The production of schools : a critical investigation of capitalist and democratic struggles for social efficiency

Abstract

This paper aims to understand from a critical historical perspective how the ideology of the Social Efficiency Movement has been adopted, contested, transformed, and rewritten by the forces of public interests in key historical moments. By evaluating the context of public interest, strategies of implementation, and the results of production I will review the existing literature on the influences of social efficiency ideology in schools, curriculum and national policy. Central to my thesis is the question of how social efficiency is defined and enacted under current educational policy. In order to understand this broad question two more refined questions must first be addressed 1) how have we defined social efficiency in the modern era? and 2) what are the practices that we enact in order to achieve it? Limited within specific historical contexts I will answer what competing interests held stakes in the struggles to control the direction of schooling and, further, offer a socio-historical analysis of their material results. Regarding the principles that influenced the Social Efficiency Movement of the early twentieth century I put forth an analysis of the democratic and capitalist struggles that have taken place to define what is ‘socially efficient’ ever since.