Making sense of mass education

One of the many exasperating things about our education system is that it keeps changing: how we think it works, what we think it seeks to accomplish, and what we think its consequences are. It certainly isn't like the study of human anatomy, where a book from the 1920s will still give a pretty accurate account of how the human body works, and what goes where. A book on education from the same era is unlikely to make any mention of many of the issues we now consider to be of importance. Take, for example, Sechrist's (1920) Education and the General Welfare. With chapters on ‘School Attendance’ and ‘Why Children are Dull’, the focus was firmly on the pragmatics of how to make a school function effectively.

By the 1950s however, new ways of thinking about schools had emerged. Concerns did not necessarily begin and end with educational efficiency, but also sought to address the relationship between schools and society. The influential theorist Parsons, in his book The Social System (1951), regarded education as a vital component within a complex machine, and this was a machine that needed ‘dull children’ to do dull work. This wasn't a seen as problem; this was part of the design. Society was a finely tuned instrument, and education helped its cogs turn.