How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education
By David F. Labaree (Yale University Press, 1999).
When a book finds permanent lodging in your head, it’s often because the author introduces you to new ways of understanding the world in all its contradictions. At least that’s the case for me, and David Labaree is just such an author. He contemplates complex issues we take for granted as part of everyday life and then writes cogent analyses that illuminate the constituent parts of the problem.
While he has done this repeatedly, his 1999 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, stands out for me in its analytical heft. Despite the snarky title, the key thesis of the book is not so much about an individual’s learning (or lack thereof) as it is about schooling’s inherent contradictions. The key chapter points to the pathologies of a system that tries to accommodate both collective and individual purposes for schools. But rather than making just another simplistic “public-good, private-bad” (or “private-good, public-bad”) argument, Labaree offers a much more nuanced and intelligent view, showing, for instance, that private purposes for education are themselves contradictory. That is, the imperative for a school system that efficiently sorts students to match employment demands conflicts with the mobility goal where individuals (or their families) seek additional opportunities and advantages for themselves. And these collide with the equality impulse for everyone to have a fair shake regardless of their parents’ or future employers’ ambitions and needs. As an example, when affluent parents push for their child to be admitted to a competitive arts program created for underrepresented children, they may be looking out for their own child’s best interests, but, in doing so, may also crowd out more deserving kids, or lead to an over-supply of such graduates, funded by the taxpayers.
These mutually contradictory goals, which Labaree calls social efficiency, social mobility, and democratic equality, represent conflicting constituencies with different aims for schools. But rather than cheer for one aim and denigrate others, Labaree focuses our attention on the validity of each and shows us how trying to achieve them all will always mean schools are “failing” some stakeholders.
Christopher Lubienski’s latest for Kappan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Lubienski
Christopher Lubienski is a professor of education leadership at Indiana University, Bloomington, and was previously on the board of a faith-based school in Chicago. He is a co-editor of The Rise of External Actors in Education.
