The Schooled Society

The Educational Transformation of Global Culture

By David P. Baker

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9047-5

Contents

List of Figures and Tables,
Preface,
Introduction: A Quiet Revolution,
PART I. DIMENSIONS AND ORIGIN OF THE SCHOOLED SOCIETY,
1. From Education Revolution to the Schooled Society,
2. Constructing Culture: Academic Intelligence, Social Status, and Human Rights,
3. The Incredible Longevity of the Western University,
4. Mass Education and the Super Research University,
5. Constructing Reality: Ice Cream, Women's Studies, and the MBA,
PART II. SOCIETAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE EDUCATION REVOLUTION,
6. The Educational Transformation of Work,
7. Credentialing in the Schooled Society,
8. The Transformation of Knowledge and Truth Claims,
9. Failure, Redemption, and the Construction of the Self,
10. An Educated Polity: The Universal Solvent and the Political Paradox,
11. An Educated Laity: The Education-Religion Paradox,
Conclusion The Schooled Society and Beyond: Ubiquitous, Formidable, and Noisy,
Notes,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

From Education Revolution to the Schooled Society

My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed. The people who did this to me don't want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.

SHAMSIA HUSSEINI, seventeen, who returned to school in Afghanistan despite being disfigured in an acid attack to keep her from attending;

New York Times, August 17, 2009

GOING TO SCHOOL and attending for a considerable number of years is demographically a relatively new and massive change in the behavior of children and youth. Driving this change is the central belief that schooling should be for all people. Over the course of the education revolution this belief, as reflected in the courage of Shamsia Husseini to attend school, takes on increased meaning and wields a growing impact on an individual's future, as it supports significant growth in the participation in formal education in all parts of the world.

In premodern society, before the profound changes of industrialization, urbanization, and political national consolidation that intensified in the nineteenth century, there was no widespread mass education. Formal education, particularly beyond just a few years of basic literacy training, was reserved for a small proportion of the population. But once the schooling of larger numbers of children and youth began, about 150 years ago, the phenomenon grew rapidly worldwide. While the exact political and cultural histories of the adoption of mass schooling vary across regions and nations, the basic temporal pattern of the worldwide education revolution is similar.

Over a few generations, the education revolution proceeded through a stepwise pattern, first of access to primary schooling, then by the opening up of secondary schooling, and lastly in the expansion of tertiary education. Advanced sectors of education have been spurred on by the growth of the previous sector during an earlier generation. This progression began in wealthier nations and since the middle of the twentieth century spread globally with less and less time between each stage of educational development as educational attainment in more nations converged (e.g., Benavot and Riddle 1988; Fuller and Rubinson 1992; Dorius 2013). Notably, too, while opening access to each new level of schooling began slowly, once begun, expansion proceeded rapidly. As worldwide enrollment in levels of schooling illustrates (Figure 1.1), throughout the nineteenth century and over the first decades of the twentieth, enrollment in primary education levels expanded, but by 1940 enrollment burst into a logarithmic climb. Twenty years later, as primary schooling reached large numbers of children, enrollment in secondary schooling turned sharply up in the 1960s. And in the early 1970s enrollment in higher education began a similar ascent. Today, in many developed nations, 70 percent of individuals have obtained at least an upper secondary education degree, and a third of 25–34-year-olds have participated in higher education (OECD, 2009a). The most recent wave of the education revolution is the expansion of higher education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. At the turn of the nineteenth century less than 1 percent of university-aged youth across the world attended; now 20 percent, or approximately 100 million, attend some kind of higher education setting, and the awarding of graduate degrees continues to increase in many nations (Schofer and Meyer 2005).

This rapid increase in enrollment is not just a function of population growth. What education demographers call "gross enrollment rates"—the percentage of school-aged children and youth attending schooling—have grown steadily over this time period, and only the most extreme social or political events have retarded growth at certain times in some nations (e.g., Baker, Köhler, and Stock 2007). Similarly, the average length of individuals' school attainment continues to rise worldwide. In wealthy and middle-income nations average educational attainment across the entire population is now slightly over twelve years of schooling; and tellingly, a large group of lower-middle- and low-income nations have expected attainment of over nine years (UNESCO 2001). The multilateral campaign to bring basic schooling to all children worldwide continues on with some major challenges to full implementation, but with wide political support nevertheless (Lewin 2009). As shown in the world map of average length of school careers, in Figure 1.2, the world is rapidly becoming a schooled society.

The education revolution did not happen overnight, but it did unfold at striking speed compared with how long most human institutions take to develop. It is a revolution that began with younger children in the middle of the nineteenth century in the nations of Western and Northern Europe and their wealthier former colonies, so that by the last two decades of the nineteenth century, nations in Western Europe and Australia, Canada, and the United States were enrolling 50–70 percent of children aged five to fourteen (Benavot and Riddle 1988). And although older forms of education, centered on the religious indoctrination of children of elite castes, had been established in Asia, North Africa, and in Mayan, Aztec, and Incan societies well before the nineteenth century, as each of these regions was touched by Western nations, through peaceful contact and forcible colonization alike, their earlier indigenous systems of education gave way to mass Westernized education (Craig 1981).

The overarching idea propelling this sea change in people's attitude and behavior towards formal education is that schooling is useful, appropriate, and valuable enough to require all children to attend. Ideas about education create the belief that it is good that one's own children are schooled, as well as everyone else's children. In particular, how the education revolution unfolded in the United States illustrates the speed at which these cultural beliefs can saturate a nation with education.

THE AMERICAN EDUCATION REVOLUTION

The United States has largely led the way in developing mass education. At the beginning of the twentieth century, about one half of all schoolaged children were...