Dr Faust, in the medieval legend, made famous by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, traded his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge. To “strike a Faustian bargain” is to be willing to sacrifice anything to satisfy a limitless desire for knowledge or power, with potentially disastrous, long-term consequences. The answer is drawn from Chapter 8 of the book Master and Apprentice. Frederick Winslow Taylor was born to a wealthy Baltimore family in 1856. His early education was conventionally academic and very similar to that of a privileged English boy of the same age, but he surprised everyone when he became an apprentice pattern maker in an iron foundry, learning the practical skills that had made his father successful. For twelve hours a day the young Taylor laboured in the foundry, sharing his meals with his fellow workers. Despite the social differences these were men for whom the impressionable Taylor came to have the greatest respect: “I remember very distinctly the perfectly astonishing awakening I had at the end of my six month apprenticeship when I discovered that the three other men I had been working with in the Pattern Shop were all much smarter than I was.”  Taylor discovered something else. These men, consummate craftsmen as they were, worked because they got great satisfaction out of doing a job well. Yes, they needed the money to provide for their families, but money wasn’t everything; they took enormous pride in their work and it was their skill that gave them their status. The employees’ sense of self-worth, however, was unimportant to Taylor’s father. He was the boss, the workers drew a wage from him, and in exchange he bought their time – all of it. That the workers enjoyed what they were doing was not part of the equation. Furthermore, Taylor senior, like other industrialists across America, was becoming frustrated. While the spectacular inventions of the 1870s and ‘80s had given business new and sophisticated forms of machinery, production wasn’t growing anything like fast enough in response. So, having finished his apprenticeship, Taylor entered his father’s company, determined to solve the problem that was causing his father such difficulty. It soon became obvious to this quick-thinking young man that the potential effectiveness of the new machinery was severely constrained by the inefficient working practices of the very craftsmen he admired so much who preferred a job well done to a job done quickly. Taylor sought to apply objective scientific data to models of human labour, melding his experience as an apprentice with his early university training in maths and science. By using his stopwatch to measure exactly how long a task took Taylor effectively invented Time and Motion studies. He studied the treatment of manual work and showed that increased output was simply the result of people working ‘smarter’. Working ‘smarter’ required not craftsmen but a small team of technical experts, people like Taylor himself, using their scientifically based insights to tell the factory workers exactly what to do, how to do it, and when. Thus, for most people, scientific management came to mean following orders rather than asking questions or coming up with solutions. Since Taylor’s methods were introduced productivity has increased some fifty-fold in all advanced countries. But this increase in production came at a terrible cost to the average person’s initiative, self-esteem and innate desire for self-improvement. Thinking people, Taylor argued, risked disrupting the ‘system’. “In the past man had been first. In the future the system has to be first,” he wrote. His ideas were hugely influential. The motto adopted for the 1933 Chicago World Fair was pure Taylorism: ‘Science Finds/Industry Applies/Man Conforms’ Yet craftsmen had never seen themselves as conformists; they thought of themselves as thoughtful, creative people whose motivations came from being fully responsible for their own product. In a much-reported confrontation between Taylor and a skilled machinist we can hear the lament of the craft mentality: “We don’t want to work as fast as we are able to. We want to work as fast as we think it’s comfortable for us to work,” said the machinist. “We haven’t come into existence for the purpose of seeing how great a task we can perform through a lifetime. We are trying to regulate our work so as to make it auxiliary to our lives.” The simple truth is that Taylor probably single-handedly did more than anyone else to destroy the craftsman’s attitude towards work. This is ironic given how important his own apprenticeship had been to him. In future young people would no longer have the social and moral support of more responsible, knowledgeable men to help them develop a work ethic that could also help define them as social beings. In many ways Taylor’s concept of scientific management was a product of its time. Economic factors – namely the ever-increasing numbers of unskilled immigrants arriving in America from Europe – gave American employers a continuous flow of men and women willing to be treated like machines in exchange for a step up the ladder in what was seen as the land of opportunity. “You do it my way, by my standards, at the speed I mandate, and in so doing achieve a level of output I ordain, and I’ll pay you handsomely for it, beyond anything you might have imagined. All you have to do is take orders and give up your way of doing the job for mine,” he said. Thus Taylor began the cult of the specialist, as opposed to the expert. A specialist is the ultimate analyst who knows a subject inside out; he knows all the rules, all the tests and all the possible combinations and formulae inside their box, thereby tending to tackle problems for which they do not have to extend themselves.  Specialisms break the world down into parts, and this reductionist approach gets us, individually and collectively, into trouble. Experts, on the other hand, indulge in progressive problem solving and are quick to grasp the overall situation. They synthesize rather than simply focusing on a single issue. That makes them open to different disciplines and questioning. Taylor’s success at merging scientific management with the process of industrialisation had a profound effect on the relationship of learning to education, and how education systems were to be organised. For, as Taylor’s followers posited, is not education a ‘system’? Henry Pritchard, president of the highly influential Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, proclaimed just that in 1907 when he said, “It is more and more necessary that every human being should become an effective, economic unit. What is needed is an educational system that is carefully adapted to the needs of the economy; a system that sorts people efficiently into various positions that need to be filled in the stratified occupational structure.” It’s all very straightforward, the advocates of scientific management seemed to be saying, once you define what you want. You have to take the mystery out of education, stop messing around with the intangibles, and then we can help you design a perfect system. It sounded very persuasive not only to the Americans but to those officials at the English Board of Education, urgently seeking a cheap, effective model of education that would suit the ordinary man. In his book English Popular Education written in 1976 the English educational historian David Wardle wrote: “It was the factory put into the educational setting. Every characteristic was there, minute division of labour, a complicated set of incentives to do good work, an impressive system of inspection, and finally an attention to cost efficiency and the economic use of plant.” Most recently in England a series of Education Acts has attempted to standardize what has to be taught in the national curriculum. This makes it possible for teachers to be narrowly trained for working in specific areas of the curriculum leading government to make the dangerous assumption that it is no longer necessary to train all-round teachers who teach well because they have a love for, and knowledge of, their subject. This extends the difference between specialists and experts in industry to the classroom and explains how a senior adviser in Downing Street in 1997 could say of the argument addressed in this animation: “I can’t really fault your argument; you are probably right. But the system you argue for requires very good teachers. We don’t think there will ever be enough good teachers, and so we’re going for a teacher-proof way of running schools. That way we will get uniform standards.” Key to being able to function in a scientifically managed factory was the ability to read basic instruction manuals, fill out order forms and worksheets, and do basic mathematical calculations. To become an ‘effective economic unit’ in the modern industrial workplace, all workers needed to be equipped with the three Rs. Schools also became central in sorting out individuals to meet the various demands of the increasingly specialized labour market. While Taylor was primarily concerned with the efficient organisation of labour, another American, John Dewey, was determined to establish methods of learning that were congruent with human nature – learning that went with the grain of the brain. Dewey grew up in the small market town of Burlington some three hundred miles to the north of industrial Boston, surrounded by mountains and lakes of great beauty. A somewhat delicate and sensitive child, he had the freedom to grow up slowly and, for the first twelve years of his life, lived a Huckleberry Finn-type existence – “I never let schooling get in the way of my education” – wandering widely through the countryside and keeping the company of traders, craftsmen, and native Americans who still adhered to some of their traditional ways and customs. Burlington retained the air of a pioneer town, a place where Town Hall policy really did depend on public debate and argument. John Dewey’s great affinity with nature and his deep empathy for the skills and attitudes of working people were exceptional. To his sensitive and gentle disposition he added a rare ability to think in a wide-ranging and coherent way. He became for Americans ‘the Philosopher appropriate to his Time’, the kind of thinker that late nineteenth century and early twentieth century England had sorely lacked. His philosophy spoke of the experience of everyone, with an intellectual sharpness that the advanced processes of the English craftsman had never found a voice capable of describing. Dewey’s writing and lecturing life was to span nearly three quarters of a century. He frequently clashed with Taylor, for scientific management demeaned what Dewey saw as the very essence of our humanity, namely our ability to think things out for ourselves. Man lives his life in its entirety, Dewey argued, not in separate compartments called work and leisure. Dewey believed that democracy depends on a continuous stream of thoughtful people who are developing their intelligence through everything they do. In this he was a devout follower of Thomas Jefferson who had written when President of the United States of America: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” If employers treat people as if they were automatons, explained Dewey, then they will cease to be inquisitive and personally responsible in their private lives. Community, under such a regime, becomes a nebulous concept, he reasoned, and democracy itself will inevitably be weakened. It was while Dewey was at Michigan, at the age of forty, that he wrote his three most significant papers in which he set out his key beliefs, ‘The School and Society’,  ‘The Child and the Curriculum’, and later ‘Democracy and Education”. The educational process must begin with, and build upon, the interests of the child; it must provide opportunities for the interplay of thinking and doing within the classroom; the school should be organised as a ‘miniature community’, and the teachers be guides rather than task setters organising fixed lessons and recitations. Above all else, the goal of education had to be the growth of the child in all its totality. Here was the authentic voice of a man able to reflect on his own youth, and distil his thoughts into a set of guiding concepts. This form of more inclusive learning set Dewey apart from most educators of his time who were deeply rooted in the logic and formalities of the classroom. Rather than leaving children to their own devices as the French philosopher Rousseau had recommended, or imposing subject matter on pupils as traditionalists advised, Dewey proposed constructing an environment in which the child, while engaged in familiar activity, would be confronted with a problem solvable only with the aid of the knowledge and skills learnt earlier within traditional subjects. Dewey argued that such a task would require teachers of extraordinary skill and personal learning, for this was not so much a child-centred as a teacher-centred pedagogy. Teachers had to be very good indeed if children were to develop their full potential. Dewey feared the impact of Taylorism while Taylor’s followers were quick to dismiss Dewey’s ideas as unrealistic and of no utilitarian value. Dewey wanted to celebrate the creativity and uniqueness of the individual. Taylor believed that the skills of the few, imposed on the unquestioning masses, would eventually benefit everybody. Dewey articulated an early twentieth century vision for a people that would have been endorsed by the Founding Fathers in America while Taylor, in arguing that economic efficiency should shape all actions, was speaking to a new kind of America. Would he also speak to a new kind of England? How Behaviourism led to a Faustian Bargain In the 1920s the new, strident voice of Behaviourism started to emerge in America. It strengthened greatly Taylor’s case for applying the techniques of scientific management to schools. Even Lenin was an advocate of Taylor’s thinking: “We must introduce into Russia the study and teaching of the new Taylor System and its systemic trial and adaptations.” Advanced by J.B. Watson, Professor of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, it was a direct challenge to the classical and liberal philosophical thought expressed by Dewey. “Behaviourism claims that ‘consciousness’ is neither a definable nor a useful concept; it is merely another word for the ‘soul’ of more ancient times,” stated Watson. Behaviourism, he went on to argue, attempted to make a clean start. Introspection and speculation, the very qualities that Dewey cherished, should be abandoned. Psychology, he argued, had to become a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science. Anything that couldn’t be measured, Watson stated regularly and emphatically, either did not exist or was not significant. It seems extraordinary to us now, in the 21^st century, that such a theory was regarded as an explanation of man’s actions but we must remember that the studies of the brain with which we’re now reasonably familiar, are largely the result of technologies only developed in the last twenty or thirty years. To the late Victorians the brain was virtually a complete mystery. Psychologists were operating at the limits of the methodology then available to them. With the continuing assumption in the 1920s that evolution had no part to play in understanding the function of the brain, Watson would tell his audiences in 1925 that only when every aspect of the learning process could be quantified would educators be taken seriously. He made an extraordinary claim. “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief and, yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocation, and race of his ancestors.” That was all there was to it: control the environment, discard all aspects of inheritance, provide the theoretically correct training and you could define the end product. Schools that do their job properly, his followers claimed, would be bound to achieve the desired outcome. Children should fit the system, rather than the system being adjusted to suit the individual, anything else would be inefficient, and inefficiency was to be avoided at all costs. Dewey’s thinking on education, on the other hand, resonated strongly with those Americans who had themselves grown up in stable communities with well-established values. Many of them, however, were looking at the wave of immigrants coming from every corner of a collapsing Europe, and starting to panic. Dewey was right in the long run, they thought but, in the short term, something more manageable and practical was needed. School might be the only common experience such immigrants would have of America, so school had to assume that little, if anything, of life outside the classroom would have any beneficial impact on the children. School had to ‘do it all’, and do it quickly, efficiently and cheaply. The inevitable started to happen: once people saw that schools could be required to do something that had earlier been done informally by others, then why should those ‘others’ bother to do it in future? Taylor’s system of management was good at delivering specific results, but it was indifferent to what it failed to produce, namely thinking people who could do things for themselves. The scientific management of the workplace brought about increased efficiency and economic growth, but reduced the personal responsibility of workers so that they dealt with parts rather than the whole. While those destined to be leaders received a broad education, state schools concentrated on teaching the basics needed by the workforce: literacy and numeracy. The legacy of this factory model of schooling remains with us today and its transformation is central to helping all children become responsible lifelong learners. Scientific management was, in reality, a terrifying Faustian bargain both for education and for society at large. It was as if Taylor and others had said: I’ll give you all that you could possibly wish for in the short term but this will come at the cost of losing what makes you a human being and not a machine. The Behaviourists’ model of learning was moderately successful in equipping most young Americans with sufficient basic skills to survive in a world of systems but the impact of old, industrial-age repetitive skills has created generations of ‘learned helplessness’.