The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (review)

Every once in a rare while, a book appears that causes us to reassess much of what we believe in. It questions our basic beliefs and suggests that the allegedly wise persons among us may have no undergarments and be blind in one eye. This is such a volume.

The Education Gospel is amiably written and forcefully argued. The authors are both chaired professors, one at Berkeley, the other at the University of Pennsylvania; they are both serious scholars of American schooling. What Grubb and Lazerson have produced collaboratively is a provocative contrarian tract about schools, colleges, job training, and politics.

The book takes aim at three fundamental issues. One is the American faith in schooling. This century-old mantra holds that schools and colleges are essential to voter-driven democracy, to personal growth and affluence, to greater social equality and harmony, and to a well-prepared labor force for the economy. The more schooling the better: free high schools for all, college opportunities for everyone who is able, adult education, job training, workshops and institutes, online courses. Abundant formal education is believed to rescue lost souls, produce more analytical and critical thinkers, help persons get better jobs, and contribute to the nation's health, taste, and cultural appreciation, as Howard Bowen maintained 30 years ago in his famous Investment in Learning (a book that is surprisingly absent from this publication's references). This credo Grubb and Lazerson label as "The Education Gospel," something preached more fiercely than ever now that, as some allege, we have entered a "knowledge society."

Grubb and Lazerson contend, however, that this faith in the individual, social, and economic benefits of education is "overblown." While they admit that there are private and public gains from schooling, they argue that the individual benefits have been "exaggerated," that "education now plays only a small role in major sectors of the economy," that "about 35 to 40 percent of those in the labor force . . . may have too much schooling for their jobs," and that "the status effects of schooling have declined." They advocate that "we all need to revise our claims for education" (pp. 171, 205, 167, 263).

The second issue they take on is what they contend is the growing vocationalism of America's high schools and colleges. High schools, they write, have become "irreversibly vocational" and "have ceased to be a place for any serious endeavor" except for those few students who aspire to selective colleges. Indeed, high schools are little more than "warehouses" to hold the young. Moreover, secondary schools seldom connect with adult life outside the schools, do not train students for contemporary work, and neglect civic and moral values. Colleges and universities have also become "vocationalized," with less and less liberal learning, even in the 200 or so self-proclaimed liberal arts colleges. As for the elite research universities, they are merely a higher form of vocationalism, preparing students for professional jobs in such fields as medicine, film making, computer engineering, law, and teaching at universities. Actually, "the American approach to vocationalism now emphasizes postsecondary over secondary education" (p. 132).

Grubb and Lazerson admit that "any effort to de-vocationalize schools would be politically inconceivable." But they point out that "each of the modernized occupations includes a great deal of academic content in math, sciences, reading, and writing" (p. 197), so they recommend that academic content in career training should increase. And schools and colleges must not forget to "debate and define and promote the common good."

Their third issue is less transparent but appears throughout the book. Grubb and Lazerson believe that the United States has become a society and has elected governments that increasingly neglect the poor and troubled. To them, the current system of U.S. higher education is devoted to overschooling and undereducating, tracking the abilities of students, and seriously underinvesting in families of poverty. The authors are passionate egalitarians, the kind who...