Education and the cult of Efficiency

Education and the Cult of Efficiency, by Raymond E. Callahan, is widely considered to be the most important and thorough examination of the history of the social efficiency movement in the fields of education and curriculum. The book, published in 1962 and dedicated to progressive educator George S. Counts, offers a classic critique of the scientific management approach to schooling. Although this approach achieved prominence during the first third of the 20th century, many suggest that it underpins the popular imaginary about and administration of schools today.

Callahan meticulously documents the early incursion of the principles of a business model into the organization of schools and the curriculum development process. Explained in the 10 chapters of the book are the principles and mechanisms of scientific management, the negative atmosphere regarding schooling in the second decade of the 20th century, the application of the approach by educators, the work of the educational efficiency expert, the platoon school movement, the new profession of the school executive, and the mainly deleterious results of the movement.

Although the book has held great interest for the field of educational administration, it has also held great consequences for the field of curriculum studies. This result is largely due to the fact that the principles of scientific management were transported into the arena of curriculum design.

The notion of scientific management was the brainchild of business consultant and industrialist Frederick Taylor and introduced to education most prominently by curriculum theorist Franklin Bobbitt. The rationale of school-based scientific management relied heavily on the public school as a business or factory. It was a response to a discontent among the public that schools were spending tax dollars wastefully. An approach based on sound principles of science and business was considered to be an effective remedy for this state of affairs.

For Callahan, however, the idea of school-based scientific management was an approach that, while considered by many to be a panacea for what ailed education, in reality possessed several significant drawbacks. Among them, he argued, were the following:

• Control of the educational process would be removed from the hands of lay people who are presumably the source of a true democracy and placed into the hands of efficacy experts and businesspeople, who would operate in their own specialized interest rather than in the broader interests of the public.
• The scheme radically misunderstands the nature of the educational process as one that is quite simple and merely procedural. Callahan suggests than the plan is naïve in its failure to grasp the complexities of education as a field that is not simply mechanical in nature, but that is fraught [Page 321]with all of the complexities inherent in human activity.
• The plan mistakenly views school people in terms of a factory metaphor with students as raw materials on an assembly line to be assembled by the workers (teachers with predetermined standardized procedures, cooperatively overseen by supervisors, or school administrators) to ensure efficiency in teaching the greatest amount of material to the greatest number of students in the least amount of

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