Efficiency is an educational vice

How ‘efficiency’ derailed education

This article first appeared in TES magazine on 26th February 2025

Superficially, efficiency is a laudable aim in education: surely, it’s wrong to waste taxpayers’ money or our students’ time, especially those students for whom school is the main route out of poverty?

The trouble with efficiency, however, is that it is the wrong tool for the job. “Efficiency” is a mechanical metaphor that’s dangerously inappropriate for education.

And it has its roots in the latter of two competing frameworks for evaluating education: Aristotle’s biological approach versus René Descartes’ mechanical approach.

We are in thrall to Descartes’ picture and we don’t even know it. We should jettison the mechanical idea of efficiency and replace it with an understanding of waste in terms of virtue and vice.

And the Department for Education should see itself not as an engineer, but as a gardener.

Education’s obsession with efficiency

In the classroom, discovery learning is criticised for being less efficient than explicit teaching, and teacher trainers talk of “engineering efficiency” with clear routines.

Saving money and spreading best practice were the motivations for expanding multi-academy trusts. The last government wanted MATs of at least 10 academies, since that’s apparently the size at which efficiencies and economies of scale are best achieved. That’s since anecdotally shifted to 20, or some say 30, for optimal efficiency.

And in 2016, the UK government introduced the school efficiency metric, according to which efficiency is the amount of progress pupils make for every pound the school spends.

Is the most efficient education system, no education system at all?

Before getting into the philosophical issues, it’s worth considering, at face value, what it would mean to truly prioritise efficiency in education.

In The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan convincingly argues that formal education does little to increase our “human capital”. Crudely put, we just don’t remember enough of what we are taught to make school worth the cost.

Instead, he claims education systems are just very expensive ways of signalling intelligence, conscientiousness and conformity. An improved maths grade is less an indication that the school added value and more an indication of a student’s ability and willingness to knuckle down and get stuff done.

Worse, Caplan argues that our education systems inflate the cost of this signalling. Standing up at a concert might improve your view of the stage, but if everyone stands, no one sees better and everyone’s more uncomfortable.

Young people are engaged in a credentialist arms race: 40 per cent of graduates in the USA now have a master’s degree. The system prioritises certificates over the learning required to achieve them.

So perhaps the most efficient approach is to defund the entire system. Is this what Bridget Phillipson has in mind when she talks about removing barriers to opportunity?

The fallacy of presumption

I’d find Caplan’s argument very convincing if I thought we should prioritise efficiency. But I don’t think that.

The problem is the concept of efficiency tempts us to commit a “fallacy of presumption”.

The question “when did you stop punching your students?” presumes you started punching them.

Similarly, since efficiency is the ratio of valuable output to expense, any claims about efficiency presuppose some specific measure of value and of expense.

This is uncontroversial when applied to machines, which are designed for particular functions: if we want a car to be more efficient, we know we want more miles per gallon, for example.

But not everything can be understood as a machine. What’s an efficient tree, for example?

To make sense of this question, we have to unmoor the concept of “tree” from its ordinary meaning and treat it as a machine designed to fulfil some specific function. It’s not so different when applied to school.

So, no discussion of efficiency is practical without a discussion of purpose first - but if we look at the evolution of the concept of efficiency, we can see that it is primarily a mechanical metaphor, and is somewhat inimical to discussions of purpose.

The evolution of the concept of efficiency

The concept of efficiency has evolved through four distinct stages.

The word “efficient” first appeared in English as part of Aristotle’s system, in which things were explained in terms of purpose or value (the heart pumps blood); form (the human heart has four chambers); material (muscle); and efficiency, in this sense meaning “whatever brought it about” (embryogenesis).

Aristotle’s framework was fundamentally biological, centred around the goal of good mental and physical health, making good use of (and not wasting) our powers and talents.

Imagine a parent turning the TV off and telling the children to go and play. Why do this? Because the children ought to exercise their minds and bodies, and not be lazy.

However, during the Scientific Revolution, thinkers like Descartes and Francis Bacon rejected explanations of purpose. The problem was that during the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas synthesised Aristotle’s framework with Christianity - so purpose was now something ordained by God (God designed the heart to pump blood).

Consequently, Descartes thought discussions of purpose were speculative hubris. Science, he insisted, should explain only in terms of materials and efficiency. This was called the mechanical philosophy.

Thirdly, in 1855, William Rankine created our modern concept of efficiency as a ratio to describe the workings of wondrous machines like steam engines.

And then the final stage of the evolution of the idea of efficiency is known as Taylorism or the efficiency movement.

Frederick Winslow Taylor pioneered the application of engineering concepts to industry as “efficiency techniques”. His ideas spread to all areas of society through economics.

Followers thought everyone, especially the poor, would benefit from great minds finding ways to eliminate waste and proliferate best practice.

Five consequences of prioritising efficiency

The hubris of efficiency worship in education has consequences.

1. Efficiency can lead to fragility
Nassim Taleb argues optimisation can make organisations weak. For example, expenditure on protective equipment and unused hospital beds is considered inefficient until a pandemic hits. Similarly, investment in the arts or humanities may yield unforeseen benefits.

2. Schools serve multiple purposes
Building human capital and providing signals are just two purposes. We might include childcare, various forms of or preliminaries to social work and educational psychology, maintaining public safety and so on. At the very least, when we prioritise one purpose, we deprioritise others.

3. Efficiency undermines dignity
Living things have their own goals; machines don’t. And human beings have the power to deliberate, to choose. To treat a human being, without their full and free consent, as if they were a machine or part of one, is to deny their personhood.

Adam Smith noted that the division of labour boosts productivity but undermines workers. Similarly, centralising lesson planning might reduce teacher workload but sacrifice autonomy. While superficially saving time, it limits the degree to which teachers can feel pride in their work.

4. Efficiency marginalises atypical students
The concept of efficiency unjustifiably dictates what ought to be. As their etymology suggests, what “ought to” or “should” be is what is owing, what is missing.

If there is a puzzle with one missing piece, that piece is what ought to be there. Just as a piece cannot be missing if there is no puzzle, what ought to be is irreducibly contextual. Mechanical notions like efficiency try to decontexualise it.

It is not true, for example, that individual students ought to make an expected amount of progress. Country-level statistics and patterns may justify the claim that students typically ought to, but there are obvious reasons why this is not true at an individual level. If we treat school as a machine for making progress, those who are atypical are spanners in the works.

Similarly there’s a pomposity to the notion that students ought to engage with “the best that has been thought or said”, as Matthew Arnold described it. I agree with his criticisms of our “superstitious faith in machinery”, but it doesn’t take incredible feats of imagination to realise the absurdity of the idea that everyone ought to enjoy Shakespeare.

5. Efficiency distorts education itself
Finally, the notion of efficiency distorts our understanding of the nature of education. Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

He specifically applied this to education, writing that “when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways”.

“Campbell’s law” gets right to the heart of the matter: what is education for?

We must go back to Aristotle, and reintroduce purpose into our discussion.

A return to Aristotle

But isn’t it still true that we shouldn’t waste taxpayers’ money and our students’ time? Yes.

And isn’t it an essential part of government to set direction and priorities, and to make difficult decisions? Yes.

How do we resolve the tension between these truths and the negative consequences of efficiency worship?

The concepts we require here are not mechanical; we need something like Aristotle’s biological framework.

Think of that parent turning off the TV and telling their children to go and play. They don’t want their children to waste time, but this isn’t about efficiency - it’s about how we respond to our situations, what Aristotle called virtue and vice.

Being wasteful - carelessly using resources - is a vice, as is being stingy. The virtue is the prudent use of resources.

But virtues are also irreducibly contextual. What is wasteful in one context may be necessary in another. As GH von Wright put it, “the path of virtue is never laid out in advance”. Experience and wisdom are required to judge what’s right.

Instead of trying to engineer improvement in the education system through frameworks, inspections and centralisation, perhaps the government should see its job as gardening: watering, nurturing and pruning guided by experience, context and wisdom.

Top-down legislation should be replaced by bottom-up case law based on a dispute resolution system for anyone with an interest in education.

Through particular cases, our collective understanding of what counts as good education - what “ought” to be - could be revealed and developed: an educational jurisprudence.

Caplan accepts “the merit of play”, but he sees schooling and playing as mutually exclusive.

I think this is a mistake. The word “school” comes from the Greek skhole, meaning free time (or “protected time” in modern teacher jargon).

So, here’s the choice: continue with our assembly-line archetype, whereby extrinsic goals result in waste and ill health; or return to this ancient notion of schooling as protected time - time free from the pressures and exploitation of work, free from the dehumanising machinery of society, free from danger, from internet grifters; time when children are free to explore the world, think and play, when they are encouraged to exercise their virtues.

Education isn’t engineered. It is cultivated, encouraged and enabled. And if school encourages and enables students to be brave, kind, wise and so on, and if it does so with prudence, then it is time and money well spent.