Abstract
This article looks at the concept of education for human capital from its origins in the US and Britain as part of a neo-colonial effort, to its current role in dominating educational discourse across Asia. It argues that although there is nothing wrong with promoting education for career success, this should not be the only lens through which we view schooling.
Keywords
“Hong Kong needs educated people—more educated people to hone that most treasured of artifacts, ‘the competitive edge’” (Ming, 2014) This quote from an e-paper focusing on Hong Kong, published by China Daily Asia, is an example of how natural the association between education and economic competition has become across Asia. Across the region, education is being promoted, not as a human right, but as an “investment” in creating and maintaining a competitive edge in international economic competition. In addition, national aggregate scores on international comparison tests such as the PISA and the TIMMS are being used as surrogates for returns on those investments. In other words, if students from a particular Asian country are doing well on these international tests, it is seen as evidence that the country’s “investment” in its educational system is paying off. According to a recent ranking of scores on the PISA international test in math and science, five out of the top-five scoring countries are in East Asia (Coughlan, 2015). It appears, first, that Asian educational systems are dominating the world, and, second, that scoring well on international tests is natural to Asian countries. In many ways that is a good thing, but is there another side to this focus on education and financial gain?
Rationale for article
In this paper, I do not argue that high standards in education are unimportant, that it is useless to have a highly educated population, or that education cannot improve life chances. In fact, I believe that there is a lot of truth to all of the above. I do, however, want to point out a few problems with understanding education mainly (or in some cases exclusively) as a means of building capital, or, in other words, as an engine for economic growth, as well as for the assumption that scores on international comparison tests are evidence that investments in education are “paying off.”
Human capital theory is based on, and connected to, a great deal of research in macro-economics and related fields, and there have been a lot of convincing arguments that schooling, when properly planned, can increase economic prospects both on the individual and the societal level (Becker, 1962, 2013; Géza, 1966; Harbison and Meyers, 1964; Martin et al., 2013; Mincey, 1956; Schultz, 1963). There has also been a fair amount of critique of human capital theory from the standpoint of Marxist theory (Bowles and Gintis, 1975), of human resource development (McLean and Kuo, 2014), and from a more general social perspective (Bouchard, 2008; Krul, 2010; Tan, 2014). Although this debate is extremely interesting, and highly relevant to education, I do not want to engage here in a discussion of the truth or falsehood, theoretical correctness or incorrectness of human capital theory. While acknowledging that it is an important way of understanding education, and that it has been intensively researched, I would like to look at it from a different perspective—as a metaphor for understanding the role of human capital formation in the way we understand and justify schooling. In its essence, schooling is a way of raising young people to be future members of society. Without arguing whether schooling is, or is not, an engine driving economic success, I would like to ask whether raising young people as future workers is the main or only way we want to understand the education of young people, as well as whether preparing young people for a certain limited set of professions (for example, the “STEM” professions and business) gives us the type of society we most desire. Whether or not planned human capital development through schooling gives nations an economic edge—and this point is still being debated, are children as the drivers of a future economy the main or only way we want to understand childhood? I look at human capital theory not merely as a set of testable formulas, but also on a more philosophical level as a metaphor for understanding childhood. The point I make here is that theories, including rigorously researched theories, often represent two levels of thinking. The first level is an empirical framework. The second is as a metaphor that helps us perceive and understand a particular topic or aspect of life. Metaphorical theories can shape the way we understand particular aspects of reality. Thus, I would ask the following question: regardless of whether or not particular types of schooling increase economic prosperity, is money, or capital, the main way in which we want to understand the lives of young people?
Theoretical orientation
I am basing my arguments on two assumptions, one drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, and the second coming from the traditions of metaphor theory. The first assumption is that language is power (Foucault, 1980). That is, it is impossible to separate the way we use language to understand a situation, and the “real-world” consequences of those understandings. We tend to view “truth” as something stable and neutral—as something that belongs to everyone and that has no political implications or consequences. In contrast, for Foucault, truth inhabits a specific time, and a specific location, and it always has consequences of power. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980: 131)
While Foucault gives us a general framework for understanding truth and power, the workings of societally constructed reality can be seen on a more specific level by using metaphor theory. While encompassing only part of what Foucault means when he writes about truth and discourse, looking at metaphor offers us a concrete and fine-grained method of seeing the specific ways that language shapes and constrains reality. Conceptual metaphor theory asserts that much of our abstract thought, including what we see as true or false, right or wrong, comes from the ways in which we use language. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that abstract qualities such as goodness or appropriateness are hard for people to understand. Instead, we process abstractions by comparing them with something concrete, such as the idea of investment, or of the concrete number of a test score. As Ying writes, “…Our moral thinking or abstract thinking in general is imaginative in nature, depending in a fundamental way on conceptual metaphors grounded in our embodied and socioculturally situated experience in the world” (2016: 108). Extending this further, O’Brien (2003) states that we understand and search for solutions to problems, largely through the use of (socially created and constrained) metaphors.
As O’Brien (2003) writes, “Problem setting, or the formation of how social problems are perceived, may be a more important policy issue than problem solving, and problems are framed in large part through [language]” (p.33). Thus, from both standpoints, reality is not transparent, and our understandings change with time and with place. These understandings are shaped and limited by language, and the way we use and understand language is specific to the historical period and the culture we live in (Foucault, 1994). We cannot live outside culture, but we can question our cultural assumptions, and one way to do that is to understand that they are not universal (Cushman, 1995). I hope to show, in this work, that we have not always understood the primary purpose of schooling to be the production of people as “capital” for the enrichment of national economies, and that there are other possible ways of understanding children and schooling. In doing so, I focus on the general discourses surrounding human capital theory, and more specifically on the metaphor of education as a financial “investment.”
Methodology
As can be imagined from its focus on metaphor, this work involves the close reading of text, to trace the emergence of new understandings of education over time. While I focus on larger concepts, these concepts can be traced through the emergence and disappearance of particular metaphors—in this case, the appearance after World War II (WWII) of the concept of education as an investment (expected to pay off) in the US and Britain in the years immediately following WWII. In this case, I have read a number of texts concerning education from several different time periods. I have borrowed techniques of “close reading” from literary studies, but in this case, rather than look for more general concepts, I focus on a particular small set of metaphorical usages that are indicators of a larger discursive shift which involves the adoption of the neo-liberal concept of and used methods of “close reading” taken from literary criticism to identify, and mark, changes in the dominant metaphors for understanding children, and their roles as future citizens. I use this analysis to make the argument that the concept of education as an investment is not a universal concept, but rather is a sudden departure from previous understandings of the purpose of schooling, and that this was made in the context of a colonial movement intended to increase the power of the US (and to a lesser degree Britain) globally.
What is education for human capital?
Human capital theory has become such a ubiquitous underpinning of educational policy across the globe that it has become hard to perceive it for what it is—a metaphor which has emerged in a specific time and place, and a way of looking at children and their schooling which has not always dominated our understandings. What, then, is the metaphor of human capital theory? Instead of seeing young children as protected beings who are “outside of the workplace,” human capital discourse defines young people as “investments,” much like bank accounts, stocks, or mutual funds. Like bank accounts, stocks, or mutual funds, young children have now become investments (Bloch et al., 2006; Lightfoot, 2001; Lightfoot-Rueda and Peach, 2015). We spend money on education, with the expectation that children, like other “investments,” will return a profit or pay society back. In this paper, I intend to unpack this financially based metaphor, and reveal it for what it is – one way out of many that we can understand children, their futures, and their role in society.
How and where did human capital discourse in early childhood emerge?
The metaphor of the “productive child” or the child as an economic resource to the community emerged very suddenly in the US and Britain in the years immediately following WWII. Given the ubiquitous nature of this concept in contemporary educational discourse, it is important to emphasize that its early dominance came from a specific time and place. However, it was built on the foundation of a number of earlier changes in understanding – “epistemic shifts” which took place in Europe and later in the Americas. The first of these shifts was what Foucault has referred to as “governmentality,” which took place in the 16th–18th centuries. This represents a shift in the way governments understand wealth. While previously wealth was seen as coming from land, or territory itself, after this shift, wealth was seen as coming largely from the people who inhabited a piece of territory (Foucault, 1991). The next crucial element in making the child as “investment” possible is what Hacking (1990) calls the “taming of chance” or the emergence of probability in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This involves a number of elements which are familiar in current educational policy documents. They include the “bell-shaped curve” which is used to evaluate student performance and statistical aggregates. The same period saw the development of risk/benefit analysis (Donzelot, 1991), or the idea that desirable and undesirable outcomes are calculable and can, to at least some degree, be avoided or encouraged by particular actions and policies. Using large samples of people, events that previously seemed to be random acts of God can often be predicted – or at least we imagine we can predict them. While before, educational policy was largely based on moral judgments about how we wanted to raise young people, it could now be based on mathematical formulas and economic calculi. This way of understanding education, however, did not begin to dominate national discourses until after WWII.
After WWII there was a major shift in understanding the role of education in the world. The Soviet Union began sending educational aid to a great number of lower-income countries in the interest of spreading communism. The other change was the dismantling of political empires around the world, meaning that countries in the metropole had to gradually shift their influence from direct political control to indirect, economic influence (Lightfoot, 2001).
At this point, policymakers in the former colonial centers of the world began thinking about replacing actual empires with what might today be called “virtual empires”—that is, empires based on investments and on education—what Winston Churchill referred to as “empires of the mind” (Pennycook, 1994). Instead of direct political control or even direct aid, Western countries began loaning money to “developing” countries (Lightfoot, 2001) to expand their educational systems. This money was intended to create generations of young people who had a “democratic” (i.e. Western) and “entrepreneurial” outlook. As the macro-economists Harbison and Meyers explained, nations were rich because their citizens were well-educated, and nations were poor because their citizens were poorly educated. They wrote: “Countries are underdeveloped because most of their people are underdeveloped, having had no opportunity of expanding their potential capabilities in the service of society” (1964: 13). This lack of skills and of “entrepreneurial attitudes” was seen to be both a societal and a personal problem. Individuals were seen to be lacking qualities such as “empathy, [which] endows a person with the capacity…to be interested in ‘what is going on in the world’ and to ‘get out of his hole’” (Lerner, 1958: 234). Large numbers of people in the population who lacked these qualities also dragged the economy of a country down as a whole, while well-educated and entrepreneurial citizens improved national economies.
Seen this way, the entities that granted or, much more often, loaned money predicted that they could not just educate people, but could also mold countries’ economic futures. Theoretically, poorer or Third World countries could become wealthier by expanding their educational systems without impacting the prosperity of “First World” countries. The reason aid was given in terms of loans rather than grants, is that people imagined that by growing the economy, education would “pay for itself.” In other words, education was no longer an expenditure but instead an “investment,” that would produce “returns” on any money put into it. This idea of “investment,” and financial “return,” still frames the way we talk of schooling today (Bloch et al., 2006; Lightfoot, 2001; Lightfoot-Rueda and Peach, 2015). This idea of expanding economies through education spread worldwide, and became part of the ethos of Asian economic expansion through a series of Asian “economic miracles.”
In the years following WWII many Asian countries began investing heavily in education and simultaneously experiencing high rates of economic growth—causing many to refer to themselves as “tigers” or “dragons” due to high rates of economic growth, which they universally attributed to good educational systems. In many Asian countries, there is a perception that the only way that nations can get ahead is through education for manpower development. In many countries, there is a strong recent interest especially in early childhood education, which is seen as providing a strong basis for the workforce of 15 or 20 years in the future.
The following passage from Hong Kong demonstrates the connection between the concept of “investment” in early childhood education and economic success that has been drawn in many contemporary Asian contexts. Professor James Heckman [has found a] return of 7–10% per annum for…early childhood education programs. These rates of return are higher than those of equity in the stock market between 1945 and 2008…. His work has revolutionized our thinking about the subject…Professor Heckman will… deliver a public lecture at the University of Hong Kong…on “Investing in early childhood…. There is an old Chinese saying “one’s achievement at age eighty has been pre-determined at age three.” Professor Heckman’s research takes this old saying and shows how and why the intervening years from birth to five can make a significant difference in the life achievements of young children in terms of their future income, health, criminality or other forms of behavior. (On, 2015) Despite the degree of international attention to Korea’s fast economic growth, Korea’s remarkable achievement in human development is little known. One of the most surprising characteristics of Korean development is that the nation has accumulated a stock of educated work-force at an unprecedented rate. (Lee, 1997, electronic journal, no page number)
Singapore also relates its rapid economic growth to education. Human resources have been identified as the single most important strategic capital for Singapore. A small country with virtually no natural resources, Singapore has become one of the most developed countries in Asia primarily due to its strong emphasis on developing human resources and for continuously making significant investments in its human capital. (Osman-Gani, 2004) Early childhood development is an extremely complex process…. Internationally there is a growing interest in the development of children from birth to school entry and the impact of these years on the entire life course. Three factors are fueling this interest: a) the widely acknowledged need for human capital to enable global economic competitiveness…and the need for workplace skills, b) research in neurobiology…and c) rich evaluation literature that documents how early intervention have the capacity to boost lifetime outcomes…. It is in Singapore’s interest to understand these key factors in relation to child development to ensure that we “grow” adults who are…equipped with the skills they will need to participate in economic…life. (Wright et al., 2011) Indian policymakers, like most of their counterparts across the developing…world, have been concerned about the employability of their working age populations…. This paper makes the case that, with the focus of making India a knowledge economy which is dynamic, [and] highly skilled Indian policymakers should…focus on preparing the workforce that will be needed for such an economy. Fulfilling the requirements of today’s industry…does not mean we cannot have…a vision for the future. The World Economic Forum’s Human Capital Report 2013 argues rightly that…lack of long-term planning can perpetuate continued wasted potential in a country’s population and losses for a nation’s growth and productivity…. If we wish to become a knowledge economy with highly skilled labor force…as our hallmark, we would have to revamp our…early…education systems. (Medhi and Divya, 2015)
In addition, the concept of educational success is increasingly measured by the results of international educational achievement tests. One of these measures is the PISA test, first developed in 1997 (OECD, 1999). Another popular measure of international “success” is the TIMMS test, which came out in 1995 (National Centre for Education Statistics, 2009). It is notable that both tests were developed roughly during the past two decades, as the language of human capital has come to dominate world concepts of “successful” educational systems. What the two tests have in common is that they reduce the entire educational system of a country to one number, and that number is taken as a surrogate for the nation’s prospects for economic success—or at least a large part of those prospects. In this respect, many Asian countries are doing well, as they generally have scores in the top ranks on both the PISA and the TIMMS.
Conclusions
At this point, many Asian countries are experiencing success, both in terms of economic success in an increasingly globalized arena and in terms of what is increasingly seen as a surrogate for that success – that is, international test scores. Why, then, should Asians be concerned about the way the language of human capital has come to dominate educational discourse? I do not oppose the use of schooling to advance career success—either on an individual or a group level. However, I do have some concerns about the overwhelming importance given to this language in discussing schools, which I will discuss as follows.
First is the fact that the idea that the primary reason for supporting education is economic is not neutral, and it does not exist independent of time and place. The idea of education for human capital originated in the US and Britain as part of an effort to extend neo-colonial influence across the globe at a time when traditional colonies were breaking up. Hence, education for human capital is, in essence, the entry of colonialism into education. That alone is not a reason to reject education for economic success, but it is a reason to question its extreme dominance in educational discourse.
Second, the way we are currently using the idea of human capital has come to dominate and exclude other ways of seeing education. While the purpose of this paper is not to lay out a definitive history of educational rationales in any country, it has made the point that throughout history there have been a number of different ways to understand schools and their meanings within society. Human resource development may be one possible purpose for educating citizens, but is it, and should it, be the only purpose? The idea of a single purpose for education may be particularly troubling in a globalizing world and globalizing economy. Economic success is definitely a worthy goal, but do countries want to give up everything that makes them unique in the name of economics? Do we not want to preserve something that is unique about national cultures, and about the schools that educate young people to enter those cultures? Can schools produce successful world citizens while maintaining some sort of cultural integrity?
Another problem with this orientation may be more related to the testing and the definitions of curriculum considered “useful” than with the concept of schooling for future vocations. We do live in a world increasingly oriented towards skills. However, no society can live on high-tech skills alone. Many economically important skills do not show up well on international or even national academic tests. All successful societies still need electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics, bricklayers, etc. While these professions are crucial to the functioning of any modern society, they are not primarily dependent on abstract learning of the type usually represented on academic tests, and, again, too often considered the sole engines driving a nation’s economy forward. There are young people who do not do well on tests of abstract reasoning, yet are extremely skilled at hands-on work which I would argue is also crucial for a nation’s success. Do we want to create an educational system where these young people are considered failures?
An additional concern is with the flattening of curriculum that too exclusive an emphasis on education for perceived economic needs produces. I am concerned about this for two reasons. First, even if society feels it needs engineers and technicians, for example, is that enough to provide society with a good life. What role, for example, do we want culture to play in society? Certainly, things like art, music, and literature, or, in a different vein, social work, are academic subjects, but the skills they involve are not usually measured on international comparison tests, and so they are generally ignored. Do we truly want societies with no art, no music, no literature, and no professions that soften the harshness of life in an increasingly competitive economy?
Finally, there is a fundamental problem with education for perceived vocational success. That is, industry may currently tell educational policymakers what they think they need for a future workforce. The problem is, can they really look 12, 10, or even five years in the future and know what an economy needs, or what it can potentially find useful? What if, for example, a country places extreme emphasis on training engineers, when future economic growth comes from something like the entertainment industry, or industries we cannot even imagine at present. If we have flattened curricula, how can we prepare for an unknown future?
In summation, I have nothing against “investment” in education, if we want to call it that. However, I have deep worries about the concept that the only valid use for schools is vocational training for a future which always remains uncertain, but which certainly requires a number of professionals which far surpasses the narrow range of what we currently consider “useful.” In addition, I worry about the idea that every country in the world should educate its young people following international standards, while ignoring those aspects of culture that make every country unique. Is education for manpower development all right? Yes, but only if it is balanced with other ways of understanding how we raise our young people to fit into society.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.