At a time when debates about schooling too often focus narrowly on jobs and standardized test scores,
The Education Gospel is a refreshing and illuminating attempt to place issues of educational policy and practice in a broader framework of social institutions and social values.
--Michael McPherson, President, The Spencer Foundation (20041203)
This is a stunning book, and I hope that educators and policy makers of all stripes read it. Grubb and Lazerson's sweep, scope, and analytic prowess are unparalleled; every chapter sparks fresh thought about tough, old problems.
--Mike Rose, Professor, UCLA, Graduate School of Education, author of "Possible Lives" and "The Mind at Work" (20051001)
A lively and thoughtful inquiry into excessive vocationalism in American education. Grubb and Lazerson bring to light some truths that undermine the myths of education's magic power, and make a cogent case for educational and social reform.
--David Tyack, author of
Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse SocietyNorton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson provide a richly nuanced historical analysis of how the American faith in education's economic power has vastly expanded educational opportunity and secured public support for public schooling, but at the expense of narrowed educational goals and increased social differences. Their conclusion from this analysis is compelling--that we need to preserve beneficial elements of the education gospel, while shifting more responsibility for social equity to the political realm where it belongs.
--David Labaree, Stanford University School of Education
Grubb and Lazerson have given us a welcome antidote to the excesses and exaggerations of many of the writers and policy analysts who talk about imperatives of training the workforce for a global technological society.
--Derek Bok, President Emeritus and Research Professor, Harvard University
Grubb and Lazerson have written a very important book; the best thing I have ever read on vocational and professional education in America. This volume provides a framework for understanding the national education debate of the past two decades.
--Arthur Levine, President, Teachers College, Columbia University
As Americans debate the sources of growing inequality and possible cures this provocative and original book challenges conventional wisdom. Grubb and Lazerson offer fresh and important perspectives on the role of education in society and in the economy.
--Paul Osterman, MIT Sloan School of Management
The Education Gospel argues compellingly that for the last hundred years America has relied too heavily on education to solve profound social problems and, in so doing, has reduced the power of education to contribute to the strengthening of our democracy. The authors offer intriguing suggestions for creating an education system that would better serve our society and its people.
--Richard Murnane, Harvard Graduate School of Education
This book provocatively challenges conventional thinking about the roles of schools and colleges by making a persuasive case that education must be more than an instrument of the economy in order to be a foundation for democracy.
--Richard Chait, Harvard Graduate School of Education
This is a major work that is balanced, analytical, [and] accessible.
--Michael Duffy (
Times Educational Supplement )
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...What Grubb and Lazerson have produced collaboratively is a provocative contrarian tract about schools, colleges, job training, and politics...This book is a powerful and salutary assault on educational evangelism, and a compassionate plea that meritocracy may have some new requirements for social justice.
--George Keller (
Review of Higher Education )
Do you want your children to succeed? Do you want to reduce poverty and to create a good society? Do you want the U.S. to be competitive internationally, and to meet the challenges of the Knowledge Revolution? Then education must be the answer. Or is it? This critical history of the Education Gospel reveals the allure-and the fallacy-of the longstanding American faith that more schooling for more people, to develop occupational skills, is the solution to virtually all social and economic problems. Grubb and Lazerson show how all levels of education were transformed over the twentieth century into preparation for vocations and professions. As a result high schools, colleges, universities, short-term job training, and other forms of "life-long learning" expanded enormously. But Grubb and Lazerson argue that the promises of the Education Gospel and the changes of the Knowledge Revolution are exaggerated. The abilities developed in schooling and the competencies required at work are often mismatched. At least a third of all Americans are already over-educated for the jobs they hold, and little more than 30 percent of jobs in the coming decade will require some college- hardly justifying College for All. The drive for personal advancement and workforce preparation has also squeezed out civic education-not to mention learning for its own sake. Worst of all, Grubb and Lazerson show, the vocational focus of schooling has reinforced social inequality. The challenges over the next century are to create forms of education incorporating both occupational and civic goals, and to reverse the preoccupation with narrow work skills, empty credentialism, and schooling as the only source of salvation. W. Norton Grubb is the David Gardner Chair of Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. Marvin Lazerson is the Howard P. and Judith R. Berkowitz Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
