Western Society in Transition by Volker Bornschier

Author:Volker Bornschier [Bornschier, Volker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781351293112
Google: 2k8PEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-24T17:39:22+00:00

Frustrating Competition?

Better personal formal education is only an advantage as long as others do not follow, otherwise additional educational investments are needed to keep the advantage, as Fred Hirsch points out, “If everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees better” (1976: 5). The rapidly increasing population of graduates with higher education has thus had a paradoxical result. Under the pressure of competition, formal education has been converted from a means of ascent into a necessary defence against social decline, which has also decisively affected the climate within educational institutions. They increasingly become arenas of selection prior to entry into the labor market, characterized by performance pressure and “frustration.” Many take an interest in the institution because of its ability to secure status and not because of its content.

According to the assessment of many observers, the educational expansion of this century has neither fulfilled the wish to preserve status nor the exaggerated hope for fundamental change in social opportunities. Ulrich Beck et al. address the resulting frustrations: “During the 1960s there was great hope that educational expansion would bring about societal changes in the direction of diminishing social inequalities. This optimism was followed by disillusion during the 1970s and is about to change into indifference and resignation at the beginning of the 1980s” (1980: 7). If this assessment is true as an empirical observation resignation is not what results.

It is true that euphoria about education collapsed at the peak of the recent wave and that it has been succeeded by a certain resignation ever since. Heiner Meulemann (1983: 781) has illustrated the change of mood in Germany with time series data. The question: “Does everybody in our country nowadays have a chance to be educated according to their talents and abilities?”, was answered in an affirmative way by 68 percent of the population in 1958. Until 1963, the peak of the previous societal model, affirmative answers increased to 74 percent. However, during the downswing phase of the societal model they dropped to 59 percent in 1979. This marked decrease in popular assent of 15 percent between 1963 and 1979 occurred despite the fact that the chances of attending higher schools or universities doubled and tripled, respectively, between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s respectively (Meulemann 1983).

With respect to education, Fred Hirsch’s use of the catch-phrase “If everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees better” is inappropriate because it is one-sided. If everyone has one additional year of schooling, nobody may reap an advantage in an instrumental sense, yet without doubt, the base of equal opportunities has been extended. Thus, education can also help toward understanding the world (enlightenment) and towards self-fulfillment, particularly if schools are not simply and closely directed towards the general status and occupational systems. Education as enlightenment and enjoyment, as a source of fulfillment, as a key to more sophisticated cultural and spiritual satisfactions and as the basis for the ability to criticize may not be its fundamental function but is still an important outcome of educational expansion. The

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