On the capitalist fatcats
The truth about Taylorism in education
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I’ve seen claims of Taylorism applied to everything from teacher accreditation to assessment. The capitalist fatcats, with their focus on accountability, bean-counting and those confounded student ‘outcomes’ can be blamed on Taylorism and his scientific management that have ostensibly been bastardised, marketised and corporatised, applied indiscriminately to schools and systems.
But if we go to his original writing, we might see that Taylor’s principles are both noble in sentiment and practical in application. Unfortunately, the ideological cherry-picking and bad-faith interpretation of his ideas in theory and policy have led to a bastardisation of his writing that is polarising, divisive and ultimately unproductive. So while the principles could be useful in their original form, more relevant is the necessary critique of their application in education.
The first wilful omission in the application of Taylorism to policy and practice is the neglect of the central tenet of ‘maximum prosperity’ (Taylor, 1911, p. 9) for owners and workers. Taylor promotes the idea of the ‘smallest combined expenditure of human effort’ (1911, p. 10) as key to efficiency, also citing training and ‘intimate cooperation between management and workers as essential. However, innumerable reviews into teacher workload provide evidence of inefficiencies at every level, with teachers engaging in menial, time-consuming tasks. The application of Taylorism is most evident in the volume of data points and compliance, ostensibly evidence of said efficiency. But this Hechinger report finds that an obsession with data has had a detrimental effect on productivity, with few teachers having the knowledge, support or skills to act upon it, demonstrating a failure of ‘management’ to uphold their part in their Tayloristic aims.
Certainly, in a vacuum of instructional leadership, and within systems that equate to faceless bureaucracies, the burden is on teachers to generate outcomes and efficiencies but with little of the support that Taylor talks about. But academia takes criticism to unhelpful extremes in relation to student learning. Stoller derides all learning outcomes as Tayloristic, saying that the focus on end-products of learning detracts from the ‘authenticity’ of the learning process, arguing in a hyperbolic way that outcomes ‘dehumanize’ students and are a threat to agency and dignity. While Scott Eacott rightly argues in his discussion of the ‘Hattification’ of education (my term) that human subjects — rather than products on the factory floor — cannot be divorced from the disadvantage they bring into the classroom, a purely academic rejection of measures helps nobody.
Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management, Harper. Out of Print.
Not a fan of Taylorism by any means but this doctrine isn't very capitalistic. In fact, Lenin co-opted Taylorism without breaking a sweat: https://complexitymatters.substack.com/p/s01e02-how-one-man-created-the-single
I have never previously heard Taylorism discussed in the context of teachers, but this is a fascinating and insightful critique. Data isn't helpful if it is being used by people who have no idea how to use it!