Comparative and Historical Patterns of Education

Abstract

We usually take for granted that we know what a school is. There are a series of grade levels through which students progress, promoted by their scores on examinations. Schooling is limited, at least initially, by a pupil's age, and there is a fixed number of years for each level of study. More advanced schools take students who have completed the preceding level of school-ing. Additionally, how far one advances in the educational sequence has consequences for one's adult career in the hierarchy of social stratification, as well as being influenced by it. This picture of education, although conventional for the 20th century, is not found throughout history; it was constructed by social processes in relatively recent times. Today, it is one of the cliches of conversation with children to ask, "How old are you? What grade are you in?" This age-grading would not have been important in most previous societies; many children could not have answered the first question, let alone the second. Our omnipresent age consciousness was developed in large part because of the construction of bureaucratically age-graded schools. In a school in medieval Europe, the classroom would have contained pupils ranging in age from below 10 to over 20, all reciting the same lessons. In such a context, one could not take for granted that schooling starts with elementary educa-tion, then continues with secondary education, and is finally completed with higher education at the university; in fact, as a formal structure, the university or highest level of education was invented before secondary schools, and in a sense, even before elementary schools. As we shall see, different kinds of schools competed with each other before the modem sequence of schooling was established. It is conceivable in the future that variant forms of education will again compete and upset the sequence that we have come to think of as natural. The construction of schooling has been a historical process in its own right. Sociologists of education are right in seeing education as deeply implicated in the structure of the entire society, especially its stratification and even its ethnic divisions. The most popular view is that education reflects and reproduces social class inequality (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). His-torical comparisons show that this is only partly correct. Educational organization has its own autonomous dynamic. It has shaped and reshaped social stratification, as well as vice versa. Educational dynamics have shaped the distinctive pattems of virtually every complex society. The Indian Brahman caste, the Confucian scholar-bureaucrat, and the Roman lawyer/ speechmaker were all products of their own educational institutions; so were the Jewish rabbi and the Muslim ulama who still blends theology with legal authority in Islamic states like contemporary Iran. We ourselves go through a lengthy process of acquiring educational de-grees that determine what jobs we can get because of a series of changes in school organiza-tion that started in the Christian Middle Ages and have recently spread around most of the world. Max Weber argued that the different world societies have taken unique paths because of their religions; we could just as well say that their distinctive forms of social stratification have been created by their forms of education. Historical comparisons are crucial because there have been a number of different kinds of education, not a single evolutionary progress from primitive to modem forms. Because things do not develop in a straight line, we need to skip back and forth in time and in space, looking for key similarities and comparisons that reveal the main types of educational dynam-ics. In a brief overview, here are some of the main altematives: Schools might consist of the entire community of a particular age group, such as the adolescent cohorts undergoing initiation rites as in tribal societies and in early Greece; our own age-graded compulsory public schooling revives and extends this pattem and thereby creates a social defmition of childhood encompassing everyone. A completely different pat-tem is apprenticeship that takes places within sharply divided enclaves such as families, house-holds, and guilds; such education is often secret, and as such systems of training become more elaborate, it builds up status distinctions of exclusivity, which may even take a religious or ethnic form. In this way Brahman educational monopoly shaped the Indian caste system, and the leamed rabbi shaped Jewish ethnicity. A third type of stmcture is the licensed profession, occupations like the lawyer or the physician that have acquired elite public status because their education gives them a recognized license to practice, in conjunction with their mo-nopoly over teaching and hence admitting others to practice. This third type differs from the second type, the private apprenticeship in the family or household, because the profession is part of the public community. Professional licensing is connected with formal degree-granting institutions and thus grows up along with formal govemment-sanctioned schools, reaching its strongest development with the highly formalized university corporation. The fourth type, bureaucratic schools with a hierarchy of grades, examinations, and de-grees, often combines with the third type. The four kinds of educational organization are ideal types and thus can be found in various mixtures; there is a sense in which modem mass educa-tion has incorporated aspects of two of the others (excepting the second, private household education, which is antithetical to the bureaucratic form). We can see the dynamics of educa-tional bureaucracy most clearly by looking outside the orbit of Westem professions to the growth of the Chinese imperial examination system. Asian educational history is not very well known in the West, but it ought to be; among other reasons, it shows us the dynamics by which bureaucratic systems of formal examination not only stratify society into social classes but also foster competition that leads to both school expansion and inflation of educational cre-dentials. These dynamics can take place no matter what kind of contents the schools teach as