I've been working in vocational education and training for about 40 years. And there are a few themes that seem to repeat themselves. The assertion that education is out of touch and needs changes to meet the demands of employers and modern industry. The need for reform of vocational qualifications (although it may be that this is a particularly UK obsession). A more recent discourse is the importance of VET for productivity. And, of course, there are the ever changing demands for adopting new technology as a tool for modernising VET.

So I was interested to read about Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency in Mondays edition of Second Breakfast, Audrey Waters weekly newsletter.

Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business goals. "The procedure for bringing about a more businesslike organization and operation of the schools was fairly well standardized from 1900 to 1925," Callahan argues in his opening chapter. "It consisted of making unfavorable comparisons between the schools and business enterprise, of applying business-industrial criteria (e.g., economy and efficiency) to education, and of suggesting that business and industrial practices be adopted by educators."

Audrey Waters is best known for her 2023 book, Teaching machines which MITPress describes as "a lively history of predigital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey's mechanized positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box. Watters shows that these machines and the pedagogy that accompanied them sprang from ideas—bite-sized content, individualized instruction—that had legs and were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerized learning."

She returns to this theme in Monday's Second Breakfast.

One should view the history of education technology in the twentieth century alongside Callahan’s history of education, his history of school administration and scientific management. While there is a tendency to see ed-tech as a matter of instruction – as tools that reshape teaching (and learning) – these are often, more accurately, tools of management, or prescriptive technologies in Ursula Franklin’s framework. This is the learning management system, most obviously. But it is also the “productivity suite,” the software through which almost all school work (and thus all thinking) is assigned and accomplished, where students and teachers can be monitored and timed, surveilled and controlled.

About the Image

The image shows the paradox of AI-driven work and spatial disconnection in contemporary employment. Even workers who perform their tasks in physical proximity are entirely isolated from each other; their work relationships are mediated by intangible algorithms and physical technology like laptops/mobile phones. It also highlights the emotional and social isolation that can accompany digitalised labour. The image was created using Procreate.