EDUCATION AND THE CULT OF EFFCIENCY

Education and the Cult of Efficiency

Education and the Cult of Efficiency

Introduction

This paper is a reviewed paper of the book Education and the Cult of Efficiency by Raymond E. Callahan.

In this book if efficiency means the demoralization of the school system; dollars collected and human elements squandered; discontent, drudgery and disillusion-We'll have no of it! If efficiency denotes small money, bickering and neglect; exploitation, mistrust and inhumanity; greater kinds, slighter pay and reduced joy-We'll have no of it! We'll espouse and exalt humane efficiency-efficiency that curses felicity, dedication, participation, and right conduct. Give us honorable efficiency and we will rally to the civic cause. (Callahan, 1962, p. 121)

 

Book review

In chapter one the authors declares that the efficiency movements in training can be disputed to be predicated upon the thought that both separate someone worth and the worth of training can be lessened to monetary terms. That is, eventually, separate people have monetary worth in much the matching sense as other monetary goods, for instance a natural resource. Just as natural supplies can be marketed in their raw state or have more worth adjoined by farther development of the wares, so too human beings are observed as having more or less worth by virtue of their stage of training and skills.

Equally, training is observed in time spans of its family member scope for to augment to monetary expansion, and separate someone and public participation in training is observed as an `investment' to be weighed against other probable environs of return. The less right away economically quantifiable constituents of training are either bargain or ascribed an (arbitrary) monetary value. Within human capital model, as this practice is termed, separate people and societies are observed as `rational' to the bounds that they compute effects how to maximise their revisit on their instructive financial endeavour (S. Marginson, 1989). Individuals and societies are in addition observed as sensible insofar as they only invest in training to the bounds that training brings ahead a better monetary rate of revisit than other configurations of financial endeavour (Blaug, 1972; Woodhall, 1972; World Bank, 1994).

One of the universal corollaries of this approach is that, bestowed the assumption that it is separate people that reap the gain of their financial endeavour in training, they themselves should withstand the costs. Ultimately, then, one of the assumptions upon which human capital model stands is that of methodological individualism, that is that the achievements of gatherings are eventually reducible to the achievements of separate people (Brodbeck, 1968; Lukes, 1968; Durkheim, 1969). The state, it is at times disputed, should not have to invest (substantially) in the coaching of employees, past the elementary stage, since it is the separate someone who reaps the gain (S. Marginson, 1989).

Another contingently linked principle is the thought that training can augment extensively to monetary growth. This thought, admired amid modernisation theorists in the 1950s and 1960s and often employed uncritically to legitimate extensive financial endeavour in training in Third World `modernising' ...