Spring 1972

Spring, Joel H. 1972. Education and the Rise of the Corporate State. Boston: Beacon Press.

• "The coporate image of society turned American schools into the central social institution for the production of men and women who conformed to the needs and expectatins of a corporate and technocratic world" (1)
• the corporate image of society was shared by major interest, business elites, labor unions, and political elites, as a way to deal with rapid indsutrialization and urbanization (1)
• business leaders started on paternalistic labor relations to control working classes, and many of the activities of these programs were later adopted by the education system (22, and chapter 2 as a whole)
• early schools were created to give their parents more times to work, improve home lives (and thus imporve efficiency), and to educate th enext genreations' workers (36-38)
• the school was like a factory (44-45)
• it was argued this was a great way to create a good industrial society...knowledge done by assembly line (45
• "professionalized and bureaucratic control of education became a barrier to establishing the school as a meaningful center of community life in the city. Schools were instruments for shaping community life along lines determined by the expertise of the organizer." (89)
• "the hard shell of bureaucracy provided protection for school systems that were basically hostile to their environments and to large numbers of the people they served (89)
• cmprehensive high school was partially started to push back against specialization of previous schooling, specialization which "threatened the whole goal of training a self-sacrificing and cooperative individual" (108)...schools were places for socializing individuals, but doing so to create good citizens, as teh workplace was a terribly individualizing place, whichi would lead to an atomized, bad society (108-125)
• "the parallels that can be drwn between teh socialization programs of the factory and school are not accidental. Both believed they faced the problem of internal fragmentation and both believed that the new institutions of society required a cooperative individual (124-125)
• "The school is and has been an instrument of social, economic, and political control. It is an institution which consciously plans to turn people into something. Within this framework the school must be viewed as an instrument of power. ... The most important feature of the school in the twentieth century as its role as the major institution for socialization." (149)
• "Schooling not only prepares for the acceptance of control by dominant elites and social structures but also can create a dependence on institutions and expertise." (152)
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