Review: Education and the Cult of Efficiency by Raymond E. Callahan

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Raymond E. Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency was written in the mid-20th century about the early 20th century and yet, still feels so relevant and palpable today. Callahan is focused on K–12 education, but its relevance to higher ed feels just as potent.

Callahan traces a rich history of efficiency springing out of Taylorism and making its way into public education, particularly through administrators and the professionalization of administration. Superintendents increasingly became a distinct class of professional administrators rather than teachers who happened to become administrators. And that class was deeply informed by the discourse of efficiency. The result is efficiency deeply entrenched at the administrative level of public education for generations (over 100 years now).

Callahan is capable of empathizing with their situation. These were public positions, accountable to communities increasingly asking schools to demonstrate that they were using public money efficiently. But some administrators also leaned into this with real enthusiasm. They celebrated supposed wins that don't really feel like wins. They found increasingly elaborate ways to produce reports and numbers that demonstrated efficiency without necessarily demonstrating actual learning.

That tension might feel quite familiar. We still talk about education through budgets, assessments, compensation, inputs and outputs, administrative “bloat,” and especially return on investment. And there are legitimate reasons for some of that. Education costs people a lot of money. Public institutions should be accountable for public dollars. I don't know that there is some simple alternative where we just stop thinking about costs.

But education is not clear. It is not straightforward. It is messy.

Callahan shows what can happen when efficiency becomes the easiest and therefore most important metric. One solution is increasing class sizes. Another is asking more of educators who often aren't compensated particularly well (that good ole vocational awe). Resources disappear while more gets thrown onto teachers' plates. The pursuit of efficiency becomes a continual approach to de-skilling, making mentally laborious work harder and more tedious.

It also changes what education can offer. Callahan discusses languages such as Latin and Greek disappearing because classes didn't fill and therefore were not effecient. The important thing becomes full classes rather than full opportunity for intellectual pursuit. That's its own kind of harm because it quietly changes what we think education is supposed to be. Again, something we see time and again in higher education as small departments are much more likely to be closed.

Reading Callahan made me more suspicious of measurement in education, particularly because he shows that these tendencies have been with us for well over a century. It brought to mind C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. There is a similar problem of value capture: we measure something that represents another thing, a proxy for what we're actually trying to get at, and eventually the measurement becomes a trap that determines how we go about doing things.

There is also a larger political problem here. Public education is necessary for maintaining a democratic society, and democracy requires people to support things from which they may not individually or immediately benefit. Taxes supporting somebody else's education are part of maintaining the society we all participate in. That sits uneasily beside the rugged individualism that developed alongside the efficiency movement Callahan documents: the Horatio Alger books, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, education understood primarily in terms of individual advancement and return.

None of this left me particularly inspired. Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1964) is older than I am by 15 years, and Callahan himself is writing about events that were already decades old. Reading it now feels like standing at another point along the same timeline and realizing that many of these problems haven't changed. In some ways, they've gotten worse.

And that makes the book feel especially relevant to AI.  Reading Callahan now, I can't help wondering what would have happened if AI had been available to these efficiency-minded administrators in the early 1900s. Would they have tried to bypass teachers altogether?

That question connects Callahan for me to Audrey Watters’ Teaching Machines. I worry about AI being offered as an opportunity to replace or undermine teachers because doing so requires us to pretend that content, discipline, relationship, and learning can all be parceled out into distinct things. Let AI handle the content. Hire somebody else to be relational. But that misses the way disciplinary expertise shapes the relationship and the learning itself: the ways of thinking within a discipline rather than simply possessing its content.

Meanwhile, higher education is creating undergraduate and graduate programs around AI, producing people who will presumably step into professional roles tasked with making institutions more “efficient” through these tools. Pair that with an already strong discourse against public education and its costs, and the possibilities get dangerous.  Callahan's work begins to look less like history and more like a playbook.

Not because today's administrators are necessarily reading him, but because the logic he describes is still here: identify expensive skilled labor, break it into measurable pieces, find efficiencies, and demonstrate success through numbers. AI gives us an extraordinarily powerful new tool for doing exactly that.

More than a century after the story Callahan tells begins, I'm not convinced we've figured out how to escape the cult of efficiency. I'm not even sure we fully recognize how deeply embedded in education it already is.

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