Scripted Bodies by Kenneth J. Saltman

Author:Kenneth J. Saltman [Saltman, Kenneth J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Education
ISBN: 9781317199328
Google: v0dnDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-07-28T06:03:19+00:00

The New New Taylorism:13 Controlling the Body

In the last fifteen years, critical education scholars have pointed out how the rise of high stakes standardized testing represents a new Taylorism in education. Taylorism, or scientific management, was launched at the start of the twentieth century by Frederick Taylor, who sought to introduce a “science” of business management. His primary aim was to create labor efficiencies by eradicating waste in the labor process. Taylor saw management’s role in production as developing and actively implementing scientific programs of time and movement efficiency. Taylorism calls for breaking down the work process into the fewest possible subtasks to decrease the time, movement, and energy used by the worker. Taylor preached the universal virtue of efficiencies created by disciplining workers to carry more pig iron or lay more bricks in a day—right up to the point of physical failure. While the owner of the industry benefitted from producing more in the same time, Taylor falsely believed that this meant that the worker earned more in the same time. In fact, the work speed ups that Taylor promoted allowed more work to be extracted from a given worker for the same labor cost while creating greater competition among workers and driving wages down.

Taylor believed that workers were mentally incapable of knowing how to manage themselves through the “scientific” approach. Workers should be treated as dumb animals or machines. Taylor’s scientific management formed the basis of modern business education. It also, more pertinent to our purposes, was imported into education in the early twentieth century by Franklin Bobbitt and others applying a factory production model to schooling.14 Taylorism modeled the time and space of school on the factory, and treated knowledge and curriculum as the domain of specialized expert managers and teachers as delivery agents aiming for efficiency, framing students as the “raw materials” of the production process.15 In short, as critical education scholars in the 1970s and 1980s pointed out, Taylorism participated in instituting a hidden curriculum of capitalism within a public system. As E. Wayne Ross contends, while the modern workplace has moved on to flexible specialization and lean production, not to mention a service-based rather than industrial factory economy, the US school is still rooted firmly in the factory model.16

Critical education scholars in the 1970s and 1980s took aim at the legacy of Taylorism or scientific management as part of a broader left criticism of the ways that public schooling was implicated in reproducing class and cultural hierarchy, and undermining the development of politically engaged forms of civic education. In this discourse, critical scholars such as Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz highlighted how scientific management as a cult of efficiency was also involved in actively denying the politics of schooling and curriculum.17 Today, this insight could not be more relevant as biometric education and other approaches to controlling student and teacher bodies impose a political agenda for schooling under the guise of disinterested objectivity and neutrality.

Following the early 2000s launch of No Child Left Behind

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