing else to do. The part-time student may also be a less docile pupil—and no teacher, no matter what he may say, really likes having people in his class who know more about the subject than he does. But to sacrifice the self-motivated adult student to the administrative convenience of the educators is antisocial and should not be tolerated.
For hundreds of years the educators quite properly pleaded and cajoled for a few more years of schooling. They saw their brightest pupils leaving school just when they were beginning to learn something. They saw even more of the brightest not going to school at all. For centuries the educators fought, with good reason, to make a little education universal and a lot of education accessible.
They have achieved these goals. Only the United States has so far committed herself to higher education as a “right.” But this will sooner or later become general in the advanced countries. But now that we have, or are going to have, all the years of schooling one can possibly ask for, there is no point in pushing for more years of schooling. Now the goal of the educator has to be to make the years of schooling fully productive, rather than to get more of them. Now, above all, it is his job to think through how one can acquire adequate knowledge in less time rather than how one can justify more time for school. Tire job today is to prevent an unnecessary extension of adolescence.
2. Long years of schooling create another new problem: the young man (or less commonly the young woman) who is no longer in school even though below the age when we expect young people to stop their formal education. He is increasingly "unemployable.”
American statistics still include in the “working population” any- one above the age of fourteen. But no one under eighteen or nineteen in this country is really considered employable. He should, public opinion believes, be in school. If he works, it cannot be in a “real job.” It is a “summer job” or a “week-end job,” but not a job which has anything to do with his future work or indeed with the working world of adults. This was vividly expressed in a recent “public service advertisement” in the New York subways. It showed a husky teenager with the legend: “Boy. That’s what they’ll call you all your life if you drop out of school now.”
In the United States, this development has gone the farthest. But it occurs whenever or wherever the years of schooling are being prolonged. It is, according to all reports, appearing in the Russian cities. It is also appearing in Japan.
The teenage jobs in Japan are still there. The traditional industries of preindustrial Japan, the small shop, the lacquer maker or the silk weaver still want boys of fifteen who have graduated from middle school. But except in the remote villages in the poor north—an area culturally and economically somewhat akin to America’s Deep South—the middle-school graduate is no longer considered employable. The traditional industries of Japan, therefore, are drying up for lack of employable manpower. This explains why the young apprentices who, by all Japanese traditions, are in honorable and secure work, and who can aspire to becoming independent craftsmen and artisans themselves (if not to being adopted by their master and becoming his successor) feel uprooted, dispossessed, and lost. They tend to join the Sokka Gakai, the sect of the alienated and uprooted.
In this country it is the urban, young Negro who is threatened most by this development. To jump from rural illiteracy to twelve years of schooling in one generation is more of a jump than any group can be expected to make, more of a jump than any other group has ever made in the United States or elsewhere (the same problem and for the same reason exists for the Oriental Jew in Israel).
Yet if the Negro boy in the American city drops out of school before he is eighteen, he is a “boy” and not a young adult. The traditional laborer’s jobs—handyman, deliveryman, garage attendant, gardener—still exist; their number is probably growing. Their pay is low, to be sure, and job security tenuous. But the pay is a good bit better, both absolutely and relative to other wages, than traditionally given to unskilled, casual workers. And young Negroes need the jobs, economically and psychologically. But the jobs go unfilled. For culturally the dropout is “not employable.” There is something the matter with him, even in his own eyes.
The dropout is a failure of society. He is a failure of the educator who does not know' how to attract and hold young people in school till they have reached the age at which our society is willing to let them go to work. The educator has defaulted on his first duty, the duty to tire student. We will indeed come to measure the schools by their ability to attract and hold the potential dropout—not by compulsion or by lowering standards, but by making school more meaningful, more exciting, and more rewarding.
Tire dropout is the quality control of education. Today few schools, and few teachers, would pass this test. The majority of those who do not drop out stay in school not because they want to, but because they are made to—by their parents and by their community. In spirit most of the white, middle-class youngsters are dropouts, too, kept in school only by parental and community pressure.
Tire twin problems of adolescence and dropouts indicate that we will have to learn to build school curricula that serve the individual, that is, school curricula composed of standard units that can be put together to serve individual needs, to satisfy individual aspirations, and to conform to tire one fact we really know about growing up: that no two people ever grow up exactly alike.
3. The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history. We are in danger of confining access to opportunity to those—still less than half of our young people—who have stayed in school beyond high school, and particularly to those who have finished college. Even ordinary jobs are increasingly reserved for those who have at least finished high school. We thus are denying full citizenship in the knowledge society to the large group—15 to 20 per cent perhaps—who stopped before they could get a high school diploma. And we are sharply curtailing access to opportunities for half the population—the ones who don’t attend college.
This is not only new in American history. It is singularly stupid. The great strength of American society throughout our history lay in our willingness to use human resources, in our willingness to put ability, ambition, and dedication to productive use wherever it arose. We never fully lived up to this principle. We certainly did not live up to it with respect to women. And we disregarded it entirely in the case of the black man. But never before did we deny it explicitly as we are now doing.
By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve. There is not much correlation between ability to do well in school and ability to perform in life and work (except perhaps in purely academic work). There is no reason to believe that the diploma certifies too much more than that the holder has sat a long time. Human beings mature much too unevenly to put trust in a diploma as a final test of a young man’s “potential” and future performance and capacity. Even if the diploma, or its absence, mismeasures only a fraction of our young people (say, one out of four) we cannot afford to lose those that have been unjustly or wrongly cast out. Actually the percentage must be much higher. For going to school beyond high school is still, even among our white population, in large part a matter of accident, family tradition, wealth, local mores, or the luck of being taught by a good teacher. To be sure, three-quarters or more of our present college graduates each year have parents without college education. But conversely a large proportion, a good half or so, of the children of parents without college education only go to college if there is special encouragement.
Limiting access to opportunity to those with a diploma is a crass denial of all fundamental American beliefs—beliefs, by the way, that have been amply validated by experience. Maybe such a diploma curtain can be justified in a country where tire diploma only controls access to a minority of opportunities, as it used to do. Maybe in a country with a tradition of rigid classes, “meritocracy” (to use the particularly ugly word the British have invented for control of access to life’s opportunities by the diploma) can be defended as broadening individual opportunities—though the new rigidities will, I predict, be as stultifying and oppressive as the old class barriers ever were. But in the United States, where class never controlled, the substitution of the diploma for performance as the key to opportunity and advancement, restricts, oppresses, and injures individual and society alike.
I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status—just as questions regarding race, religion, sex, or age are now banned in a good many states. I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can. “Academic ability” is also an accident of birth, and not a very meaningful one at that.
Outlawing the question on the application blank will, of course, do as little as outlawing similar questions regarding race has done for the employment opportunities of the Negro. We need to punch big holes in the diploma curtain through which the able and ambitious can move even though they have not sat long enough on school benches to satisfy the schoolmasters’ requirements. Employers, and especially large companies, need to look in their work force for the people of proven performance and willingness to achieve, though they lack the formal requirements. Indeed, to spend on this part of the money now spent on college recruitment would be highly profitable. With everyone trying to get the same college graduates, no one can hope to get anyone particularly outstanding, or indeed anything but mediocrity. All one can do is bid up the entrance salary. Perhaps there are fewer big fish in the pond of those who have not gone to college. But the individual employer’s chance of landing one of these big fish is infinitely greater in the pond where nobody else fishes than it is among college graduates where be competes even for the minnows with every other employer in the land (The one program of this kind of which I know is governmental and operates within a civil service. It is the Public Employment Career Development Program which the State of New Jersey has been running with considerable success since 1966).
Once we have identified those performers who lack the formal credentials issued by the schoolmaster, we can give them access to knowledge easily enough. There are few cities in the United States today where continuing education in almost any area is not easily available.
The schools will also have to develop an “earned degree” for those who have proved their ability in performance even though they lack the hours on the school bench and the credits for courses that would have entitled them to the normal diploma. The schools have to accept the fact that the diploma has become the passport to outside opportunities and that therefore it behooves them to acknowledge parallel paths of achievement. And the path of the “loner” who gets there his own way and without benefit of required courses is at least as good and honorable and worth at least as much, as the mapped and charted path of the orthodox school curriculum. The standards for this “earned degree” would, of course, be high—but so they should be for any distinction, including the diploma one gets for attending school.
If we do not eliminate the diploma curtain, it will turn the opportunity of knowledge into a nightmare. It will make the diploma into a symbol of discrimination—-which is what it has already become to the poor Negro in the ghetto. It will impoverish our society and economy, and deprive us of a great reservoir of human energies. It will corrode our ideals and make mockery of our professions. Perhaps worst of all, it will substitute the arrogance of title for the pride of accomplishment as the ruling passion of the knowledge society.
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