Abstract
David Baker has written an important book about “the schooled society,” one that will broaden the scope of the sociology of education in a fruitful way. The book was the recipient of the American Educational Research Association’s “Outstanding Book” award, a testimony to its significance.
Most sociologists treat schooling as a dependent variable and examine the inequalities that lead to variations in educational attainment or, more recently, student learning. Baker, by contrast, treats schooling as the independent variable and examines the implications for society when increasing numbers of people have received higher levels of education. He sees an impressive range of outcomes, including the growth of worldviews that rely on scientific and rationalist understandings; the construction of reality through an ever-increasing number of knowledge-based disciplines; changes in the ways organizations work (from command and control to flexible and expanded interactions); and the creation of new ways of providing a sense of assurance in the rightness of social organization (with educational degrees substituting for the traditional role of religion).
Baker uses the science of ice cream as one illustration of these themes. Once a craft product, ice cream is now produced on an industrial scale and has become subject to the authoritative knowledge generated in the university. Baker describes the ice cream program at his university, Pennsylvania State: “Today, a dozen Ph.D. faculty connected to the program are expected to publish . . . on the science . . . of their topic, and they routinely do so under such titles as ‘Chemical and Thermal Characteristics of Milk-Fat Fractions Isolated by a Melt Crystallization’ . . . and ‘Viscosity of Molten Chocolate with Lactose from Spray-Dried Whole Milk Powders’ in scientific journals such as the Journal of Food Science and the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society.” He concludes, “If the university can enact its charters on ice cream, there is little else it could not include” (pp. 105–106).
As this passage indicates, Baker is a neo-institutionalist. The legitimated world is theworld created by the knowledge structures developed in universities and the knowledge-workers trained in universities. Where others see the power of capitalism, social classes, the state, or technology, Baker sees the constitutive power of schooling. Quoting his mentor, the great Stanford sociologist John W. Meyer, he argues that the modern organizational structure of society incorporates legitimated bodies of knowledge by incorporating school-approved personnel (p. 121). These personnel carry habits of mind and action into society, thereby transforming social relations and social organization.
The Schooled Society contains many insights about social structure, including provocative chapters on the rise of the “super research university,” the dominance of the “schooled society” by these universities, the expansion of the idea of education as a human right, and credential requirements for “full membership” in modern societies. The contributions are mainly conceptual, but the book also offers new evidence on the growth of educational attainment worldwide, the shift toward cognitive abstraction in mathematics curricula over time, and the replacement of previous forms of access to jobs with occupational credentialing.
Baker pushes hard against the critics of schooling. Those who see education as a means by which the privileged reproduce themselves are myopic, in his view. Far from limiting privileges to the educated, schooling for Baker ensures that every generation will be smarter and more capable than the one preceding it. (He includes a lengthy treatment of the Flynn effect on rising intelligence-test scores as evidence.) Baker agrees that educational credentials are a central source of power in society, but he disagrees strongly with theorists of the credential society, such as Ivar Berg and Randall Collins, who see a relatively unchanging occupational skills structure that uses educational credentials as a means of allocation. Baker is sympathetic to human capital theory (at a time when many economists are abandoning it!), but his main point is that educated people change the nature of jobs. They are capable of wider networks of interaction, understanding more complex systems and technologies, and greater autonomy at work. Occupational skills are not the same because the people occupying occupations are not the same.
Baker’s book should contribute to a healthy expansion of the interests of sociologists of education. Yet, for all of its genuine insights and fruitful hypotheses, The Schooled Society is also a flawed book. The book frequently suffers from a fundamental attribution error. Very often Baker attributes an important change in society to increasing educational attainment. In many such cases it is possible to substitute words like “technology” or “the market” or “conspicuous consumption” and sound equally compelling. For example, Baker writes: “Over a relatively short . . . period, education has approached worldwide acceptance as the one appropriate and legitimate playing field on which to compete for merit” (p. 183). The substitute words seem to be at least as plausible. More likely, a complex of forces has been at work to transform society in the ways Baker emphasizes, and schooling is one of those forces. Of course, that way of looking at social change is not as appealing if one is interested in putting schools at the center of social change.
Baker often sounds like a modern day Comte or Saint-Simon, trumpeting not the positivist or industrial revolution, but the educational revolution. The polemical strain in Baker’s book is evident in passages like the following: “The education revolution increasingly narrows the status of human capabilities towards cognitive performance” (p. 190). If so, the educational revolution has a long way to go before it ousts its competitors. Research I conducted with Allison Cantwell indicated that the average University of California student spent more than 40 hours a week socializing and about 25 hours a week studying and attending class (Brint and Cantwell 2010). Many who do go to class spend their time on Facebook or shopping online. The cognitive dimension is certainly prominent among large proportions of people with advanced degrees, but most ethnographies find that shared interest in popular culture is the glue that binds together undergraduate students. A popular scholar might pull in 1000 students for a lecture; a great football team can attract 100,000.
Baker’s emphasis on the cognitive dimension of the educational revolution distinguishes him from other neo-institutionalists. Meyer, for example, seems to have settled on a less elevated view of the types of people produced by educational institutions. For Meyer (2008), an important byproduct of the educational system is the provision of “cultural models of expanded actorhood.” For these empowered actors, the idea or “myth” of rationality is important as a justification for opinions and plans—but actual knowledge may or may not exist or be important. The modern actor can and will produce opinions about issues and events about which s/he knows nothing, such as whether the United States should invade a country s/he has never heard of. It is the opinion-generation itself that is important. From the perspective of Meyer, this posture may be misrecognized as activism and engagement, when it is better described as a conforming reaction to environmental cues about how to declare oneself a “modern person.” College environments foster discussions inside and outside of class, participation in co-curricular activities, and embrace of a wide and rapidly changing set of identity symbols as valid and meaningful. They are the quintessence of the “active society” run by people “with plans and strategies.” Subject matter learning occurs as much on the web as in the classroom and is consequently less immediately and perhaps less centrally important to the undergraduate college experience than the socialization of flexible and engaged actors. It is a residual form of legitimation, the legacy of a romance of a different era.