Elite Power

Paedagogica Historica, 2013
Vol. 49, No. 2, 194216, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2012.709523
Elite power and educational reform: An historiographical analysis

of Canada and the United States
Jamie Brownlee*
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
In this article, I reopen some of the seminal theoretical debates among critical
scholars on the nature of educational reform, arguing that there has been a consistent tendency in the literature to dismiss or downplay the signicance of
instrumentalist analyses in favour of cultural/hegemonic and structuralist
explanations. As a result, education scholars who advance the instrumentalist
emphasis on elite intervention in the policy process and the importance of
organised class action have often been dismissed as one-dimensional and conspiratorial. To support this argument and, by extension, those made by instrumentalist theorists I bring together historical evidence from Canada and the
United States in three historical periods: the mid-nineteenth century, the early
twentieth century and post-Second World War. In each of these historical periods, I demonstrate how the structure and purpose of educational institutions
were modied largely at the behest of economic elites (closely associated with
political power and the professional educational establishment) in order to shape
and implement a particular model of educational reform. Central to my
argument is that powerful economic actors have always recognised the political
nature of schooling and that elite class consciousness is and has been welldeveloped with respect to educational issues. The concluding section outlines
the implications of my arguments for the future of educational reform.
Keywords: critical education theory; instrumentalism; class consciousness; business activism; educational reform
Introduction
Less than two years after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school system
was replaced by a system of private charter schools. As part of this restructuring
project, the teacher unions contract was dissolved and all 4700 of its members
red, with only a select group being rehired at lower wages. Characterised by the
New York Times as the nations preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of
charter schools, many have argued that the aftermath of the hurricane was used as
a way to push through the largest privatisation scheme of any public school system
in US history.1 As journalist Naomi Klein writes: In sharp contrast to the glacial
pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid was brought back
online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans school system took place with military
*Email: jbrownle@connect.carleton.ca
1
Susan Saulny, U.S. gives charter schools a big push in New Orleans, New York Times, 13
June 2006.
2012 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
Paedagogica Historica
195
speed and precision.2 In fact, the disaster may have even offered a pretext for long
desired reforms. Klein quotes a publication by the American Enterprise Institute as
stating that: Katrina accomplished in a day what Louisiana school reformers
couldnt do after years of trying.
New Orleans is not an isolated case. At the elementary and secondary school
levels, education has become a more marketable commodity as well as a source of
considerable prot. Together, lucrative new contracts, partnership arrangements,
school-to-work programmes and advertising strategies to capture the brand loyalty
of young consumers have increased corporate ties to education. The increasing
inuence of business is also apparent in the sphere of higher education. In many
Western nations, there has been an organised effort to commercialise the mission of
universities and colleges and transform their operations to better serve the private
marketplace.
Most scholars and policy-makers agree that a new market-based vision for public education has taken shape in recent years. There is also general agreement concerning the direction and priorities of educational restructuring. Nevertheless, there
remains considerable disagreement and debate around the sources of this educational change. Within these debates, a critical instrumentalist approach locates
market-orientated reforms as part of a corporate or elite-driven political project, one
involving well-dened and well-designed educational transformations.3 These transformations are evidenced by challenges to universality and by the organisation of
educational reform around the principles of consumer choice, privatisation and competition. On the other side of the debate are cultural/hegemonic explanations that
emphasise the role of culture in mediating class relationships, and structural explanations that see education as simply reecting the needs of the capitalist economy.
In the rst section of the article, I reopen some of the seminal theoretical
debates among critical scholars on the nature of educational reform, arguing that
there has been and continues to be a tendency to downplay the signicance of elitedriven policy activism and organised class action (i.e. instrumentalist explanations)
in favour of these other explanations. Accordingly, education scholars who follow
instrumentalist lines of evidence and reasoning have often been dismissed as onedimensional and conspiratorial. In the following three sections, I bring together historical evidence in two countries Canada and the United States to support the
claims made by instrumentalist theorists. While a detailed historical account of
nearly two centuries of educational reform is well beyond the scope of this article, I
make the case that, over the past two centuries, the structure and purpose of educational institutions in both countries were modied largely at the behest of economic
2
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Alfred A.
Knoff, 2007), 6.
3
I am not inventing or re-inventing the term instrumentalism here, even though this concept is not typically used in the educational literature. Instrumentalism incorporates the work
of instrumental Marxists such as Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London:
Quartet Books, 1969) and G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power and Politics in
the Year 2000 (Mountain View, CA: Mayeld Publishing, 1998), as well as power elite theorists like C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) and
Thomas Dye, Whos Running America? The Clinton Years (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1995). As a point of reference, I refer the reader to the debates between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas in the 1960s and 1970s. While this debate specically concerned
the relative autonomy of the state, it has come to represent a more general set of divisions
between instrumentalism and structuralism.
196
J. Brownlee
elites closely associated with political power and the professional educational establishment. Central to my argument is that powerful economic actors have always
recognised the political nature of schooling (i.e. that elite class consciousness is and
has been well-developed with respect to educational issues) and that this awareness
has, in turn, shaped the nature of public policy. The concluding section outlines the
implications of my arguments for the future of educational reform.
Elite power and critical education theory
The various iterations of critical education theory are united by a critique of the
meritocratic or liberal-democratic understanding of schooling in capitalist society.
Contrary to assertions by liberal theorists and historians that public education promotes social equality, critical theorists argue that schooling often contributes to the
subordination of marginalised groups. Schools are seen as central agencies of
oppression and social control that limit individuals capacity for creativity and tend
to legitimate social class differences. From the perspective of most critical theorists,
formal schooling actively reproduces capitalist domination and other inequitable
social practices. Amidst this general agreement, however, there is signicant debate
concerning how and why the education system functions in this way.
Within the eld of critical education scholarship, the notion that schools are
institutions of economic and cultural reproduction has motivated the work of what
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux refer to as radical reproduction theorists.4
Incorporating a diversity of methodological approaches, reproduction theorists call
attention to the political nature of education and its connections to dominant social
groups. There are two distinct traditions within the literature on reproduction in
education: the economic tradition and the cultural tradition.5
The economic tradition highlights the inuence of class and power in educational
institutions. These scholars examine the relationships between the capitalist political
economy and education, with an emphasis on the class composition of the occupational structure, the reproduction of capitalist social relations and the critical role of
economic power in the process of educational change.6 A central claim of the economic model is that educational institutions are shaped and constrained by external
power most notably the social division of labour and relations of production
which in turn shape the subjectivities of subordinate classes through the hidden curriculum. For theorists who stress educations economic functions, the hidden curriculum is seen as those social relations that legitimate specic values, attitudes and
ideologies, particularly with respect to practices of authority in the workplace.
Broadly speaking, scholars in the economic tradition form a continuum from
those who prioritise structural power to those who emphasise organised political
4
Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Westport, CT: Bergin
and Garvey, 1993).
5
See also Michael Apple (ed.), Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays
on Class, Ideology and the State (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
6
For some of the classic expositions, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet,
La Escuela Capitalista (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1975); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis,
Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic
Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976); and Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, Schooling and
Work in the Democratic State (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1985).
197
action (or instrumentalism). On the structural side is Louis Althusser and his theory
of an ideological state apparatus.7 Althusser and his contemporary Nicos Poulantzas see business leaders as too divided or short-sighted to engage in organised political action.8 For them, the motivations of conduct should be afforded little
explanatory signicance. On the other end of the continuum are revisionist histories, which explain periods of educational restructuring largely in instrumental terms
by pointing to the causal effects of direct capitalist intervention.9 Others fall somewhere in the middle, such as Samual Bowles and Herbert Gintis classic work,
Schooling in Capitalist America.10 For Bowles and Gintis, major educational
reforms have resulted from both structural economic forces and instrumentalist pressures.
Drawing from phenomenological or interactionist paradigms and rst associated
with the new sociology of education of the 1970s, the cultural tradition in the literature gives priority to the mediating role of culture in reproducing class relationships.11 These scholars argue that the economic model is overly deterministic,
thereby negating the lived experiences of class actors. For this reason, they emphasise the importance of the formal and informal culture of schooling, the construction
and transmission of curricular knowledge, the process by which education and
social reproduction are linked to other social institutions (like the family), as well
as how class domination in education is exercised through a process of hegemony.
In reaction to economic and cultural reproduction-based understandings of education, resistance theories have emerged as a critique to the emphasis on control
and domination.12 Resistance theorists claim that, by downplaying the importance
of human agency in class struggle, reproduction models overlook educations liberating potential and the opportunities for challenging its more repressive features.
Resistance theorists begin from a similar analytical position: that educational structures and outcomes are not determined by direct elite control, by structural economic requirements or by ideological and cultural domination. Instead, they see
schools as relatively autonomous institutions that provide space for critical pedagogy and collectively informed student opposition. For these theorists, schools hold
conicting features of circulating ruling class ideology and justifying inequality, at
the same time making space for progressive forms of understanding to take shape.
7
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

Nicos Poulantzas, The problem of the capitalist state, New Left Review 58 (1969): 6778.
9
See, for example, Marvin Lazerson, Origin of Urban Schools: Public Education in Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger,
1971); Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1968); and
Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1972).
10
See note 6.
11
For some of the classic expositions, see Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3
(London: Routledge, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in
Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977); and Peter McLaren,
Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols
and Gestures (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
12
See, for example, Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working
Class Jobs (London: Collier Macmillan, 1977); Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in
Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983); and Aronowitz and Giroux, Education Still Under Siege.
8
198
J. Brownlee
It is not surprising that mainstream theorists and historians tend to downplay

evidence of elite-driven educational reform. It is surprising, however, that this same
practice permeates the work of so many critical scholars. The majority of cultural
theorists, resistance theorists and structurally-orientated scholars within the economic-reproductive tradition posit that explanations connecting the form or function
of schooling with purposeful intent suffer from a deterministic, one-dimensional
view of power. Caveats and warnings about affording too much importance to business intervention have saturated the critical education literature for decades, most
notably (at least for the purposes of this article) in the formative years of critical
educational theorising in the 1970s and 1980s. A few examples serve to illustrate
the nature of this line of argumentation.
Henry Giroux is one of the foremost critics of educational determinism. In his
work, Giroux acknowledges the important contributions made by the economicreproductive tradition. At the same time, he has been highly critical of scholars
who prioritise elite intervention in public education instrumentalists within the
economic-reproductive model preferring analyses that are based on class conict
as opposed to direct domination. Giroux condemns instrumentalist types of analysis
as conjuring up a kind of melodrama in which a unied and wicked ruling class
imposes its will on the complacent masses13 and as offering a grimly mechanistic
and overly determined model of socialization.14 Like Giroux, Svi Shapiro invokes
one-dimensional metaphors, criticising the reductionist, conspiratorial and
uncompromisingly monolithic positions of scholars who (apparently) suggest that
education is the product of a single, totalitarian social class, able to impose its
ideas, sensibilities, meanings, and values throughout the consciousness and practices
of society.15 For Shapiro, the more subtle concept of hegemony is better suited to
analysing the relationship between education and economic power. Along these
same lines, Roger Dale explains that, the advantage of hegemony over ideology
is that ideology tends to have about it some notion of contrivance, of deliberate
manipulation of having an identiable source, of being devised to forward or
protect a particular interest.16
Leading educational theorist Michael Apple uses two historical examples of capital marshalling its forces in order to promote educational reform the Great
Debate and Green Paper in the United Kingdom and the Ryerson Plan in the United
States. While he claims that to dismiss their impact would be the height of folly,
he qualies this assertion, stating that:
by keeping our focus only on these overt attempts at bringing school policy and
curriculum into closer correspondence with industrial needs, we may neglect what is
happening that may be just as powerful at the level of day to day school practice. One
could ght the battles against capitals overt encroachments (and perhaps even win
some of them) and still lose within the school itself for teachers and students some
Henry Giroux, Teacher education and the ideology of social control, in Henry Giroux
and David Purpel, eds. The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education (Berkeley, CA:
McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1983), 405.
14
Aronowitz and Giroux, Education Still Under Siege, 31.
15
Svi Shapiro, Between Capitalism and Democracy (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990),
103104.
16
Roger Dale, 1982. Education and the capitalist state: Contributions and contradictions, in
Michael Apple, ed. Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class,
Ideology and the State (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 147.
13
199
of the ideological and material inuences of our kind of social formation are not more
importantly found at the level of these kinds of documents or plans, but at the level of
social practice within the routine activities of the schools.17
While I would not say that Apple is wrong to stress hegemonic meanings and
practices (or to note that overt encroachments are not all determining), it is
important to question why Apple and others are so reluctant to allow instrumentalist
arguments to stand without qualication. Apples analysis represents a near reexive
tendency on the part of scholars to downplay conscious intent among dominant
social groups. Indeed, dismissing the very idea of governing classes, caricatured as
fat men in morning coats meeting behind closed doors to plot the future, appears
to be viewed as a rite of passage into respectable educational scholarship and as
necessary so as not to be accused of conspiracy theorising.18 This tendency in the
literature extends well beyond the standard critiques of radical revisionist scholarship, which is often said to systematically confuse outcomes and intentions.19
In fact, this hesitancy to give political agency to economic elites even permeates
the study that has been most criticised for offering a one-dimensional view of
capitalist domination in education: Bowles and Gintis Schooling in Capitalist
America.20 In this work, the authors alternate between intentional and structurally-deterministic explanations or between agency and structure. On the one hand,
they refer to the power of dominant elites and an ascendant and self-conscious capitalist class who came to control societys major institutions through organised political struggle. On the other hand, their analysis falls back on a base-superstructure
conceptual framework that relies upon the functional requirements or needs of
a capitalist economy. In the words of Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Bowles
and Gintis never quite decide whether there are actual far-seeing capitalists who
understand the importance of schooling for the market system.21
As the above cursory review of some of the critical education literature suggests, critical theorists often downplay the explicit class conscious and systematic
way in which business groupings and other elites pursue their interests. Before
moving on to provide evidence to counter this line of argumentation and to support
instrumentalist claims, it is useful to rst briey revisit the work of resistance
theorists who stress the importance of attending to human agency in class struggle.
Resistance theorists emphasise the choices people make to achieve certain
educational objectives. As Liston explains, they employ intentional, not functional
explanations Whereas a functional explanation claims that the persistence of an
institutional feature is explained by its effects, an intentional explanation claims that
17
Michael Apple, Education and Power (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982),
138139.
18
Phillip Corrigan, Bruce Curtis and Robert Lanning, The political space of schooling, in
Terry Wotherspoon, ed. The Political Economy of Canadian Schooling (Toronto: Methuen,
1987), 2425.
19
The most famous of these critiques is Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique
of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
20
For some early critiques of Bowles and Gintis work, see Gilbert Gonzales, Progressive
Education: A Marxist Interpretation (Minneapolis, MN: Marxist Educational Press, 1982);
Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey, eds. Power and Ideology in Education (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977); and Willis, Learning to Labour.
21
Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling For All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the
Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 18.
200
J. Brownlee
the institutional feature is explained by the intentions and actions of social

groups.22 While resistance scholars are primarily interested in less powerful social
strata, I contend here that this same logic holds for the actions and intentions of
societys most powerful social actors. So, just as the intentions and actions of marginalised groups have been neglected by the economic and cultural traditions, the
intentions and actions of dominant groups have been neglected by virtually all
major strands of educational theorising.
To keep them from our throats: the rise of mass education
Many historical accounts position the movement for universal schooling in the
1800s as part of the larger class struggle for participation in the democratic process.
To be sure, there was a popular desire by workers to have access to an education
that would be useful and could serve to protect them from economic and political
exploitation. It is important to note, however, that the type of education provided
prioritised discipline and subordination over the acquisition of new knowledge.
Because of this emphasis, there was actually powerful resistance to the rise of mass
public schooling across North America in the 1800s.23
In the US, many working people struggled against compulsory schooling because
they saw it as threatening their independence and fostering the creation of docile and
obedient factory workers.24 As an example, in Massachusetts, one of the earliest sites
of the common school movement, compulsory schooling was resisted sometimes
with guns by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last
outpost not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by
22
Daniel Liston, Capitalist Schools: Explanation and Ethics in Radical Studies of Schooling
(New York: Routledge, 1988), 69.
23
Most of the discussion in these sections emphasises the similarities between the two countries under review; however, this is not meant to deny that the structure and content of
school systems differ signicantly across and within both nations. While educational traditions and structures within Canada have never mirrored those in the US, it is nonetheless
true that similarities in social forces, in economic development, and in political and cultural
values produced educational systems with many of the same underlying features (Michael
Katz, Introduction, History of Education Quarterly 12 (1972): 253). Moreover, educational
ideas from the US have always been highly inuential in Canada. The majority of early
Canadian educational reformers, for example, had at least some educational training in centres like Columbia, Chicago and Stanford. Canadian periodicals also routinely drew upon
American sources to describe new educational developments. See, for example, Robert Patterson, Society and education during the wars and their interlude, in J. Donald Wilson,
Robert Stamp and Louis Philippe Audet, eds. Canadian Education: A History (Scarborough,
Ontario: Prentice Hall, 1970). This emphasis on educational similarities is also reected in
the focus on public school systems. While private schools occupy an important history in
both the US and Canada, providing training and socialisation for many generations of economic and political elites, this article only engages with private schooling in relation to private non-prot universities in the US. Moreover, as this article is concerned primarily with
educational reform in Canada and the US, it relies primarily on literature emanating from
North America. It should be noted, however, that many of the same theoretical debates,
arguments and conclusions outlined in this article have also been addressed in the European
literature on education and schooling.
24
See Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 18151846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Joel
Spring, The American School, 16421985: Varieties of Historical Interpretation and the
Foundations and Development of American Education (New York: Longman, 1986).
201
militia and children marched to school under guard.25 Likewise, there has been a
long history of Canadian working-class resistance to elite-inspired educational
reform dating back to the mid-1850s in Lower Canada.26
In Canada, like in the US, the privileged classes controlled the agenda and
determined the process of educational change in the middle part of the nineteenth
century. Nevertheless, there were some important differences in the rise of mass
education in the two countries. Most notably, full-scale industrialisation came later
to Canada, which meant that the factory system was still in its infancy when the
expansion of the schools began. The dominance at the time of a mercantile-agrarian
economy explains, in part, why capitalists did not initially support a public education system. Instead, the majority of support came from a close-knit group of political elites, led by Egerton Ryerson, chief superintendent of education for Upper
Canada. According to Stephen Schecter, in suggesting that universal schooling precedes industrialisation, Ryerson and his colleagues were acting as the avant-garde
of the Canadian bourgeoisie27 they engaged in a concerted campaign to convince
business leaders that public education would guarantee the political security of the
social order.
Resistance continued and intensied through the mid-nineteenth century in both
countries. In the US, the expansion of capitalist production and the power of the
capitalist class were met by rising class conict. Employers found the rst generation of industrial workers nearly impossible to discipline; job turnover was high;
and there was little tolerance among the population for the monotony of factory
labour. To quell this conict, elites instigated the use of new mechanisms to encourage political stability. For example, according to Gatto, following the Civil War isolating and indoctrinating children in custodial compounds began to be discussed
seriously by the Northeastern polity elites of business, government, and university
life.28
The work of revisionist historians is critical to understanding the common
school movement. Their writings do not change the identity of early school reformers so much as they reect on their motivations. In his work, historian Michael Katz
highlights the extensive business connections among educational reformers in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. According to Katz, these prominent individuals
wrote the legislation, invested the money, and ran the enterprises that transformed
the commonwealth, expending huge amounts of time and effort to extend a system
of public schooling with the intention of socialising and disciplining workers for
factory life.29 Here, and in other parts of the eastern US, industrialists lent their
pens, purses, and inuence to the cause of education with the conviction that by
25
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
(Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2005), 22.
26
See Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 18361871 (London,
Ontario: Althouse Press, 1988); Harvey Graff, Respected and protable labour, in Gregory
Kealey and Peter Warrian, eds. Essays in Canadian Working Class History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); and Stephen Schecter, Capitalism, class and educational reform
in Canada, in Leo Panitch, ed. The Canadian State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1977).
27
Schecter, Capitalism, class and educational reform in Canada, 375.
28
John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (New York: Oxford
Village Press, 2003), 37.
29
Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform, 35.
202
J. Brownlee
doing so they were advancing their own prosperity.30 Similarly, in their research,
Bowles and Gintis note that, although capitalists were initially divided on the question of educational expenditure, their support increased as the problem of creating,
controlling, and extracting ever-increasing amounts of work from a permanent
labour force became more pressing.31 In both countries, then, the leadership of
educational reform was held by economic and political elites, and the goal was to
use schools as agents of social control in an unstable economic environment.
In addition to the more obvious intention to use education to develop a disciplined and productive workforce, elites also supported mass education because they
feared that a growing, unschooled proletariat could disrupt the social order. To borrow from Ralph Waldo Emerson, elites saw universal schooling as a way to keep
them from our throats.32 In Canada, elite reformers shared a common fear of the
undisciplined and uneducated mind.33 For them, the primary purpose of schooling
was to control the emerging working class, and they justied their support for
schools by citing the moral and physical dangers of the unschooled masses to society. Compulsory education laws, for example, were defended on the grounds that
existing schools were not catching those children for whom they were designed;
namely, children from the dangerous classes. In the view of many Canadian
elites, school-houses were better public investments than penitentiaries or jails.34
Related to this, it was perceived that formally educated workers could have a calming and conservative inuence in times of labour dispute, and that education was a
means of instilling deference, docility and support for capitalist institutions.35
According to Curti, prominent US reformers echoed the sentiments of industrialists,
as did many high-ranking educators. He writes: Hardly an annual meeting of the
National Education Association was concluded without an appeal on the part of
leading educators for the help of the teacher in quelling strikes and checking the
spread of socialism and anarchism.36
30
Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Totowa, NJ: Littleeld, Adams,
1959), 77.
31
Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 164. In addition, Alexander Field has
shown that manufacturers viewed schools primarily as agencies of social control and made
few references to technical requirements for skilled or educated labour. See Alexander Field,
Educational expansion in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts: Human capital formation
or structural reinforcement? Harvard Educational Review 46 (1976): 521552.
32
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (Boston, MA: James Munroe, 1844).
33
Susan Houston, Politics, schools and social change in Upper Canada, in Michael Katz
and Paul Mattingly, eds. Education and Social Change: Themes from Ontarios Past (New
York: New York University Press, 1975), 41.
34
Some mill and factory owners in Canada offered to end the practice of child factory labour
on the condition that education was compulsory. However, it is not clear if Canadian children would have welcomed the offer. For example, an informal survey of 500 working children in US factories found that over 80 per cent of them preferred to labour in the
treacherous conditions of the factories than return to school (Gatto, The Underground History of American Education).
35
For similar reasons, Eastern capitalists were determined to have a say in how education
developed in the West. Bankers, merchants and industrialists looked to public schools and
colleges to teach unpredictable frontier folk proper economic doctrines and to ensure the
security of their property rights. See Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators, 6870
and Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 1980),
219.
36
Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators, 218.
203
In the US, another consciously articulated function of education was the induction of time-discipline. Transforming self-directed work habits into industriallystructured labour was identied as a difcult task and one that obsessed school
committees.37 In order to be effective, it was understood that these habits had to
be learned and internalised so that there was no need for overt control by the state.
Canadian reformers also focused on inculcating future workers with proper industrial discipline. Working-class children (and especially immigrant children) were
separated from the so-called corruptive inuence of their parents and taught capitalist values and morals, a tactic supported by educators at all levels of policy-making.38 The values and attitudes conducive to factory labour came to dominate
pedagogical practice and, over time, to shape the structural organisation of the
schools. Schools became more bureaucratic in nature (with centralised school
boards and professional supervision) and adopted methods of hierarchy and the
strict division of labour of the factory system.39
Of course, elites were not solely aiming to create productive students and workers who accepted the structure of class relations. They consciously desired and
arguably attained a deeper penetration of capitalist relations where students and
workers actively embraced their social subordination. Elites recognised the importance of education as a form of social rule that was accepted and internalised by
the population, in contrast to the use of overt violence. In the words of Ryerson,
when a people know their rights, there is but one way to govern them, to educate
them.40
Over this time period, then, one can clearly see support for the instrumentalist
perspective through the strong inuence of elite leaders in shaping the rise of education. These historical accounts illustrate how this inuence took shape (e.g.
through the push for compulsory schooling and the introduction of capitalist values
in schools) and, more importantly, why elites consciously manipulated the role and
functions of educational institutions.
The intensication of corporate inuence in the early twentieth century

Early in the twentieth century, both the administration and organisation of public
schools in the US and Canada were increasingly brought under the rubric of corporate business interests. In the Canadian context, an alliance of capitalists, politicians
and educators came together to call for a change in the methods and purposes of
education. This elite alliance promoted educational reform with a new vigour and
consistency in an attempt to stabilise socially diverse populations and craft a new
37
Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, 32.

Haley Bamman, Patterns of school attendance in Toronto, 18441878: Some spatial considerations, in Michael Katz and Paul Mattingly, eds. Education and Social Change:
Themes from Ontarios Past (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 218.
39
Although alternative models of schooling were put forward by labour and other groups,
they could not compete with the bureaucratic model favoured by elite reformers. For a discussion, see Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools (Chapter 1).
40
Egerton Ryerson, Report on a System of Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada
(Montreal: Lovell and Gibson, 1847), 20.
38
204
J. Brownlee
vision of industrial harmony.41 Their demands for change were so far-reaching that
only an entirely New Education would sufce.42
During this period, elites in Canada continued to view educational reform as a
solution to the problems of industrial stability, the trade union movement and the
inuence of socialist ideas. With approximately one-third of the labour force now
employed in factory occupations, schools were increasingly being asked to discipline corporate workers. However, the use of education to quiet the masses
became a much more targeted and organised endeavour. In addition to government
propaganda that attempted to sell educational change to a reluctant public, business
leaders organised formal associations to pursue their objectives. One of these organisations was the National Council on Education (NCE). Although the ofcial mandate and membership of the Council were fairly broad, the strong inuence of
business leaders ensured that business programmes predominated. Through the
NCE, elites pressed for moral education in the schools to produce sober, clean and
punctual employees and for the extension of state-provided manual, commercial
and vocational training.43
Some organisations centred their efforts almost exclusively on vocational education. These efforts were led by the Canadian Manufacturers Association (CMA), in
partnership with the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, the Dominion Board
of Trade, Quebecs Council of Arts and Manufacturers and the Manufacturers
Association of Ontario.44 Across Canada, business organisations viewed vocational
training as a way to inculcate a social consciousness in youth compatible with the
capitalist work ethic, at the same time as providing a convenient route for working
class children who might otherwise challenge the middle class monopoly on prestige positions in the occupational hierarchy.45 Vocational education in the public
schools also, in effect, placed the form and content of occupational training beyond
the reach of workers and unions. By the 1920s, enrolments in private business colleges had declined signicantly and public educators boasted that more thorough
ofce training could not be obtained anywhere.46
Some of this elite inuence penetrated the legislative arena. For example, in
1919 the Technical Education Act was passed as part of the general effort to
41
Terry Wotherspoon, The incorporation of public school teachers into the industrial order:
British Columbia in the rst half of the twentieth century, in Pat Armstrong and M. Patricia
Connelly, eds. Feminism, Political Economy and the State (Toronto: Canadian Scholars
Press, 1999), 33.
42
For a good overview of the New Education, see Douglas Lawr and Robert Gidney, eds.
Educating Canadians: A Documentary History of Public Education (Toronto: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1973).
43
Alf Chaiton, The National Council of Education: A case study of a voluntary, lay, extragovernmental organization in the inter-war period, in J.H.A Wallin, ed. The Politics of
Canadian Education (Alberta: Canadian Society for the Study of Education, 1977), 2124.
44
Robert Stamp, Education and the economic and social milieu: The EnglishCanadian
scene from the 1870s to 1914, in J. Donald Wilson, Robert Stamp and Louis Philippe
Audet, eds. Canadian Education: A History (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall, 1970).
45
Graham Bleasdale, Towards a political economy of capitalist educational values, in Randle Nelson and David Nock, eds. Reading, Writing, and Riches: Education and the Socioeconomic Order in North America (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1978), 17.
46
Nancy Jackson and Jane Gaskell, White collar vocationalism: The rise of commercial
education in Ontario and British Columbia, 18701920, Curriculum Inquiry 17 (1987):
190.
205
integrate the working class into the changing class structure without having to resort
to direct coercion. According to the report of the Royal Commission on Industrial
and Technical Education, the new reform was motivated by the thinking that class
conict could be mitigated through instilling habits of obedience and the desire for
social control, a goal which reected the concerns of the Canadian elite.47
While there was signicant business pressure to change the nature of Canadian
education in the early twentieth century, similar forces in the US launched even
more aggressive and sophisticated campaigns. In response to growing labour
militancy and unionism, schools, it was believed, needed to be isolated from popular interference and placed under the command of a centralised authority. Consistent
with earlier periods, these proponents of school reform tended to be upper-class
professionals and business leaders, especially the new and rising corporate elite.48
Writing during the Great Depression, Edward Filene, dubbed the mouthpiece of
industrial America, said that, [t]he time has come when all our educational institutions must concentrate on the great task of teaching the masses not what to
think but how to think.49 This view was representative of many corporate leaders
who self-consciously began to identify as educators.
Like in Canada, a number of business organisations supported educational
reform. In the US, the National Education Association, the Chambers of Commerce, newspapers, professional journals, and businessmens clubs formed a
nationwide interlocking directorate of educational lobbyists.50 These business
leaders and representatives inuenced the educational agenda through various mechanisms. In most major US cities, economic elites and conservative professionals
started by assuming control of boards of education. This development has been
It is worth noting that there was some opposition to the New Education agenda promoted by Canadian elites. Opponents of manual training included not only trade unions but
also prominent Canadian educators. Vincent Massey, for one, deplored that manual training
had become a fetish in primary schools. In his words, it was wrong to turn a school into
an elementary contractors workshop and to treat every lad as if he were a carpenter in
embryo. The Massey quote is taken from Robert Stamp, Evolving patterns of education:
English-Canada from the 1870s to 1914, in Wilson et al., Canadian Education, 321.
48
While the emphasis here has been on elites as proponents of school reform, it is also
worthwhile to note that the views of these proponents were often aligned with those of middle-class liberal reformers. In part, this alignment reected a desire on the part of the middle
class to allow increased access to education at the same time as preserving their own advantages within the system. The middle class supported the role of the educational system in
tracking and streaming (stratifying) individuals and groups ostensibly through meritocratic
means and thereby perpetuating the unequal allocation of social positions. This alliance
also reected broader political and ideological similarities between ruling elites and liberal
middle-class reformers. For example, these groups both ascribed to the liberal assertion that
schools should teach the values of sound citizenship, including those associated with subordination and obedience in the workplace, and to the views of liberal democratic theorists,
who claimed that systems of schooling, like other democratic institutions, should function to
pacify the population and legitimate the social order. Also, it was in the early decades of the
twentieth century that liberal theorists began to discuss the importance of the manufacture
of consent as a means of controlling the population in societies where the state did not have
absolute authority to use force or violence; see, for example, Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922). For a useful discussion of liberalism and education, see
also Howell Baum, Brown in Baltimore (New York: Cornell University Press, 2010).
49
Cited in Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the
Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 5455 (emphasis in original).
50
Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 187.
47
206
J. Brownlee
well-documented. Scott Nearing, for one, studied boards and found that business
leaders and professionals represented nearly 80 per cent of school board members
in 104 cities in 1917, despite representing only about 10 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force.51 That boards of education were dominated by elite groups is
also supported by the work of George Counts and Upton Sinclair.52
In addition to their direct inuence on school boards, business leaders also lobbied school administrators to adopt a more corporate model of organisation. In this
period, the rhetoric supporting a business model was connected to the principles of
scientic management. Just as scientic management in industry was being used to
differentiate the workforce thereby increasing employers control over the production process the schools were directed to follow suit through differentiating
courses of study. Elites advanced the use of intelligence and scholastic-achievement
tests (which expanded rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s) to provide a supposedly
unbiased means to classify students into different academic streams (and by extension into different positions in the occupational hierarchy). Of a sample of 150
school systems in 1932, three-quarters were using intelligence tests to assign students to curriculum tracks.53
These changes in organisation and structure, not surprisingly, were associated
with changes in the culture of the schools. In his detailed work on the development
of business values in education, Raymond Callahan documents how leading US
administrators started to self-identify as business managers and to embrace the corporate communitys vision of educational efciency.54 According to Callahan, the
adoption of business methods by administrators was not simply the result of a powerful business ideology; reforms were often forced upon administrators with the
threat of job loss. As a result, key curricular decisions including course selection,
educational materials and even teaching methods were now effectively being
made outside the classroom.55
Scott Nearing, Whos who on our boards of education?, School and Society 5 (1917):
8990.
52
George Counts, The Social Composition of Boards of Education: A Study in the Social
Control of Public Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1927); Upton Sinclair, The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools (Pasadena, CA: Author, 1924).
53
David Cohen and Marvin Lazerson, Education and the corporate order, Socialist Revolution 8 (1972): 4772. Although the ideology and practice of scientic management was
especially strong in the US, Canadian schools were not immune from its inuences. For
example, in The incorporation of public school teachers into the industrial order, Wotherspoon documents how schools in British Columbia were reorganised and governed like business enterprises in the early 1900s. This reorganisation was, in part, a response to a 1903
federal commission that expressed concern with rising working-class consciousness and class
conict in the province. Employing technical analyses of schooling adopted from scientic
management, new pedagogical methods were introduced along with a reordering of educational administration and nance, all in an effort to induce a new morality infused with
dedication to the industrial order and corporate state (p. 37).
54
Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efciency (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1962).
55
Teachers were also a target of business leaders. Teacher training textbooks, such as
William Bagleys widely circulated Classroom Management (1907), showcased the business
ideology of the times. According to Bagley, the problems of classroom management were no
different to those encountered in business. He advocated a mechanical, rigid and efcient
classroom environment, one that would build solid industrial habits.
51
207
Along with demands to adopt a corporate model of organisation and a shift in

the culture and values of the school system, US elites organised an intensive campaign focused on vocational education. This campaign included the establishment
of corporation schools for apprentices, the creation of private trade schools and
pressure for publically supported industrial education. The pressure for vocational
schooling was initiated and maintained primarily by prominent capitalists (people
like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller), business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), as well as organisations with professional and corporate leaderships, such as the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial
Education (NCPIE).56 The ideology of scientic management and educational efciency was key to justifying the stratication of students along class lines and into
distinct vocational streams. Moreover, as Michael Katz explains, vocational education was an ingenious way of providing universal secondary schooling without disturbing the shape of the social structure and without permitting too much social
mobility.57 Under the guise of universalism and with the promise of beneting all
social classes, tracking, testing, streaming and vocational guidance turned schools
into increasingly rened training mechanisms for capitalist industry.58
At the same time as there were signicant shifts in lower schools, elites in both
countries were targeting higher education. Notably, it was during this period that
members of Canadas economic elite formally increased their control over the countrys university system with the passage of the University Act in 1906. This Act
placed control and management of the university in the hands of an appointed body,
the Board of Governors, which strengthened the nancial control of business leaders over higher education. In the US, the inuence was even stronger. According to
Clyde Barrow, for elite reformers, the question of who owned the universities
was always a central and consciously articulated point of contention. In this context, the emergence of American universities is best understood as a cultural component of the Industrial Revolution.59
Organisations in both countries worked to increase the number of disciplines
that served business interests. In Canada, the CMA lobbied for new higher
education programmes in commerce, nance and business administration. Shortly
56
These efforts did not go unchallenged. Fearing that vocational education would threaten
the power of unions and provide a source of cheap labour for industrialists, many labour
unions and teachers organisations strongly opposed it. In cities such as Chicago, Atlanta
and New York, resistance movements blocked early attempts at establishing dual systems of
schooling, and even began their own labour colleges as an alternative to the public system.
57
Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, 121.
58
In referring to the success of vocational guidance, it is important to draw attention to the
distinction between the effectiveness of the specic content of the formal curriculum and the
overarching legitimation and social control functions of schooling. Many programmes of
vocational education have been less than successful in providing workers with a skillset suited to work within industrial occupations. At the same time, what they have been effective
in doing is instilling particular values, attitudes and ideologies, particularly with respect to
practices of authority in the workplace. In this article, the focus is on the role of vocational
and other forms of education in allocating people to social positions, providing a cover of
legitimacy for this allocation, and inculcating a social consciousness in youth compatible
with the capitalist work ethic. These educational programmes have been successful insofar
as they have prepared people for the context of work in capitalist societies.
59
Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 18941928 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990), 32, 14.
208
J. Brownlee
thereafter, the number of programmes and student enrolment in these areas rapidly
expanded.60 In the US, between 1915 and 1925, schools of commerce increased by
over 450 per cent.61 The elites inuence over engineering education in the US was
particularly noteworthy. In his book American by Design, David Noble details how
reformers restructured the form and content of engineering education to suit the
requirements of corporate development.62
The inuence of corporate elites extended far beyond the provision of new disciplinary programmes. In Canada, the CMA exerted an extended propaganda campaign to ensure the establishment of university-based industrial research facilities
and to usher in the creation, in 1916, of the National Research Council of Canada.63 With these changes, the number of industrial research laboratories increased
from just a few dozen in 19171918 to nearly 1000 in 1939. At the same time,
business leaders started channelling large sums of money to programmes, professors
and graduate students whose work they inuenced and/or approved of, and occasionally even paid for professors salaries.64 Writing in 1918, Thorstein Veblen
describes how the introduction of business principles into American universities
was also evident on many fronts, including university governing boards whose discretionary control over policy now rested nally in the hands of businessmen.65
Likewise, Earl McGrath reports that bankers and business leaders on university governing boards increased from approximately one-quarter of total membership in
1860 to one-half in 1930.66 Nearings study of university trustees reveals a similar
trend. Of a total of 2470 trustees in 143 institutions across the country, Nearing
found that more than half were professionals and over one-third were merchants,
manufacturers, corporate ofcials or bankers.67 Upton Sinclairs work highlights not
only business domination but also the dedicated suppression of academic freedom
by boards of trustees.68 Through governing boards, the American business community increasingly controlled decision making in higher education.
60
Robin Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada 16631960 (Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 1976).
61
David Smith, Who Rules the Universities? An Essay in Class Analysis (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1974).
62
David Noble, American by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
63
Phillip Enros, The Bureau of Scientic and Industrial Research and School of Specic
Industries: The Royal Canadian Institutes attempt at organizing industrial research in Toronto, 19141918, in Richard Jarrell and James Hull, eds. Science, Technology and Medicine
in Canadas Past: Selections from Scientia Canadensis (Thornhill, Ontario: Scientia Press,
1991), 211.
64
Phillip Enros, The University of Toronto and Industrial Research in the early twentieth
century, in Richard Jarrell and Arnold Roos, eds. Critical Issues in the History of Canadian
Science, Technology and Medicine (Kingston, Ontario: HSTC Publications, 1983).
65
Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum (Kila, MT: Kessinger
Publishing, 2004), 44.
66
Earl McGrath, The control of higher education in America, Educational Record 17
(1936): 259272.
67
Scott Nearing, Whos who among college trustees?, School and Society 6 (1917): 297
299. Similar conclusions are provided by Hubert Beck, Men Who Control Our Universities
(New York: Kings Crown Press, 1947) and Counts, The Social Composition of Boards of
Education.
68
Upton Sinclair, The Goose-step: A Study of American Education (Pasadena, CA: Author,
1923).
209
It is worth drawing attention to the specic role that some prominent organisations played in bringing about these changes. Noble documents the inuence of the
War Department Committee on Education and Special Training, the American
Council on Education and the National Association of Corporation Schools
(NACS). The role of the NACS is particularly noteworthy, as it integrated the public, vocational and higher educational institutions into the industrial system and
infused them with business priorities. In Nobles words, NACS organisers saw in
education, properly guided according to corporate imperatives, the key to corporate
prosperity and stability; by means of education they sought to eliminate the problems of labor turnover, labor troubles, and lack of training, to bring about
greater productivity and industrial efciency.69 To complement the inuence of
these organised networks, some corporate leaders, like those in the utility industry,
actively participated in campaigns to control higher education. In the early 1930s,
the US Federal Trade Commission discovered that the utility companies were
hiring college professors; subsidizing utilities courses in colleges; subsidizing research
work reviewing and editing textbooks; seconding company personnel to college
faculties; controlling university extension work; saturating schools with utilities-company propaganda against public ownership; and even conducting summer schools for
faculty members.70
Understanding the unique role of private educational foundations in inuencing

higher education is also important in this time period. For elite reformers, the funding and ideological leadership provided by these foundations was critical. From
1902 to 1938, the leading foundations spent upwards of $680 million on higher
education alone.71 In addition to monetary inuence, private foundations played a
decisive role in promoting organized class action. They did so primarily by offering a forum wherein representatives of the countrys largest nancial groupings
organized their class consciousness relative to the university in cooperation with
prominent educators and university presidents.72 According to Smith, corporate
and foundation gifts had enough strings attached to make the universities dance
like puppets.73 Through their involvement in North American universities and
associated research councils (e.g. the US and Canadian Social Science Research
Councils), the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations were especially important in
extending corporate inuence. In Canada, both groups were intimately involved in
the construction and expansion of burgeoning Canadian universities, with almost
every Canadian institution receiving a Carnegie grant between 1920 and 1940.74
By the early twentieth century, it could be argued that the robber barons had
succeeded in shaping higher education according to their desires, and the more the
universities conformed to the requirements of capitalism, the more thoroughly and
directly the capitalist ruling class came to control them.75 As explained above, the
inuence of business extended from lower schools through to higher education. It
69
Noble, America By Design, 180.

Ibid., 256.
71
Smith, Who Rules the Universities?
72
Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State, 6163.
73
Smith, Who Rules the Universities?, 104.
74
Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada 16631960.
75
Smith, Who Rules the Universities?, 86.
70
210
J. Brownlee
was supported by legislative changes and involved a broad range of strategies

from the focus on vocational education and the creation of new disciplines to the
corporate control of university boards and players, including business leaders,
educational organisations and private foundations. Summarising business efforts to
control and direct education during this period, Noble notes that, several decades
later, when students and professors in both countries began to rail against the
knowledge factories machines which produced them and then employed them to
produce others like them few understood how consciously the system had been
designed.76
Selling free enterprise in the post-war period
Following the Great Depression, educational restructuring continued in Canada and
the US, though in a changed context. As the majority of literature on corporate
inuence in education during this time period deals with the US specically, I begin
this section by focusing on the American situation. In the late 1930s and pursued
with greater energy after the Second World War, US corporate leaders sought to
reassert their authority over social and political life. This was done primarily
through the organisation of major offensives to recapture public opinion and restimulate a climate more favourable to business. The campaigns involved largescale public relations operations in all major social institutions, including the media,
the churches, the workplace and, most importantly here, education.
In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf details how the education system was targeted as part of this corporate offensive.77 According to Fones-Wolf,
corporate elites (under the direction of the Advertising Council) extended their
inuence in education by promoting the idea that the public system was in a state
of scal crisis. The overarching goal was to convince the public that the school system was in a state of collapse and that the solution required an increase in funding
and control by the private sector. At the same time, corporate leaders built alliances
with teachers by establishing close working relationships with their respective
school systems. Through these relationships, hundreds of millions of dollars of business-sponsored teaching materials were provided by corporations and employer
organisations. Alliances with the schools were also entrenched through the organisation of committees on education by Chamber of Commerce afliates. The number
of these committees which had a strong inuence on school authorities grew
from 200 in 1944 to 1300 in 1949. Contact was also intensied with school administrators. For example, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) initiated
dozens of regional meetings and hundreds of community discussion groups involving thousands of business leaders and administrators from around the country.
Teachers and students were also invited into the corporate sphere through organised
tours and instructional seminars (known as BusinessIndustryEducation days).78
Corporate elites also continued to control and distribute information and propaganda about the virtues of American capitalism. The NAM, for example, conducted
76
Noble, America By Design, 158.

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 19451960 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
78
By 1955, BusinessIndustryEducation days had involved over 36,000 companies and
some 300,000 teachers.
77
211
a widely publicised investigation of school textbooks to screen them for anti-business perspectives. Its class-backed organizational attempts to exclude particular
texts and formulate broad curricular aims helped to ensure that the US textbook
market took a sharp rightward turn by the late 1940s.79 Business leaders also
campaigned for the introduction of economic studies in lower schools. For example,
the NAM offered instruction on the working of the US economy to both students
and teachers in thousands of schools across the country.80
During and after the Second World War, large-scale resources went into distributing corporate materials in the schools. Groups like the Advertising Federation of
America, the Bankers Association, the Federation of Sales Executives and the
NAM ooded classrooms with printed materials and lms including a pro-business news weekly. NAM organisers estimated that their materials reached between
two-thirds and three-quarters of high school students and between one-third and
one-half of junior high school children in the early 1940s.81 In 1955, school superintendents estimated that business invested $50 million in sponsored classroom
materials annually, approximately half the amount public schools were spending
each year on standard textbooks.82 By the end of the 1950s, one in ve corporations reported supplying classroom materials to the schools, which meant that
about a third of the material in American elementary schools was coming straight
out of corporate propaganda ofces.83 According to Robert Brady, these kinds of
educational materials represented an ideological outpouring of transparent propaganda, reaching to the roots of the principles which underlie contemporary capitalist civilization.84
In Canada, active corporate pressure to promote business values in lower
schools was not nearly as evident and came somewhat later. Also, it was not until
79
Liston, Capitalist Schools, 111112.

Employer organisations required that teachers attend workshops to familiarise themselves
with the materials. How Our Business System Operates (HOBSO) was a typical example
of such a programme. By 1956, the NAM had trained 2000 teachers to present HOBSO in
their classes, and by the following year the programme was being used in over 12 per cent
of all secondary schools in the US (See Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise). Efforts to
impart a proper understanding of economics was also promoted by groups like Americans
for the Competitive Enterprise System, the American Economic Foundation, the Joint Council on Economic Education, the Foundation for Economic Education and the Industrial Information Institute.
81
Inger Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in
the 1930s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
82
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Business propaganda in the schools: Labors struggle against the
Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System, 19491954, History of Education Quarterly 40 (2000): 255278.
83
Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education (New York: RoutledgeFalmer,
2003), 234.
84
Robert Brady, Business as a System of Power (New York: Columbia University Press,
1943), 217218. These campaigns only increased in the following decades. Relevant details
can be found in Sheila Harty, Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda
in the Schools (Washington, DC: Center for Study of Responsive Law, 1979). Harty notes a
survey conducted in the 1970s by the Research Department of the National Education Association. It indicated that half of the teachers in the United States were using industry materials; 64 per cent of the Fortunes 500, 90 per cent of the trade associations and 90 per cent
of the utilities were sending informational materials to the schools. To meet these
demands, a clearinghouse, known as The Institute for Constructive Capitalism, was established at the University of Texas to make corporate materials more available.
80
212
J. Brownlee
1974 that the Canadian Bankers Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce
and the Canadian Life Insurance Company came together to establish the Canadian
Foundation for Economic Education to insert business-generated educational materials into classroom curriculums. This is not to say that Canadian elites did not play
a pivotal role in restructuring Canadas education system in the post-war period. In
Canada, these efforts were focused largely on the expansion of vocational and technical training. Under the direction of corporate Canada and state ofcials, the Technical and Vocational Assistance Act was passed in 1960. This Act resulted in the
construction of hundreds of new vocational high schools and technical institutes;
from 1961 to 1967, enrolment in the vocational-technical sector of Ontario alone
expanded from 24 to 46 per cent of the total secondary school population.85
Overall, the corporate class was instrumental in the fundamental restructuring of
Ontarios educational system, including the formation of community colleges and
the implementation of higher school streaming.
Corporate motivation for advancing the increase in vocational and technical
training was twofold: rst, it provided Canadian corporations with lucrative new
investments in construction and the production and distribution of educational materials; second, the primary benet was the social control function of these new educational arrangements. As George Martells analysis of this expansion indicates, the
largest expansion of the secondary system was in the bottom stream where most
of the students from the lower classes were generally congregated. The goal,
according to Martell, was the development of a properly subordinate character
structure suitable for the dead-end work that awaits these kids or for a life in
which they will have no job at all.86
Like in the previous two time periods under review, elite intervention in the
school system during the post-war period occurred at the post-secondary level at
the same time as there were interventions in lower schools. In Canada and the US,
post-secondary education became a training ground not only for social leaders but
also for a growing number of middle managers, technicians and other white collar
employees. To meet these demands, higher education became stratied into a number of distinct levels and different institutions. In particular, there was an increase
in the number of community colleges to ensure the educational system had the
capacity to streamline workers into various occupational roles. Canada had 170
public community colleges in 1975 compared to just one a decade earlier.87 In the
US, enrolments in two-year college programmes were eight times greater in 1972
than in 1947.88 Elites supported community colleges nancially and used their
representation on college advisory boards to ensure they served government and
industry.
The economic elite concentrated on community colleges but there were also
strategies targeted at universities. During the post-war period, companies were
increasingly dependent on universities for scientic and engineering research as
well as business management training. In order to exert inuence in these areas,
George Martell, The schools, the state and the corporations, in George Martell, ed. The
Politics of the Canadian Public School (Toronto: James Lewis & Samuel, 1974).
86
Martell, The schools, the state and the corporations,11.
87
Terry Wotherspoon, The Sociology of Education in Canada: Critical Perspectives
(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998).
88
Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.
85
213
corporations increased funding and established new institutional ties. Working

through organisations like the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the CMA and the
Industrial Foundation on Education, Canadian elites directly intervened in the 1950s
to restructure the university system. For example, corporations became a more
prominent contributor to university nancing. According to Paul Axelrod, business
raised its funding for higher education by 450 per cent in just one year in the late
1950s, with most of the money coming from dominant industrial and commercial
sectors.89 Business explained its increased contributions as promoting an understanding and appreciation of the private enterprise way of life and cultivating an
economic, social, and political climate in which companies can survive and continue to progress.90 Canadian business leaders also recognised that their nancial
contributions were insufcient to achieve these ends. For this reason, corporate
leaders, in unison, called upon government to seize the initiative and meet the
national crisis.91
Building on efforts during the previous time period, corporate elites continued
to increase their presence on Canadian university governing boards as a way to
exert their inuence over university governance, infrastructure and programme
development.92 Ornstein found that the average number of corporateuniversity
interlocks via university boards increased from 12.4 in 194650 to 24.9 in 1961
65.93 Moreover, Axelrod argues that national and local business interests played a
vital role in the creation and expansion of every university in Ontario.94
While corporate funding to universities and corporate representation on university boards also increased in the US in the post-war period, business leaders used
other mechanisms to inuence the university system. For example, to combat
widespread misunderstanding of the economic system, the Foundation for Economic Education, together with leading corporations, established summer conferences, seminars and exchange programmes to bring university faculty into contact
with the business community. By the mid-1950s, speakers from the NAM were giving over 1700 talks a year to nearly 200,000 US students and faculty.95 Shortly
thereafter, American corporations began to fund Chairs of Free Enterprise, which
provided economic education with the explicit purpose of defending the free enterprise system.
89
Paul Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars: Politics, Economics and the Universities of Ontario
19451980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).
90
Herbert Byleveld, Corporate Aid to Higher Education in Canada (Montreal: National
Industrial Conference Board, 1966), 22.
91
Paul Axelrod, Business aid to Canadian universities 19571965, Interchange 11
(198081): 27 (emphasis added). To support these efforts, Canadas advertising industry
launched a nationwide media campaign to inform Canadians that the country faced serious
dangers if higher education was not expanded, though it did not compare in size or scope to
the American offensive.
92
John Barkans and Norene Pupo, The board of governors and the power elite: A case
study of eight Canadian universities, Sociological Focus 7 (1974); Wallace Clement, The
Canadian Corporate Elite: An Analysis of Economic Power (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975) 8198.
93
Michael Ornstein, Corporate involvement in Canadian hospital and university boards,
19461977, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 25 (1988): 365388.
94
Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars, 55.
95
Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise.
214
J. Brownlee
Through these and other efforts, business pressure succeeded in increasing university programmes and course offerings in multiple areas that directly served its
needs.96 But it is also important to note that elite interests intruded into disciplines
that were relatively removed from the market. Soon after the war, business leaders
had concluded that only by investing large nancial resources in the social sciences
could the free enterprise system be saved from the threat of the welfare state,
socialism, collectivism and associated disasters.97 Consequently, from 1946
onward, business provided signicant funding for social science research in areas
such as public relations, industrial psychology and the measurement, development
and change of attitudes and opinions. In just a few short years, an intensely symbiotic relationship developed between the business community and social scientists.98 The magnitude of corporate inuence over higher education, and especially
the social sciences, is illustrated by a 1954 congressional investigation (the Reese
Commission) into the workings of corporate foundations. Its conclusions are worth
quoting at length, as they demonstrate the level of class consciousness of elites during this period:
The power of the individual large foundation is enormous. Its various forms of patronage carry with them elements of thought control. It exerts immense inuence on educator, educational processes, and educational institutions. It is capable of invisible
coercion. It can materially predetermine the development of social and political concepts, academic opinion, thought leadership, public opinion There is such a concentration of foundation power in the United States, operating in education and the
social sciences, with a gigantic aggregate of capital and income. This Interlock has
some of the characteristics of an intellectual cartel It has come to exercise very
extensive practical control over social science and education [Social science
research] is now almost wholly in the control of professional employees of the large
foundations.99
As in the other historical periods discussed above, the actions of business leaders over this period provide support for the instrumentalist position that the course
of educational reform has been intentionally shaped by the direct intervention of
elites. This occurred through targeted public relations operations and the distribution
of corporate materials, new strategic alliances with teachers, school administrators
and universities, and the rise in vocational and technical training.
Conclusion: the limits of educational reform
To date, the stream of critical educational theory that emphasises the direct exercise
of elite power has been criticised for advancing a one-dimensional and conspiratorial
view of educational reform. This article has countered these critiques by bringing
96
For instance, by 195455 nearly 20 per cent of university graduates in the US were studying business and commerce, more than all students in the basic sciences and liberal arts
combined (Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society).
97
Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom
and Liberty (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 145.
98
US foundations also had considerable inuence over Canadian social science in the postwar period. According to Harris (1976), the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations provided
the majority of the funding for the Canadian Social Science Research Council from 1940 to
1957.
99
Gatto, The Underground History of American Education, 254255.
215
historical evidence together to document the enormous inuence of elite intervention

in the educational sphere. The important role of elite activism in the process of
educational change in both Canada and the US began in the middle of the nineteenth
century and continued through the post-war years. In each historical period,
economic and political elites often aligned with professional classes succeeded
in dening and implementing a model of educational reform to support capitalist
interests. Though not the focus of this article, this inuence continues today in new
and often more veiled forms.
A nal issue to be considered here concerns whether, within this instrumentalist
understanding of educational reform, there is any room for progressive educational
change. What does the historical evidence suggest about the capacity for marginalised social groups to intervene in the educational process? Is progressive educational reform possible given the role and inuence of these dominant groups?
To answer these questions, it is useful to situate the discussion within the critical
debates on educational reform. These debates generally revolve around two principal views. The rst assumes that schools are key agents of social reform and that
educational change can be a liberating force for attaining a more just and equitable
society; the second holds that schools exist as agents of their larger political and
economic environments, making progressive reform difcult if not impossible.100
Instrumentalist critics of education, who of course emphasise the importance of
conscious elite intervention in the educational sphere, have often been associated
with this second position. This positioning is based on the erroneous assumption
that their analyses are overly deterministic. While some critical theorists most
notably, structuralists do rely on deterministic reasoning, this line of argument
should not necessarily be extended to instrumentalists. From my perspective, the
evidence presented above suggests the opposite conclusion. Far from implying
determinism or powerlessness, instrumentalist critiques re-afrm the contested nature of education and the agency involved in educational reform. The fact that, at
crucial historical junctures, elites have marshalled their collective agency or
resources towards initiating, expanding, and reforming the schools, demonstrates
their awareness (or at least their belief) that alternative educational practices and
structures could play an important role in facilitating social change. In other words,
because elites see the structural power they hold over the educational system as
being open to challenge and contestation, they resort to direct intervention to control the process of educational reform.
Following this line of argumentation, the most important conclusion suggested
by the evidence presented here is that working-class resistance and democratic
struggles are important, perhaps even crucial, for achieving different forms of
schooling as part of broader social change. As resistance theorists rightly emphasise, most critical theorists (including some instrumentalists) have downplayed the
importance of human agency in class struggle and have thereby overlooked educations liberating potential. While in this article there was a focus on historical
Proponents of the rst view include John Dewey, My pedagogic creed, The School
Journal 54 (1897): 7780 and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1970). Proponents of the second include Paul Goodman, Compulsory
Mis-education (New York: Horizon Press, 1964); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New
York: Harper and Row, 1970); Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, eds. The Limits of
Educational Reform (New York: David McKay, 1976); and Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in
Capitalist America.
100
216
J. Brownlee
evidence that demonstrated the inuence of elites and a focus on countering dominant perspectives that downplay these inuences, this is not to say that there are no
opportunities to contest elite-inspired reforms. Educational reform has never simply
reected the imposition of elite rule and schools have never been the mere instruments of manipulation by dominant social groups.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Salena Brickey for reviewing and editing the paper and Bruce Curtis
for his valuable guidance as well as Wallace Clement, Aaron Doyle, Neil Gerlach, Kevin
Walby and Doug Lowther for comments on earlier drafts.
Notes on contributor
Jamie Brownlee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Ruling Canada: Corporate
Cohesion and Democracy (Fernwood Publishing, 2005), which explores how the Canadian
economic elite cooperate to control state and national policy. His doctoral research builds on
this work through examining the inuence of corporate power in the educational sphere. He
has taught at the undergraduate level on capitalism and ecology, corporate power and
corporate crime.
Copyright of Paedagogica Historica is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed
to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,
users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Elite Power

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Elite Power

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Paedagogica Historica, 2013

Vol. 49, No. 2, 194216, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2012.709523

Elite power and educational reform: An historiographical analysis

Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

It is not surprising that mainstream theorists and historians tend to downplay

the institutional feature is explained by the intentions and actions of social

The intensication of corporate inuence in the early twentieth century

Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, 32.

Along with demands to adopt a corporate model of organisation and a shift in

Robin Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada 16631960 (Toronto: University

Understanding the unique role of private educational foundations in inuencing

Noble, America By Design, 180.

was supported by legislative changes and involved a broad range of strategies

Noble, America By Design, 158.

Liston, Capitalist Schools, 111112.

corporations increased funding and established new institutional ties. Working

historical evidence together to document the enormous inuence of elite intervention

Você também pode gostar