Why do some societies try to turn education into a commodity, while others recognize it as a necessary social good? In this interview, Bob Kuttner speaks with Cathie Martin, professor of political science at Boston University and one of the leading U.S. students of Danish social democracy. In her latest book, Education for All?, Martin compares the long history and cultural roots of the Danish and the Anglo-Saxon approaches to education. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.
Robert Kuttner: Cathie Martin, you and I first met about 20 years ago, when I was doing some research and writing about Scandinavia, particularly about Denmark, and I turned to you as a real expert who knew a lot more than I did. I’m intrigued that you’ve written a new book whose main title is Education for All?, where your cases in point are Denmark and the U.K. But your deeper subject is the roots of a neoliberal versus a more social view of education.
So I want to ask you about the book and the broader subject. One thing that really stood out for me, as someone who knows a little bit about Denmark, is that the roots of Danish social democracy in most standard accounts are usually dated to the Compromise of 1899, where the LO, the union confederation, agrees to stop beating up on the companies, and the employers in turn agree to recognize the unions.
But in your book, you date a social view of education for all almost a century before that, to 1814. And that’s very much a part of a more social view of how the society and the economy works. So how did that happen? And what are other roots of Danish social democracy?
Cathie Martin: Thanks for asking that question. Generally we talk about social democracy in terms of equality, and certainly these countries have very high regard for equality. But there’s also a deeper tradition of a great regard for society and the need for social investment. The origins of these ideas go back very far indeed.
I start around 1700, looking at literature in Denmark and Britain. In Denmark, you already see a high regard for society in the literature of the 18th century. At the end of the 18th century, the crown prince and his advisers stage a coup against a schizophrenic king, and after the coup is successful, they engage in land reform, education reform, and social welfare reform. They create big commissions on these different aspects of social life, and they firmly believe that land reform is necessary to elevate Denmark in global economic terms as well as on the world stage. Politically, they believe the only way to get durable land reform is to do school reform.
School reform does a few things for them. First of all, they believe it’s absolutely necessary for farmers. At this time, Denmark has serfs and they want to create a new class of middle-class farmers. They believe these farmers need to be fully educated in order to implement these new agricultural technologies associated with land reform. Even more important, they believe that every individual needs to make a contribution to society, and that requires providing all persons with adequate education. So this is really the antithesis of class-bound, neoliberal Britain.
Land reform, British style, is really the enclosure movement, which made the peasants worse off. The other liberal, pro-market, pro-capitalist so-called reforms of the 1830s were intended to force people who have been pushed off the land to take factory jobs at the lowest possible wage. Later on, Maggie Thatcher famously, or infamously, says there’s no such thing as society; there’s only the market. So you couldn’t have two more antithetical cases than the U.K. and Denmark.
Another key point in your book is that Britain only gets around to creating a rather meager system of state schools late in the 19th century. So-called public schools are not public at all. They’re private, for the elite. So, as you suggest, the modern histories of Danish and Scandinavian social democracy, and of British neoliberalism and British social failure, are hundreds of years old, as found in these literary and social histories.
Britain and Denmark have completely different ideas about the working class. For Denmark, the working class is part of the solution. For Britain, it’s part of the problem. The irony is that in the latter part of the 18th century, the world admired British workers because they tended to be higher-skilled, and they had a fair amount of freedom at that time. The Danes went and observed Britain, and they wanted to create workers from their serfs who had more of the attributes of British workers.
But this was a case of changing places, if you will. In the British case, education was not a way of contributing to society. It was to produce a perfect, self-developed individual, and especially an upper-class individual. You get these norms of individualism in narratives in British literature and also philosophy. So you have John Stuart Mill talking about how education’s goal is to perfect the individual, and he talks about his own education. Matthew Arnold, one of the leading figures in this period, also feels strongly that education is for perfecting the individual, not society.
When I say that workers were considered part of the problem, I’m referring to concerns about a culture of poverty, which was a huge trope in the 18th and 19th centuries, long before we think about it in the 20th century. The conclusion is not to educate the working class. You just want to minimize their pain. The great Victorian novelists talk in agonizing terms about poverty; and they feel very sorry, especially for women and children. But they don’t ever think about what lack of working-class education does to detract from society, and how education could actually help workers make such a contribution. So these are very deep roots indeed.
Let’s bring in the United States of America, which was the very first country with tax-supported public education, at least in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The South, where you had slaves, is a whole other story, but at least in the free states, and in particular in Massachusetts—and this is more than a century before the American Revolution—these settlers have a different view of the relationship between education and prosperity and the good society.
The good settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony decide that it’s a good idea to have free public education. The United States is also an early adopter or imitator of the German kindergarten system in the late 19th century, at least in the Northern states. We have had a pretty decent system of universal public education (for white people). And yet we’ve gone from there to a neoliberal version of education as more and more of a commodity, with things like vouchers that are really a form of commodified education.
Another part of this Anglo tradition of education is a one-size-fits-all mentality, which, of course, is very much popular in the United States today. To educate the individual, the Anglo tradition paradoxically suggests that you need a fixed curriculum. Read a certain number of great books, and that will help you evolve to your fullest self.
Denmark has been more interested in experiential learning as well as vocational training. And so there’s a lot more education for manual workers. In Denmark, they make a very strong commitment to the working class when they finally pass a Secondary Education Act in the early 20th century. Around the same time, Britain passes one, but in Britain it’s very much focused on the humanities.
In Denmark, they have many academic tracks, but they also have a very strong vocational track. As a result, Danish workers become much better educated than their British colleagues. Over the course of the 20th century, a big reason for Danish equality is that it lifts the skill level and the wage level of Danish workers.
I think the United States is a little different from Britain in several ways. First of all, the United States was rebelling against the British Crown and the British class system. You have a lot of second and third sons who settled in America. They reject class. So a lot of talk about equality is built into American dialogue from an early period on, especially in the North settled by Puritans. They tend to be more collective in their thinking.
At the same time, America is also deeply committed to this idea of “one size fits all.” You see this in curriculum theory in the thinking of scholars in the 19th century. In 1926, there was a huge fight over secondary education. This is when Congress passed the 1926 High School Act, which established a uniform education track for secondary education and meant that all students were given the same educational curriculum from first through 12th grades.
Some people, including a lot of industrialists in the Northeast, wanted vocational training systems as part of secondary education. But a rather interesting coalition of Southern racists, who didn’t want to skill African Americans, and Northern Progressives, who worried that vocational training would create a second-class education system for workers, rejected vocational training. And we got rid of most of it at that time. That was a huge loss to education, because some kids learn better through learning-by-doing and acquiring vocational skills.
You asked about the rise of neoliberalism. Actually, neoliberal ideas have had a big impact across the advanced industrialized world. In Britain, Thatcher’s Education Act of 1988 set off the neoliberal formula by demanding a more standardized curriculum for all students, imposing more national standards for quality, linking funding to students’ test scores, and introducing incentives for competition among schools with vouchers for private schools. In America, we espoused similar ideas with “No Child Left Behind.” The Danes also had a version of that. But in Denmark, it was always tempered by this deeper cultural understanding that you had to have more varied courses for kids who learn differently.
In general, what’s happened today in education is that these neoliberal ideas have been mobilized to bolster the class attack on workers. The working class in America was actually not doing badly between the New Deal and around 1973. But they’ve been beaten back. And these neoliberal ideas have been used to beat workers back. What’s happening now is that people are starting to realize the limits of educational reforms along neoliberal lines. They don’t like privatization as much as they used to. They recognize the need for technical schools. But nevertheless, I think some fundamental class conflict underlies these debates.
Vocational-technical education has been the stepchild of American education. Community colleges, which are wonderful institutions to help working-class people get good technical jobs, are chronically underfunded. At the high school level, the view has been that the voc-tech track is for the dumb kids, instead of viewing it as an avenue of upward mobility. Do you think, with the disillusionment with high-stakes testing and the fact that charter schools and voucher schools are being exposed as less than the panacea that their proponents thought they would be, are you seeing an upsurge of interest in more Danish-style active labor market policy, including vocational and technical training?
Absolutely. There’s been a big resurgence in the last 20 years of an interest in technical high schools. And, interestingly enough, a lot of this has been happening in the South, where you have many foreign companies coming into places like South Carolina, and these states are trying to improve their human capital by putting resources into vocational training. I find it quite fascinating that the progressive view in Denmark is more likely to be held by conservatives in America.
Are we asking too much of schools? There’s a line I often quote from Christopher Jencks’s classic book, Inequality, published in 1972. Sandy Jencks’s point in that book is that we expect schools to make up for all of the other sources of inequality in society. When you have an inner-city school that has kids who start out with two and a half strikes against them, and the inner-city school doesn’t work miracles, we blame the school.
Jencks says very delicately that the solution is “what other countries call socialism.” So my question is, how much can we reasonably expect of schools if the goal is greater equality both of opportunity and of result? And how much do schools need to piggyback on other efforts to increase social and economic equality, which of course is what Scandinavian social democracy does?
First of all, I completely agree with Sandy and your point that inequality underlies a lot of these problems. I think, however, that you have an added problem with education: Anglo cultural norms reinforce the expectation that all students, if they just try hard, can perform in a similar way in the same kinds of educational programs. So you have really two kinds of inequalities. You have an inequality of class and race, and you also have an inequality of abilities and capacities and learning styles, and sometimes those overlap, but sometimes they don’t.
In America, we have thought about inequalities of class and race, and we’ve struggled to make education available to working-class kids or kids from underrepresented minorities. And I’m a big fan of affirmative action. But we have not thought enough about the kids that don’t have the kind of capacities to thrive with a more academic education.
What about the kids who learn differently? What are we doing for them? Until we start opening up educational opportunities for people who need a different kind of education, I don’t think we’re going to accomplish very much. I think one of the reasons why Americans of all political persuasions feel so under siege and disillusioned with the country is that there are a lot of young people out there who don’t feel like academic winners, and they feel that the academic winners make disparaging comments about them. When you hear words like “flyover” states and the “deplorables,” that’s not how we should talk about each other. So I really would like everyone to feel appreciated the way that Danes try to make everybody appreciated.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is how creeping neoliberalism has affected even Scandinavia. Maybe that’s truer in Sweden than it is in Denmark. Several governments ago, the Social Democratic Party decided that it would be smart to be a little more neoliberal. They introduced an educational reform where any local group of parents or any other local group could get together and start an alternative school and get money from the state.
This sounded almost like the radical demands for local control of the 1960s. But it was partly captured by hedge funds based in other countries. So now you have situations in parts of Sweden where an alternative school is run by some hedge fund not even based in Sweden, and it attracts the easy kids. The affluent kids get money from the state and that money is diverted from the state system, which is left with the hard-to-educate children. It’s very analogous to the problem with voucher schools and charter schools.
I think I wrote a story about this at least ten years ago. I don’t know if they fixed that, or if that’s gotten worse. Maybe you do. But it’s an example of creeping neoliberalism afflicting even social democrats, with predictable results. So I have a two-part question: Have you followed this trend? And, secondly, are the Danes somewhat more resistant to neoliberalism in sheep’s clothing?
The answer is yes, and yes. Sweden is really different from Norway and Denmark in many respects, and the Swedes have gone much farther down the neoliberal route than the other Nordic countries. Denmark does have a long history dating from the early 19th century of allowing communities to form their own schools. They did this because it was a way of expanding access. But it was very much a democratic bottom-up process rather than a top-down process, and a completely different animal. There has been a history of local control in Denmark, and the idea is that teachers and local communities should have the autonomy to teach their students what they need.
I have a really hard time understanding what’s going on in Sweden. But part of the reason is that the Social Democratic Party ruled without coalition partners for many years and took a different trajectory than in Denmark, Norway, and Finland, which developed policies with coalition governments and broad party support. Denmark recently had a big school reform which rejected many neoliberal ideas, and these ideas never flourished as much in Denmark as they did in other countries. Denmark freaked out after their 2001 PISA scores [worldwide standardized test scores], and adopted some reforms, but they were very ambivalent about these. With the latest reform this fall, Denmark has moved away from neoliberal ideas to a more traditionally Danish approach.
Aren’t the PISA scores about more traditional academic subjects? How did that affect voc-tech?
PISA scores typically are calculated in the last year of folk school, before Danish children move into upper secondary programs. Danish policymakers continued to offer vocational training programs, but they adopted neoliberal ideas about more standards, even if they did not go as far down this path as Britain did. At the same time, many Danish students enrolled in academic rather than vocational programs, because they wanted to be suitably trained for the so-called knowledge society. Vocational programs have been receding in popularity, partly due to the views of students and their parents, and partly due to deindustrialization. But Danes are trying to engineer a resurgence of these programs.
To conclude, are you optimistic that we’re going to move down this trajectory of using vocational and technical education to pay more attention to the needs of working-class people?
I’m not sure I’m optimistic about anything. But assuming that we remain a democracy, I’d say there is definitely more appreciation for these programs. And I just want to say one more thing about the book. A lot of the book is about authors and their contributions to education struggles at different critical junctures of reform. I read a lot of novels and I analyze these large bodies of literature in Britain and Denmark with computational text analyses. I have detailed charts and figures that show that the percentage of Danish words about workers and education are much larger than the percentage of British words. And this goes way back. And so I talk about the repeating cultural narratives that get passed down from one century to the next, and how these narratives help to bolster alternative approaches to education.
I do not see the impact of narratives as cultural determinism, because it’s not. Rather, these narratives and motifs are picked up and manipulated in political struggles. But nevertheless, there’s a kind of cultural constraint that pushes people in each country in a certain direction. And I think what’s encouraging about America is that we do have some norms of collectivism more than Britain. We do have some norms of wanting equality and a rejection of the class system.
So I think American public opinion is becoming more amenable to this kind of pluralist education system, where more people would benefit from education tailored to their interests and capacities and would be able to contribute to society. In that way, I’m rather optimistic. I am more pessimistic about whether we’re even going to have a society in 10 or 15 years. But I do think there’s some cause for hope.
That’s wonderful. This is why we study literature, as well as economics and political science. I wish you luck with your book, Education for All: Literature, Culture and Education Development in Britain and Denmark. Thank you so much for this conversation.
