Modern western societies have shown an increasing tendency to educationalize social problems, and nowhere is that tendency more pronounced than in the United States. We ask education to ameliorate race and class inequality through school desegregation, compensatory coursework, programs to reduce prejudice, and free lunches. We ask it to counter gender inequality by developing gender neutral textbooks and encouraging girls to pursue studies in science and math. We ask it to attack public health problems by hiring school nurses, requiring vaccination for students, and providing classes in health and physical education. We ask it to promote economic competitiveness by developing programs in vocational and career education and by adapting its curriculum to the skill needs of the knowledge economy. We ask it to reduce crime by requiring school attendance, developing school discipline codes, and mandating courses in good citizenship. We ask it to promote sexual responsibility through sex education, traffic safety through driver education, healthy eating through nutritional education, and preservation of natural resources through environmental education. American society asks its system of education to take responsibility for remediating all of these social problems, and for the most part educators have been eager to assume the burden.
At the heart of this process of educationalization, however, is a puzzling paradox. Education is perhaps the greatest institutional success of the modern era. It grew from a modest and marginal position in the eighteenth century to the center of modern societies in the twenty-first, where it consumes an enormous share of the time and treasure of both states and citizens. Key to its institutional success has been its facility at educationalization – its ability to embrace and embody the social reform missions that have been imposed upon it. Yet education has been remarkably unsuccessful at carrying out these missions. It has done very little to promote equality of race, class, and gender; to enhance public health, economic productivity, and good citizenship; or to reduce teenage sex, traffic deaths, obesity, and environmental destruction. In fact, in many ways it has had a negative effect on these problems by draining money and energy away from social reforms that might have had a more substantial impact. As David Bridges notes in this issue of Educational Theory, educationalization has consistently pushed education to expand its scope well beyond both what it should do and what it can do, and the result is a record of one failure after another.
So how are we to understand the success of this institution in light of its failure to do what we asked of it? One way of thinking about this is that education may not be doing what we ask, but it is doing what we want. We want an institution that will pursue our social goals in a way that is in line with the individualism at the heart of the liberal ideal, aiming to solve social problems by seeking to change the hearts, minds, and capacities of individual students. Another way of putting this is that we want an institution where we can express our social goals without violating the principal of individual choice that lies at the center of the social structure, even if this comes at the cost of failing to achieve these goals. So education can serve as a point of civic pride, a showplace for our ideals, and a medium for engaging in uplifting but ultimately inconsequential dispute about alternative visions of the good life. At the same time, it can also serve as a convenient whipping boy, which we can blame for its failure to achieve our highest aspirations for ourselves as a society. In this sense, then, we can understand the whole grand educational enterprise as a exercise in formalism. We assign formal responsibility to education for solving our most pressing social problems in light of our highest social ideals, with the tacit understanding that by educationalizing these problem-solving efforts we are seeking a solution that is more formal than substantive. We are saying that we are willing to accept what educational can produce – new programs, new curricula, new institutions, new degrees, new educational opportunities – in place of solutions that might make real changes in the ways in which we distribute social power, wealth, and honor.
In this paper, I explore the nature of educationalization in the American context. The rationale is this: We cannot come to understand the growth of educationalization in the U.S. – in the face of education’s continuing failure to fix the social problems assigned to it – unless we consider some of the social needs that this process expresses and the social functions (apart from fixing the problem) that this process serves. In line with this aim, I start by examining the ways in which the process of educationalizing social problems is deeply grounded in American beliefs, social processes, political and organizational tensions, and structural limitations. Then I examine the roots of education’s failure in the role of social reform agent; and I close with an analysis of why we continue to pursue educationalization in the face of its ineffectiveness.