“Updating” Individualism and the Work Ethic: Corporate Logic in the Classroom

One of the most significant developments in education over the past decade or so has been the widespread of systems management models for individualizing instruction. The systems approach is perhaps best represented in comprehensive individualized instruction systems which provide a total plan and program for instructional reorganization at the school level. These instructional delivery systems, as they have been called (Talmage 1975a), were initially developed in the mid-1960's to late 1960's, and they represent a prime example of how private industry has cooperated with, and been assisted by, a growing federal and professional educational bureaucracy in the application of new business management concepts and techniques in American schools. The three most popular comprehensive systems for individualization are Individually Guided Education (IGE), Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI), and Program for Learning in Accordance with Needs (Project PLAN*). The first two were developed by federally sponsored research and development centers, with foundation and publishing industry support. The latter system was designed and has been marketed exclusively by the Westinghouse Learning Corporation. Today, over 3000 elementary schools in the United States, representing approximately 4% of the national total, have made the complex changeover to individualization through systems management (Flanagan et al. 1975, p. 160; Klausmeier 1975, p. 79). Although the rate of adoption has slackened somewhat in the past few years, this may be due more to tightening school budgets than to any disenchantment with either the efficiency or the pedagogic merits of individualization. Under the Reagan administration, federal support for systems management approaches in education continues, but in a more free market form. Now that industry has benefitted from years of federal subsidization of research on systems models, technologies, and curricula, the federal role is decreasing. Private industry is expected to assume more of the ongoing cost of fine-tuning the systems model in the 1980s, and of course will reap the substantial profits to be gained from marketing individualized instructional systems and periodically supplying users with updated curricular materials, testing programs, educational technology, etc. (Apple 1981).