Specialization and the Division of Labour

The power and efficiency of science and technology rest on one principle above all: the division of labour. To understand how a culture changed by science reshapes the school, you have to follow specialization all the way from the laboratory into the classroom.

Isolate and conquer

Scientific discovery is accelerated by isolating special features of nature for intensive investigation. The handout puts the idea in a memorable pair: politics works by divide and conquer, while science works by isolate and conquer. You break a problem into a small, isolated piece, study that piece deeply, and master it.

This drive to isolate lends itself to a minute division of labour. There are not just physicists, but physicists expert in electricity, in mechanics, in nuclear physics, and in many areas unknown to the general public. The same splintering runs through industry, where the factory system coordinates specialized knowledge and skills, managed by engineers and bureaucrats, just to produce a single product. It reaches the professions too:

1. In medicine, the general practitioner is replaced by the specialist.
2. In law, practice divides into civil, criminal, and corporate work.
3. In teaching, an alarming segmentation and narrowness accompanies the highly developed division of labour.

Flashcard

What principle underlies the power of science and technology?

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Answer

The division of labour, through isolate and conquer

Science isolates a small feature of nature for intensive study. This drives an ever finer division of labour, splitting physics, industry, medicine, law, and teaching into narrow specialties.

The school as a divided enterprise

The division of labour does not stop at the school door. Inside the school, the administrator and head know how to run a school and the duties of the office but have little knowledge of teaching, while the teacher is a specialist in mathematics, art, English, or science but knows little about running a school. The school starts to look like an industry: teachers like factory workers, the administrator like the manager of a plant.

The educational program is divided to match, and so is the curriculum. The curriculum is broken into highly specialized bodies of information. The learner then goes through the program by being exposed to fragments of knowledge here and there, accumulating the units required for graduation.

This carries a cost. In this process of schooling, the learner is not seen as a person, a socio-psychological creature, but as a student of English, mathematics, science, or art, and is judged a success or failure on that narrow basis. The whole person disappears behind the specialized subjects.

The other side: interdependence

There is a reverse side to the picture. The division of labour also breeds interdependence. The work of many individuals in almost any large enterprise, research project, or professional undertaking has to be meshed into one comprehensive pattern.

The logic is simple and unforgiving. If a product is to be made by a large number of people, each making only a small part of the total, then the product cannot be completed if any one of them fails to do their duty. Specialization makes each person less self-sufficient and more dependent on everyone else. The same division of labour that fragments the curriculum also binds a society tightly together, because no specialist can function alone.

Flashcard

How does the division of labour both fragment and bind a society?

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Answer

It splits work into narrow specialties yet makes each part depend on the rest

No specialist is self-sufficient, so a product made by many fails if any one fails. The same force that fragments the curriculum binds a society into tight interdependence.