Education as a bureaucracy

 Sarah Elgohary 

Soc 18a 

Max Weber on Education     

Human beings experience many social problems, but most people tend to ignore the most important dilemma, which is the inequality of the education system. Even though one important goal of the education system is to prepare students for life so they can become successful and productive members of society, there has been a huge transformation in how schools were run traditionally compared to how they are run today. The traditional school was a one-room school house with one teacher, there were no grade levels, and students did not receive grades for class. However, the modern school system has become McDonaldized (ie rationalized) and is now a bureaucracy with a hierarchy of grades. The current education system has become rationalized to the point where the college administrator's as only care about the number of students enrolled in the class. There is no emphasis on the well-being of the students. This paper will discuss how the sociologist Max Weber would view modern education as a rationalized system through three aspects: bureaucracy, social action, and legitimate domination. 

In order to understand these aspects, which Weber focuses on, we need to create a context for how education has changed from the traditional (what it once was) to the modern, point of view (what it is now). The traditional method of education better prepared students for the real world, because it allowed the instructors to use real life situations instead of readings from a textbook, in iorder to teach students. In addition, the traditional model allowed instructors to provide one-on-one help. On the other hand, modern education may be both narrower and more rigid because students do not really have control over the outcomes of their education. This is the result of constant test-taking and competition over scores. Inspired not by learning but by test anxiety, the students only do what they are told to do by the teacher. Marx called this alienation and preparation for a boring life, but Weber calls this the result of rationalization and bureaucracy.

    Before we can understand how education became a rationalized institution and organized into different bureaucracies, we need to understand what traditional education in America was. Traditional education was the one- room school house, it was in the literal sense a school in one room. There was a single teacher who taught academic basics to several grade levels of elementary-age boys and girls. While in many areas one-room schools are no longer used, it is not uncommon for them to remain in developing countries. The one- room school house had four notable characteristics: 1) it was completely effective, because children learned all they needed to know to become capable and successful adults who could function in society. 2) Although the traditional education system involved harsh trials and ordeals, children who survived them were allowed to “graduate”. 3) The third aspect is the cost of education. In the nineteenth century, American schools allowed bribery to get children enrolled in schools: in fact paying masters and religious leaders was often done .4) In the traditional system children are not totally withdrawn from the work force which is similar to the modern system (Tom 2015). However, traditional education is not a specific type of education, and the meaning of traditional education varies by location and time. Traditional education is a culturally sanctioned form of teaching that focuses on the values a culture deems most important. In the United States, a traditional education focuses on basic skills and preparing children for the workplace.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

    The reliance on standardized tests as another way to measure student achievement has turned our traditional education system into a modern rationalized bureaucracy. According to Max Weber a bureaucracy is a large, formal, secondary organization characterized by a hierarchy of authority, a clear division of labor, explicit rules, and impersonal interactions between its members. Calhoun (2012 p 313). He believes rationality is the goal of society. As a result he theorizes that anywhere humans organize there are rationalized organizations such as schools. Moreover, education is a rationalized institution in which one main goal is to provide all students with “ equal opportunities “ to go to college to create their best career paths in order to be successful and productive members of society. Therefore, he defines rationality as the best or most efficient way to accomplish goals. However, in reality, this rationalization of the education system is not equal because all people do not have the same opportunities and resources as others. While some individuals, such as upper-class people like rich students, benefit from structural privileges and social origins like a rationalized bureaucratic education system with a dominant race, language, or culture to which some other individuals such as poorer students do not have access to a good college education.  

In our modern education system Weber’s ideas of rationality and bureaucracies has created the wrong assumption that there is "one best system" for educating all students. This is not true is especially problematic within the perspective of a pluralistic American society, a globalized world, and advances in information technology. Despite the advantages the modern education system “offers, it the suffers from the irrationality of rationality.” Schools have become so McDonaldized through the process of rationalization that they have the same principles as a “fast food restaurant”. ( Rizer 1994 pg 55-56 ) As a result, now a bureaucracy, the classroom is an iron cage for students. Schools can be a dehumanizing place in which students are forced to learn and work only by the guidelines of professors with no individual agency to control how they complete their assignments. Moreover, modern education creates competition because students are competing with each other for the best grades, best colleges and the few best jobs out there. Presently, in the information age, this process of rationalization has made our modern education system an extremely rigid institution which does not allow students much room for intellectual freedom, agency, creativity, or the ability to think critically and interact with others. Therefore, the fact that students have to adhere to protocol in schools or get bad grades can actually decrease both productivity and efficiency. In addition American education is undergoing a revolution because of emerging technologies that have redefined school organizations as being both a virtual and physical learning environment. In the twenty-first century teaching, learning, and the educational system itself have not been beaten but transformed by forces that challenged and changed the traditional education system to our modern bureaucratic arrangement of schools with administrative hierarchies and centralized decision-making. This is the transformation that has made the traditional one room school house education system become a rationalized institution that is now based on outcomes of standardized testing rather than the wellbeing of students . 

Weber's fear was that formal rationality was becoming more dominant in modern, western society, with substantive rationality declining in importance. Weber notes that formal rationality developed as capitalistic forms of organizations emerged and its expansion is associated with this development. (Calhoun, 2012 pg 321). This formal rationality, and the organizational features associated with them, tends to crowd out other forms of rationality and limit the possibilities of creative social action. Education is a public service that is supposed be for all people in society. As a result the education system is a form of social action. This is because Weber defined action as being social when he said “by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals); it takes account of the behavior of others and is therefore oriented in its course” (Calhoun, 2012 pg 281) This means not all actions are social actions An action is only social when there is subjective meaning attached to it by the individual or individuals performing the action and the action takes into account how people will be affected by the it and its consequences for society. His main focus was to understand and analyze why people do what they do in different social situations. He explores an important shift within western societies from action guided by tradition, values and emotions, toward 'rational action'. “Rational actions are endeavors where the means to attain a particular goal are chosen through systematic reasoning.” (Weber 1969 Calhoun pg 281).Our educational system is performing rational social actions because one goal of the education system is to improve people’s social conditions. For example, all students at Hofstra can perform social action for the school because they should have Hofstra’s best interest at heart. In this view social action involves a direct appeal to values and principles.  

According to Weber there are four types of rational social actions: instrumentally Rational. ,Value-Rational Emotional or Effectual and Traditional or Habitual. Instrumentally rational behaviors are, determined by outside force such as expectations of society behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings. (Max Weber on Social Action and Protestant Ethic p 24-25). These expectations are used as "conditions" or "means" for the attainment of the actor's own rationally pursued and calculated ends. Max Weber on Social Action and Protestant Ethic p 24-25).Therefore , choosing where and when individuals get a college education is an instrumentally rational behavior because what colleges people go to is depended on many different factors such as your college major affordabibty location grades , in order for students to be able to make a calculated decision . A Value-Rational is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success. Max Weber on Social Action and Protestant Ethic p 24-25).As a result if people based getting an education simply on the fact that they have a conscious belief that an education is the only way to get salvation from hell and it is the only way to achieve the American Dream, than these beliefs would be value rational judgments for getting an education Ac. Emotional or Affectual. Affectual (especially emotional), determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states. d. Traditional or Habitual. Traditional, which is determined by ingrained habituation. Education is a tradition because many people go to college as a result of societal expectations or my “ parents went to college so I have to go college “ Education is a tradition passed down from one generation to the next because this is simply the way it is done in society. The modern education system can be seen as traditional behavior a instrumentally rational social action or a value rational social action,

 Weber’s broader form of rationality characterizes organizations, especially bureaucratic ones. As a result of this he believed that his form of rationality leads to "universally applied rules, laws and regulations that characterize formal rationality in the West ... particularly in the economic, legal, and scientific institutions, as well as in the bureaucratic form of domination." (Ritzier, p. 123). Rational-legal forms of authority such as the contemporary legal and judicial systems are examples of formal rationality. Weber believed that all “Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid”. (Calhoun 2012 P 325).Thus, Weber defined legal order as a system in which the rules are enacted and obeyed as legitimate because they are in line with other laws on how they can be enacted and how they should be obeyed. These rules are enforced by a government that monopolizes their enactment, while holding the legitimate use of physical force Max Weber broke down legitimate authority into three different types of societies. Traditional Authority, Rational-legal Authority, and Charismatic Authority. (Calhoun 2012 pg 314)_

1Traditional Authority- is the type of power that has been around longer, it is the type of power that is traditionally rooted in beliefs and the practices of society. Traditional authority is based on a tradition or custom that is followed by the traditional leaders. In traditional authority, status is a key concept of education and rational calculation. Traditional authority is based on the fact that things have always been done in a given way. Weber defined charismatic authority as "resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him." ( (Calhoun 2012 pg 323).

 Rational-legal authority (also known as rational authority, legal authority, rational domination, legal domination, or bureaucratic authority) is a form of leadership in which the authority of an organization or a ruling regime is largely tied to legal rationality, legal legitimacy and bureaucracy. (Calhoun 2012 pg323). Rational-legal authority is built on a structure of bureaucracy. Therefore the education system has rational-legal authority and it should give people the ability to gain rational-legal authority because it should give people opportunities to get their chosen career paths through promotion and they eventually retire. Some of the benefits of rational-legal authority are transportation, large-scale industry, mass communication and an income economy. Other outcomes of rational-legal authority are tendencies towards equal opportunity and a promotion of education. Rational-legal authority requires a logical and systematic approach to leadership. therefore our education system has rational legal authority because education is organization based on bureaucracy That has a system laws a hierarchy A division of labor and the education system is forced to follow a ciculcum of standardized tests provided by the government.    

    Max Weber's perspective seems most relevant to educational inequality because it does a good job of explaining why and how the education system has become rationalized institution from the traditional the one- room school house. The modern school system has become McDonaldized (ie rationalized) and is now a bureaucracy with a hierarchy of grades now has become rationalized to the point where the college administrators only care about the number of students enrolled in the class. There is no emphasis on the well-being of the student. This paper will discussed how the sociologist Max Weber would view modern education as a rationalized system through three aspects: bureaucracy, social action, and legitimate domination.

Works cited

CALLHOUN TEXTBOOK

 The goals of traditional education by van tomson 

Rizer George the mcdouldazation of society p 35

WEBER Max Weber on Social Action and Protestant Ethic p 24-25