How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education

Abstract

How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, by David Labaree. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 328 PP. $35.00 David Labaree adds to a very large body of literature criticizes American schooling. In How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning he describes relationship and contradictions between social mobility (private good), social efficiency, and democratic equality (public good). His thesis is pursuit of credentials (grades, degrees, etc.), as private good, has come to dominate and actually hinder students from acquiring knowledge and learning skills would make them better citizens and better contributers to capitalist economy. Labaree follows earlier credential theorists, Boudon (1974) Collins (1979) and Brown (1995), adding information from his historical case study of an American high school. His are clear and cogent, but for readers who anticipate new solutions to education's crisis there may be disappointment. In final chapter, Labaree simply states: Social mobility, I conclude, needs to be balanced by democratic equality and social efficiency, or else we wi ll continue to reproduce an educational system is mired in consumerism and credentialism. The formula by which such a balance is to be achieved is not provided by Labaree. To be sure, credentialist theory has much to offer in describing state of professionalism in American schooling today, and Labaree lays out its major themes clearly and concisely in his first chapter. In his next three chapters he focuses upon the sorting and selecting of students within schools by examining historical roots, consequences, and implications of process. This is followed by an analysis of education stratification from a market perspective. From this perspective, processes of selection and stratification characterize education are result not simply of societal needs but of individual demands, as individual consumers pursue symbolic advantages will enhance their competitive position. The logic governs these processes is of market. Labaree states arguments most often found in literature [ldots] draw on either human capital theory or social reproduction theory, a practice he finds to be inadequate. But this is an unnecessary simplification of a large body of literature has much to offer as well as to reject. Though he is rightly concerned about slight of individual agency, Labaree's market individualism takes other extreme, which is equally insufficient as an approach aimed at describing root causes of education's woes. Consistent with liberalism, Labaree accepts contradiction between corporate and democratic values as necessary and wants to promote both. That corporate capitalism undermines both political and educational democracy is well documented (e.g., Barrow, 1990; Callahan, 1962; Hollinger, 1996; Lustig, 1982; Ophuls, 1997; Weinstein, 1968). Rather than attempting to balance conflicting goals by putting social needs above personal desires, a better solution is to make two identical (Benedict, 1992). But Labaree gives no credence to possibility of a democratic economic system meets, as Bowles and Gintis (1992) phrase it, the demanding criteria of fostering fundamental fairness, dignity of human person, and enhanced social participation (p. 3). A major contention of Labaree is that central problems with education in United States are not pedagogical or organizational or social or cultural in nature but are fundamentally political. Labaree claims a tie to Weber, but does not seem to appreciate class, status, and party have to be grasped as phenomena of distribution of power (Giddens, 1982). Thus, completely absent is any discussion of influence of corporate power on schooling in particular and society as a whole (e. …