High Educ (2014) 67:721734

DOI 10.1007/s10734-013-9672-2

A critical perspective on large class teaching: the political

economy of massification and the sociology of knowledge

Stephanie Allais

Published online: 15 October 2013

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract Large classes have increasingly become a feature in many countries around the
world. This paper present a two-pronged analysis of this phenomenon, drawing on the
political economy of higher education as well as the sociology of knowledge to contribute
to a principled discussion about why we have large classes, and when a large class is too
large. I argue that much of the justification for expansion in higher education is not borne
by an analysis of the political economy of higher education. I then explain why the
expansion of higher education through increasing class sizes is self-defeating: because
contact between lecturers and students is necessary for the acquisition of disciplinary
knowledge, and it is difficult to achieve such contact in large classes. I conclude that the
current discourse on large class teaching, which suggests that lecturers must accept ever
increasing class sizes in the name of access and development, is unrealistic, both in terms
of the political and economic imperatives, and also in terms of the nature of education, and
the conditions for the development and acquisition of knowledge.

Keywords Political economy of massification
Political economy

of large classes
Large class pedagogy

Introduction: theorizing large classes

Access to higher education has dramatically expanded around the world. In 1900, a
fraction of a per cent of the age cohort was enrolled in higher education worldwide; by
2,000 approximately 20 % of the cohort was enrolled (Schofer and Meyer 2005). Many
countries have now moved beyond 50 %, and some industrialized countries have moved
beyond 80 % (Collins 2013). With this dramatic expansion, governments and institutions
have adopted various strategies to reduce costs, including the casualization of academic

S. Allais (&)
Centre for Researching Education and Labour, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa
e-mail: stephanie.matseleng@gmail.com

123
722 High Educ (2014) 67:721734

staff; the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to reduce numbers of
lecturing staff; and expanding class sizes. In this paper I present an analysis of the third
strategy, with some consideration of the second.
In many universities around the world today teaching large classes is presented as
something lecturers simply have to do, in the interests of social justice for individuals who
need access to higher education, as well as economic development. First year classes in
particular are large, and classes of over 600 students are not uncommon; in some instances
numbers are larger than this. I make two contributions to analyzing the phenomenon of
large classes in this paper. First, I argue that much of the justification for expansion in
higher education is not borne out by an analysis of the political economy of higher
education. Second, I claim that although the expansion of higher education through
increasing class sizes appears to be necessary and inevitable, it is ultimately self-defeating.
I start by distinguishing the intrinsic and the instrument values of higher education. I
suggest that its intrinsic value lies in the knowledge acquired, and the opportunity it
provides for people to spend time away from work (paid work in the economy to study and
unpaid work in the home) to reflect on aspects of the world. Its instrumental value lies in
the knowledge and skills acquired, which can be put to use in many different ways, as well
as in social goods. However, I show why the role of higher education in labour markets and
the economy, as well as in addressing social inequality is far more questionable. This is
important because these roles are used as justifications for massification in higher edu-
cation, increased class sizes (and thus teaching workloads), and maintaining student
contributions to funding higher education at high levels. Providing ever higher levels of
education to ever-greater numbers of people could be a wonderful social phenomenon, if
individuals left education without debts and with the prospect of good jobs, thus enabling a
good tax base to pay for the education of future generations. But on their own, higher
education qualifications increasingly do not lead to better jobs for most people, the claims
made about the needs of the economy have proved implausible in many instances, and
there are negative side effects of the dominant ideology of educational solutions to social
and economic problems. This is important to remember because to a considerable extent,
massification has increased the workload of lecturers, as well as changed the nature of their
work. A moral burden is placed on lecturers to teach larger classes in the interests of
society and learners. Having discussed the socio-economic context of large classes I turn
to considerations of curriculum and pedagogy in large classes. I argue that in many
instances large classes replicate the form of contact education but do not achieve the
essence of what makes a lecture valuable. This essence, I argue, can also not be replicated
by doing away with physical interaction through ICT based distance learning.
I conclude that the current discourse on large class teaching, which suggests that lec-
turers must accept ever increasing class sizes in the name of access and development, is
unrealistic, both in terms of the political and economic imperatives, and also in terms of the
nature of education and knowledge, and the conditions its development and acquisition.

Why massify? The value of higher education

It is frequently argued that higher education is becoming a necessity and not a luxury
(Meyer et al. 2013). Higher education has intrinsic value which lies in the nature of
specialized knowledge acquired in higher education.
While learning, of course happens everywhere, the point of education is to provide
access to knowledge which is not typically learnt in the course of everyday life.

123
High Educ (2014) 67:721734 723

Educational knowledge enables us to treat the world as an object, and not as an envi-
ronment or place of experience; it is systematized because objects must be seen in the
relations they maintain with other objects, and not only by a direct connection with a
referent, as is experienced in the world of experience (Charlot 2009). Education allows
people to spend time in a non-productive (in economic terms) activity, thus enabling
reflection on and analysis of aspects of the social and natural world.
The knowledge that is taught in educational institutions is structured and organized in
conceptual relationships. This enables, among other things, abstraction, reflection, pre-
diction, and application across time and local contexts (Bernstein 2000; Muller 2000). This
also makes it difficult to learn, requiring well-structured curricula, as well as sustained and
structured learning. If this knowledge was easy to learn in the course of everyday life, we
would not require education institutions, and massification would not be an issue; we could
simply let individuals acquire knowledge in the world. Disciplinary knowledge is the
clearest example of this point. Disciplines are not static, given bodies of knowledge,
beyond questioning or changing; they are socially developed and systematically revisable
(Collins 1998; Moore 2009; Young 2008). They take the form of a coherent, explicit and
systematically principled structure (Bernstein 2000, p. 157 in Moore 2004, p. 144). Of
course not all university programmes can be or should be entirely bounded by disci-
plinesprofessional qualifications, for example, combine and recontextualize different
disciplines. But disciplines provide a way of thinking about the specialized bodies of
knowledge which higher education institutions both develop and transmit, and how these
specialized bodies of knowledge allow us to account for and explain the natural and social
world in systematic ways as well as to participate in and reflect on key human experiences
such as the literary, visual, or musical. These roles for knowledge are instrinsically
valuable, as the use to which this knowledge can be put is unpredictable; it is not
narrowly linked to any specific task, project, or situation in the real world.
Higher education also has instrumental value to individuals and societies. Specialized
knowledge and skills can be put to use on specific tasks, projects, and situations in the real
world. Specialized knowledge can save lives, enable people to cross rivers, improve
sanitation, make difficult medical decisions ethically, help a child cope with trauma, and so
on. Higher education is widely seen as being generally beneficial to societies, with many
positive side effects, such as improved levels of health (Furnee et al. 2008). The instru-
mental value of higher education is partly based on the application of specialized bodies of
knowledge knowledge, but also on the ways in which qualifications are used in labour
markets, which are affected by many other political, social, and economic factors.
Recent ideas about the knowledge economy have led to particular emphasis on the
economic (instrumental) role of higher education. Policy makers refer to the idea of a
knowledge economy to suggest that the workforce and the economy requires high levels
of education. Since the 1970s, analysts such as Bell (1973), Drucker (1969) and Toffler
(1980) have argued that societies previously based on industrial manufacturing were being
transformed into information societies, in which knowledge would become the dominant
factor of production. New types of work were emerging, they suggested, particularly in
information management, finance, marketing, and sales (Carlaw et al. 2012). As Living-
stone and Guile (2012, p. iii) note, today the existence of a knowledge-based economy is
widely taken for granted by governments, mass media, public opinion, and most scholars
today.
The implications for the instrumental role of higher education are considerable: first,
economies, and therefore countries, need far more skilled people, knowledge workers.
Second, the promise of the knowledge economy is that individuals who invest in

123
724 High Educ (2014) 67:721734

education will attain well-paid, stimulating, and relatively autonomous jobs. In the com-
monly quoted words of one recent British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, education is our
best economic policy, while another, Gordon Brown, argued that where the success and
failure of an economy depend on access to knowledge more than access to capital, indi-
vidual liberation arises from the enhancement of the value of labour rather than the
abolition of private capital (cited in Callinicos 2001, p. 48). According to analysts such as
Lin (2001), different social classes could come to share the same interests: labourers can
become capitalists, as they enjoy the surplus of their labour The confrontation and
struggle between classes becomes a cooperative enterpriseWhats good for the com-
pany is good for the worker and vice versa (Lin 2001, p. 13). The vision of the
knowledge economy is of a more benign capitalist system in which those who are well
educated can play influential roles.
Scratch beyond the surface, and many problems become apparent with this instrumental
view. The empirical evidence that countries have shifted to knowledge economies is
highly contested: in some jobs there seems to be an increase in levels of knowledge used,
and in many others, there have been decreases. As Kennedy (2012, p. 169) argues,
While some authors wax lyrical about the centrality of the development of skilled
and autonomous human capital to the knowledge economy, it is also the case that
deskilling and temporary low-skill employment contracts remain a core feature of
knowledge work.
Thirty years ago Randall Collins (1979) demonstrated that technological change was not
the driving force in rising credential requirements. More recently Livingstone (2012,
p. 108) points out, education levels have risen dramatically faster than knowledge
requirements in most jobs:
The image of contemporary society inherent in post-industrial/knowledge economy
and human capital theories proves illusory. While an aggregate upgrading of the
technical skills needed for job performance is gradually occurring, our collective
acquisition of work-related knowledge and credentials is far outpacing this incre-
mental shift.
Brown et al. (2008, p. 4) point out that while much policy literature focuses on knowledge,
innovation, and creative enterprise, it has ignored the shift towards global standardisation
of work, along with efforts to capture and digitalise knowledge that had previously
remained locked in the heads of high-skilled workers. They refer to this as Digital
Taylorism. Much knowledge work, they argue, is being standardized in much the same
way that the knowledge of craft workers was captured and translated into the moving
assembly line in the early twentieth century. Digital Taylorism involves a power struggle
within the middle classes, for it depends on reducing the autonomy and discretion of the
majority of well-educated technical, managerial and professional employees. Lauder and
Browns digital Taylorism is echoed in Newfields (2010) idea of the cognotariat,
which captures the systematic stratification within the class or group of knowledge
workers; as Newfield demonstrates, being very well qualified has not prevented the
workforce of the higher education system in the United States from being casualized.
Collins (2013) argues that middle class and white collar jobs are being eradicated, in the
same way that earlier automation eradicated many working class manufacturing jobs.
In short, the promises of economic competitiveness due to rising levels of skills, as well
as individual prosperity and greater autonomy in a more benign capitalism, have not been
realized. Lauder and Brown (2009) demonstrate that the majority of knowledge workers

123
High Educ (2014) 67:721734 725

operate in a global labour market for work that is high-skilled but low-waged. And as
Livingstone and Guile (2012) point out, workers in all countries have unprecedented levels
of formal knowledge and qualifications, but unemployment is on the increase. This is
especially true for the youngest and most well educated, who are last in the queue for jobs.
It could be argued, particularly in the light of the other valuable roles of higher edu-
cation discussed above, that rising levels of educational attainment are still a good thing.
But when education is positioned so centrally in public and policy discourse as the solution
to economic problems, education is blamed when, inevitably, the economic problems do
not go away (Grubb and Lazerson 2004). Education particularly came to prominence in
social policy within the ambit of third way politics, which came to dominate the United
States and Europe in the mid 1990s when previously left wing parties started accepting
many of the tenets of neoliberalism (Crouch 2011). The role of education in creating
individual prosperity was emphasized in order to justify reducing collective welfare pro-
vision (Tomlinson 2009, p. 5). Giddens (1998, p. 117) describes this as investment in
human capital wherever possible, rather than the direct provision of economic mainte-
nance. This supported a shift in policy rhetoric from full employment to full
employability (Brown and Lauder 2006). A discourse of duties, rights, and responsibilities
was invoked to ensure that individuals did not expect too much from the state. While
previously many governments saw it as part of their role to create jobs and support and
develop industries which create jobs, this shifted to governments arguing that their role is
to encourage individuals to make themselves employable. The emphasis on the skills of
the workforce and therefore on training enabled governments to describe unemployment as
a temporary phenomenon, resulting from economic change and individuals (and educa-
tional providers) failure to meet the needs of the economy. The victim, rather than the
system, is blamed for unemployment (Foley 1994). The notion of employability which
has become prevalent implies that it is the moral duty of human beings to arrange their
lives to maximize their advantage to the labour market.1 The learner must be in a continual
state of up-skilling and re-skilling in order to respond to shifts in the world labour
market (Spreen 2001, p. 62).
Like the knowledge economy, third way politics did not succeed in achieving the
claims made for it about winwin systems. The recent dramatic failures of neoliberalism
to achieve economic growth, prosperity, or equitable societies, has forced some degree of
reality check on this type of politics, although the nature and extent of the change is still
contested (Brand and Sekler 2009).
Besides victim blaming and disguising underlying economic problems, another problem
with massification is that individuals feel compelled to attain ever-higher levels of qual-
ifications, at considerable expense to families and taxpayers, and with growing evidence
that attaining ever higher levels of qualifications will not help most individuals to get better
jobs (Brown et al. 2011; Livingstone 2012). Because qualifications are used as a significant
screening device by employers, potential workers are obliged to strive for higher and
higher levels of qualifications to improve their place in the job queue. Moore (2004)
demonstrates, for example, that in the United Kingdom, over the course of the twentieth
century, absolute levels of education rose for all population groupsmeaning that more
working class people got higher levels of education than ever before. But relative differ-
ences in educational attainment did not change at all over this period. So middle class
people simply got higher levels of education. There is no reason to believe this

1
Brown (2006) suggests that the idea of employability signifies a shift in the meaning of life, whereby
people are economically enslaved by opportunities for employment.

123
726 High Educ (2014) 67:721734

phenomenon will stop with the massification of higher education. Brown et al. (2011) as
well as Riviera (2011) describe how large multi-national companies are increasingly
recruiting from a tiny handful of elite universities around the world; a doctoral degree from
most excellent universities in most countries does not suffice. The opportunity cost is huge
to most people. At the same time the facade of a meritocracy is maintained.2

Social conditions for the acquisition of knowledge

The previous section has argued that massification is a great social good in so far as it
offers more people access to the chance to acquire knowledge, but in so far as it is used to
justify economic and political policies which reduce collective provision of social services,
it may be a negative phenomenon, particularly when individuals have to go into significant
debt to access higher education. The main idea focused in this section is that the conditions
for the acquisition of specialized knowledge are different from the conditions for the
acquisition of everyday knowledge. Learners need to be introduced into it in a sustained
way, gradually acquiring greater levels of conceptual depth and breadth. This has sub-
stantial implications for curriculum design and delivery. From a curriculum design per-
spective, mastery of extensive specifically chosen facts, concepts, and principles is needed
before progress can be made, and this requires uninterrupted, extended, well-planned, and
structured educational programmes. Winch (2012) argues that systematic knowledge is
organised both in terms of the classification of its various conceptual elements and the
relationships between them, but also in terms of the procedures required to gain and to
validate knowledge.
Curriculum design, as he argues, concerns introducing novices into the conceptual
field that distinguishes the subject. This conceptual field can itself be seen in hier-
archical terms with central organising and methodological concepts at its core and
derivative concepts at the periphery. It follows that one cannot be introduced in a
serious way into a subject unless one starts to acquire at least some grasp of these
central concepts.
There is always much debate and disagreement about sequencing of curriculum, as well as
the relative importance of different concepts, and in many instances such debate is not easy
to resolve. Nonetheless, it is clear that curriculum design and delivery must be systematic
and sustained in order for learners to be meaningfully inducted into a field of learning. This
has an important implication for curriculum delivery. First, it is obvious that providing
feedback to students require low lecturer/student ratios: student numbers cannot be so large
that lecturers are unable to give substantial formative assessment on students assignments.
Subjects with requirement for a lot of written assignments make much larger demands on
lecturers in terms of marking and student feedback, and logically, numbers need to be
accordingly much lower. Detailed and regular lecturer feedback is particularly crucial for
underprepared and disadvantaged students. Second, commonly, lecturers believe that the
bigger the class, the harder it is to teach meaningfully. I draw on Collins notion of

2
Not all the analyses above apply in the same way to all countries in the world. It is frequently pointed out,
for example, that graduate unemployment in South Africa is dramatically lower than it is for population
groups with Matric or lower. This, though, is to be expected in conditions of extremely high unemploy-
mentwhere employers can choose from a huge reserve army of potential workers they are likely to select
those with the highest qualifications.

123
High Educ (2014) 67:721734 727

interaction rituals (Collins 2004) as well as his sociology of the development of knowledge
(Collins 1998) to develop a way of theoretically understanding this common intuition.
Collins (2004) shows the importance of physically assembly and interaction in sustaining
any group in society. He also shows (Collins 1998) the necessity of face-to-face interaction
between individuals in the development of knowledge. This interaction enables intellec-
tuals to keep going, and is core to the project of the acquisition and development of
knowledge. I start by explaining the logic of this argument, and then consider what it
means for large class teaching.
Collins (1998) demonstrates that the physical assembly of people who are gathered to
focus on a particular text or set of ideas has been at the core of the development and
transmission of knowledge for over 2000 years. Written texts are, of course, central to the
development of knowledge. Knowledge is contained in texts because writing enables one
to transcend the immediate present; it is a gateway to abstraction and generality (Collins
1998, p. 28). Both creating and acquiring knowledge involve time sitting alone, which is
sometimes painful and sometimes pleasant. The textual basis of knowledge perhaps con-
tributes to a feeling that face-to-face teaching is one way, but not the only way, of
acquiring and developing knowledge. But contact is as important as texts. Collins (1998,
p. 25) demonstrates that:
after the printing revolution (around 1,000 CE in Sung dynasty China; by 1450 in
Europe), it should have been increasingly the case that intellectuals carry out their
activities without ever meeting each other. There is no such trend the basic
form of intellectual communities has remained much the same for over two thousand
years: key intellectuals cluster in groups in the 1900s CE, much as in the 400s BCE.
The printing press did not make the lecture redundant, and Facebook and chat rooms will
not either. Contact through face-to-face interaction is not incidental, but integral to the
development of knowledge. The conclusion of his detailed tracing of the development of
intellectual thought over two millennia is that:
The discussion, the lecture, the argument these are the concrete activities from
which intellectual activities arise although lectures, discussions, conferences, and
other real-time gatherings would seem superfluous in a world of texts, it is exactly
the face-to-face structures which are the most constant across the entire history of
intellectual life
(Collins 1998, p. 25) [my emphasis].
Why should this be the case and can it be achieved in large classes? A key insight of
sociology is that groups are different from individuals, and that society is not just a group
of individuals, but something substantively different. This insight tends to get lost in a
world dominated by economic theories premised on methodological individualism and
postmodern ideas which emphasise individual decisions and individual identity construc-
tion. Individuals, argues Collins (1998, p. 71), do not stand apart from society as if they
are whatever they are without ever having interacted with anyone else. It is physical
interaction in groups which creates energy, group bonds, identity, and solidarity. People
can do things in groups that they could not do as individualseven individual acts, like the
individual acts of bravery of soldiers fighting together for a cause. The point, Collins
(2004, p. 34) demonstrates, is not merely the banal one that people interact best when
they are together; there is the much stronger implication that society is above all an
embodied activity (emphasis in the original).

123
728 High Educ (2014) 67:721734

Collins argument is based on a detailed and empirical sociological analysis of society,

drawing on the work of sociologists Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman, which examine
the role of interaction rituals in constituting society. Collins draws on Durkheim and
Goffman to analyze the role of ritual interactions in forming and sustaining groups (Collins
2004, 1982). He argues that A general theory of interaction ritual is simultaneously a
key to the sociology of individual thinking and emotion (Collins 1998, p. 22). According
to Collins (1998, p. 22), the following are the key ingredients of any ritual:
1. a group of at least two people is physically assembled
2. they focus attention on the same object or action, and each becomes aware that the
other is maintaining the focus
3. they share a common mood or emotion.
This theory is applied to how all groups are constituted in society, from religions, which
have particularly overt and explicit forms of ritual, to the everyday rituals of two
individuals greeting each other and complaining about the weather. Rituals develop and
sustain a sense of group identity in large groups: think here of mass rallies of political
events, where a fiery speaker and an excited crowd responsive to the speaker create a
powerful energy, sense of group identity, and of purpose. The same applies to large
religious groupings, where the symbolic rituals as well as speeches of leaders and
responses of participants have the same effect. Ritual interactions play the same role in
smaller or more informal groups, consolidating peoples sense of identity in relation to
otherseven through the everyday rituals of greeting, complaining, or making ironic
comments.
Collins (1998, p. 23) argues that, Individuals who participate in IR [interaction
rituals] are filled with emotional energy in proportion to the intensity of the interaction
Emotional energy ebbs away after a period of time; to renew it, individuals are drawn
back into ritual participation to recharge themselves. In between ritual events, however,
individuals can, to some extent, sustain the energy they got from the event through
symbols or ideas which were, through the interaction ritual, charged with emotional
energy: religious, sports, or political symbols, for example, can play this role. This
charging of energy in a symbol happens initially through people being gathered
together in a physical assembly, and focused jointly on the common object. It also
applies to knowledge. Without face-to-face rituals, Collins argues, writings and ideas
would never be charged up with emotional energy (1998, p. 27). Intellectual life, he
argues, hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only
on this level (Collins 1998, p. 26).
Collins (2004) points out that in a group interaction leaders (such as lecturers) and
followers (such as students) all gain energy from the interaction ritual; in other words, the
lecturer derives energy from the focus of students on her exposition, and the students
derive energy from the joint focus. This explains why, as Masschelein and Simons (2013,
p. 73) argue,
the teacher cannot express herself with as much strength, skill and inspiration to
an audience of one as she can to a group. The reason for this is simple but profound:
it is only by addressing the group that the teacher is forced, as it were, to be attentive
to everyone and no one in particular. The teacher talks to a group of students and, in
doing so, speaks to each one individually; she speaks to no one in particular and thus
to everyone. A purely individual relationship is not possible, or is constantly inter-
rupted, and the teacher is obliged to speak and act publicly.

123
High Educ (2014) 67:721734 729

This leads to the importance of the lecture as a specific form of teaching that is core to the
transmission and development of knowledge (Collins 1998).
One could respond to the above ideas by saying that the key aspects of the interaction
ritual can be achieved in small or large classes. Collins explanation of what makes a
lecture key to learning in higher education will show why his notion of interaction ritual
will be much weaker in large classes, where distance between the person talking and her
students reduces the quality of personal contact. In thinking about the idea of the lecture in
large classes, the idea of personal contact needs to be foregrounded.
Two essential roles that a lecture plays are:
First: a synthesis and overview of a key topic, which focus attention on the analytic
cutting edge.3
Second: it gathers an intellectual (or budding intellectual) community, focuses the
groups attention on a symbolic object, and thereby builds up distinctive emotions
around these objects. Sharing a physical space, and sharing a focus on an object, is
what builds energy and excitement, what charges up an idea.
While a good overview of or systematic introduction to the key issues in an area can be
found in well-designed distance or mixed mode courses where a primary text or online
learning pathway has been specifically developed for this purpose, it lacks the energy of
the face-to-face encounter, where both lecturer and students are focused on and absorbed
by the same object. Further, a lecturer has far more flexibility in terms of adapting the
substance and pace of their presentation to a smaller audience, while even the best-
designed text has to follow its preordained learning path without deviation. While a
discussion group can be heated and emotional, it does not allow the focus of emotional
energy on key concepts as expounded by an expert. A good lecture combines two key
ingredients, which is why Collins (1998, p. 26) argues, the key intellectual event is a
lecture or a formal debate, a period of time when an individual holds the floor to deliver a
sustained argument on a particular topic. A lecture is a peculiar kind of speech act: the
carrying out of a situationtranscending dialogue, linking past and future texts. A deep-
seated consciousness of this common activity is what links intellectuals together as a ritual
community (Collins 1998, p. 28). He distinguishes this from the give-and-take of
sociable conversations, which typically cannot reach any complex or abstract level because
the focus shifts too often. He also distinguishes it from other events dominated by a single
speaker (such as a political rally or church service) because a lecture or formal academic
debate consists not in giving orders or practical information but in expounding a
worldview, a claim for understanding taken as an end in itself, which has a particular
relationship with texts and webs of knowledge built in the past.
Collins suggests that lectures, conferences, discussions and debates are crucial for
academic work. We need to meet, to assemble, to engage, discuss, debate, and hear how
others in our field have synthesized and analyzed key texts, as well as empirical data in
relation to key texts. Physical assembly provides the energy to keep us going. In the

3
Collins (1998, p. 73) argues: the reason why books are not as valuable as personal contacts is that a
general exposure to the ideas of the time is not sufficient for first rate intellectual performance; what
personal contact with a leading practitioner does is to focus attention on those aspects of the larger mass of
ideas which constitute the analytical cutting edge. This is also why the relationship between research and
teaching is importantnot because students need to learn the specifics of a lecturers own research, but
because being an active researcher means that lecturers are in touch with the latest developments in their
discipline.

123
730 High Educ (2014) 67:721734

teaching context, it creates a group out of an assembly of individual students plus a

lecturer.
In many instances large classes do not achieve the essence of what makes a lecture
valuable. They cannot not achieve it in the best conditions let alone in conditions where
extraneous factors such as weak preparedness requires personal contact even more.
Collins demonstrates that emotional energy can be developed among people who are in
the same physical space, and sharing a focus on an object. When that object is a concept,
the listeners, whether fellow academics or students, need to be able to follow the sustained
argument of an intellectual exposition in order for that emotional energy to be achieved.
Learners need to connect with the concepts presented. Listening well to a lecture is a non-
passive activity, involving sitting silently in the audience, sifting through the ideas being
presented, deciding how to incorporate them into our existing knowledge. The lecturer
needs to find a way of engaging students with the field, presenting overviews and intro-
ductions to key concepts and ideas in such a way that they make sense to the students, and
fire their interest, and in such a way that the students are introduced to and engaged with
key texts. A large class makes it difficult (and often impossible) to create a shared physical
space. To sustain interest and engagement a shared energy and experience between lecturer
and students is required.
To engage its audience, a lecture has to be pitched appropriately to them. It is difficult
to pitch a lecture appropriately to a large group of students. The energy of an interaction
in a group in which individuals can make eye contact with each other, and feel as if
there is some direct engagement, is easily lost in a large group interaction. It can be
sustained in a political rally partly because object of focus is not the expounding of an
intellectual concept, and partly through physical interactionchanting and so on. This
cannot happen in a teaching context which needs to be sustained over time, and in which
the object of focus is complex. A degree of physical proximity, that enables the lecturer
to connect with students through eye contact with many of them, is needed. Secondly,
large classes often entail addressing divergent levels of acquisition and interest, which
introduces differentiation that cannot be controlled by lecturers. In these circumstances, it
is difficult for the lecturer to gauge students involvement and the degree to which they
are following her talk, and even more difficult for her to do anything about itas
modifying it would still mean boring some or losing others. The boredom of some of the
group affects not only those left behind or far ahead of the lecture, but the whole group:
what is lost is sense of group engagement with an object of focus. Instead, a low energy
level is created for all students. Thirdly, the less education individuals have, and the
more divergent the educational experiences are within the group, the less plausible it is
that the lecturer can sustain a clear synthesis of ideas and individual attention on a
symbolic object. Students who have little experience in engaging in complex ideas,
reading and critiquing texts, and mastering concepts, are likely to be the most disad-
vantaged by finding themselves in a large class, as they are the most likely to not follow
the exposition of concepts. This is aggravated by the contemporary tendency to problem-
based curricula, where the logical sequence of disciplinary ideas is not fore grounded in
curriculum design.
Of course not all teaching is good, and not all lectures are good. Everything can be done
better or worse. This however does not absolve us from addressing what form of inter-
action is most suitable for achieving the energy created through group focus, which Collins
demonstrates is central to knowledge acquisition.

123
High Educ (2014) 67:721734 731

Will technology save us?

The possibilities opened by rapidly developing technology are widely seen as offering
alternative, and possibly better, ways of delivering learning programmes to greater num-
bers of learners. Further, it is believed that young students inherent use of and excitement
about cell phone technology as well as social networking sites should be harnessed for their
possibilities in learning. Massification also means that many working people want to (or
feel obliged to) obtain further qualifications, leading universities to consider more flexible
modes of delivery, which are mainly based on reduced face-to-face contact.
Morrow (2007) argues that the massification of education, at all levels, has forced us to
question the very nature of education and of teaching, and that we need a new notion of
what it means to teach. He suggests that instead of seeing teaching as a person talking to a
class, we should define it as an activity guided by the intention to promote systematic
learning. Once we have made this shift, he argues, we can see that teaching can be done as
well, if not better, through carefully written course packs, accompanied by carefully
structured assignments. Morrow suggests that the more limited time available for contact
can be used for discussion with students. Elsewhere (Allais 2013) I have engaged in more
detail with this argument, which has considerable merit. I suggest that Collins offers a
better way of making sense of the essence of educationwhat teaching meansand it
precisely includes a talking head (accompanied by listening heads, and reading and
writing). Face-to-face interaction with students that creates excitement and emotional
energy associated with areas of knowledge that enables students to learn further on their
own. The energy generated by the physical assembly of individuals is something which
should not be undermined, and this physical assembly cannot be done away with without a
serious loss to the educational process. It may be that people who want to study through
distance education while working have to lose out on this or not study at all, but it does not
follow that the primary delivery of the curriculum for most students should ignore the need
for face-to-face contact.
Collins argument about the lecture also provides insight into why having a text-based
introduction to key concepts, with contact time reduced to discussion groups, is prob-
lematic. In discussion groups a tutor prods reluctant students to share their limited
understanding of a topic. The main ideas which students are exposed to are those of their
fellow students. This does not mean that such discussion is unimportantit is a crucial part
of the learning process for students to have to articulate their own views, formulate their
understandings, and engage with each other. But reducing contact time to this mode
deprives students of something important: a physical assembly of people in which the key
issues and debates are expounded by an expert, who sets an example for them to follow in
how to articulate their own views and formulate their understandings.
Curriculum delivery may require a combination of instruction in abstract concepts,
description of empirical examples, and acquaintance through experiments. It is frequently
necessary for a teacher to repeatedly draw to pupils attention of the relatedness of different
concepts through the development of their inferential abilities. All of this implies a rela-
tionship between lecturer and student, and explains why a mediocre lecture contact-based
is better than a top expert on a screen.
Further, for students who are not used to reading, and who are weak readers, the
maximum amount of time needs to be spent on reading the key texts of the course. Putting
them in a situation in which they have to read more, in order to access these texts, may
further disadvantage them. They can be enticed into the actual texts far more quickly and
efficiently through face-to-face engagement in which the introduction itself does not oblige

123
732 High Educ (2014) 67:721734

them to read. A video of a lecturer could be presented as an alternative. There is certainly

enormous possibility in video technology. It seems particularly useful where a specific
concept can be explained, and students can replay and replay until they have mastered it.
But it is unsuited for sustained curriculum delivery, though, in the sense of replacing the
face-to-face lecture, for the reasons described above.
The many arguments in favour of introducing technology into higher education include
the possibilities for interactivity. But interactivity, regardless of the medium for interac-
tion, requires low numbers, regardless of whether the engagement between students and
lecturers happens through email, chat rooms, discussion groups, or social media.
Uses of technology in education should be explored in creative ways and harnessed for
whatever possibilities they contain. Much can be donebells and whistles to make lectures
more fun, but ultimately, it is the ideas that learners need to get excited by. We cant
compete with the cinema. When making decisions about technology in course design and
delivery, we should bear in mind the tendency of policy makers and educationalists to
fetishize both newness in general and new technology in specific. The ever-increasing
availability of computers and cell phones, and developments such as social networking
sites, are invoked by contemporary reformers as new and better vehicles for delivering
curricula to todays youth (for example, Murgatroyd 2010). This type of argument has been
a feature of educational reform for at least a century. Capitalism creates an inherent
tendency to fetishize technology, because of the key role of technologies which are always
improving or replacing previous ones in increasing profits starts dominating general per-
ceptions of the value of new technologies4 (Harvey 2005). We need to think about the
educational process, when thinking about what technology can achieve. For example,
while in theory, online learning programmes can be designed in a sustained and systematic
manner, in practice they may not lend themselves to sustained and structured curriculum
delivery: many ICT-based platforms are about small pieces of informationsound bites as
opposed to propositions based on concepts and objects of analysis woven together in a
structured and to some extent hierarchical web. The power of these media can easily
dominate curriculum design. Surfing the web, or online courses based on shifting to
hypertext, lead to a horizontal organization of bits of information, but may not be con-
ducive to mastering structured bodies of knowledge. This may not be insurmountable, but
it does suggest caution about how ICT can and cannot be used in curriculum delivery.
Technology can also be extremely distracting.
Most importantly, if, as if often the case, reducing personnel costs is a frequently a
major reason for introducing new technologies to education (besides other unphilan-
thropical aims such as dumping obsolete technology on poor countries or getting early
brand loyalty from school children through cell phone donations) it is likely to undermine
what makes education valuable in the first place.

Conclusion

In order to think through the possibilities for expanding class sizes, lecturers in higher
education need a coherent notion of our work, its value, and its limitations. I have argued that
4
Harvey argues (2005, p. 68): The neoliberal theory of technological change relies on the coercive powers
of competition to drive the search for new products, new production methods, and new organizational forms.
This drive becomes so deeply embedded in entrepreneurial common sense that it becomes a fetish belief:
that there is a technological fix for each and every problem.

123
High Educ (2014) 67:721734 733

our obligation is to teach and develop knowledge, to as many students as require and want
such knowledge, to the extent that this is affordable to society as a whole. I have argued further
that face-to-face contact is vital for the acquisition of such knowledge, and that the lecture
form is intrinsically valuable, and not just an outdated and no longer relevant method of
conveying a curriculum. People who need and want education should have a meaningful
chance of acquiring and developing knowledge. If we are thinking about the needs of students
for access to education, we need to think about what it is that we are giving them access to, and
what makes it really worthwhile. Massification without a concomitant increase in lecturer
numbers may well undermine what makes our enterprise valuable in the first place. If we
cannot afford this as a society, then we cannot afford to massify higher education.
I have also cautioned about many of the claims made about the benefit of higher
education to individuals and society. Solving the problems faced by individuals who want
to get good jobs does not lie within our reach in our capacity as lecturers. What is required
is economic policies that aim at full employment and that give greater power to
employeesthe reversal of policies for the past 30 years that have eroded collective
bargaining and workers power. If there is a huge reserve army of labour for employers to
select from, they will demand more and more of individuals, with less and less compen-
sation to them. The alternative is to oblige people to gain ever-higher levels of qualifi-
cations with the possibility of a job but the increasing likelihood of unemployment or
precarious work. This is a kind of prisoners dilemmawhile it is rational for each
individual to continue to pursue higher levels of education, it may make things worse off
for everyone in the long term. Offering less and less education to more and more learners
will exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the current problems.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Kelly Gilespie, Yael Shalem, Tessa Welch, and two anonymous reviewers
for thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This paper draws on my chapter (Allais 2013),
Losing contact with students in large class teaching, published in D. Hornsby, R. Osman, & J. De Matos Ala
(Eds.), Teaching Large Classes: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Quality Tertiary Education.

References

Allais, S. (2013). Losing contact with students in large class teaching. In D. Hornsby, R. Osman, & J. De
Matos Ala (Eds.), Teaching large classes: Interdisciplinary perspectives for quality tertiary education.
Stellenbosch: SUN Press.
Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post industrial society. New York: Basic Books.
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (Revised ed.).
London: Taylor Francis.
Brand, U., & Sekler, N. (Eds.). (2009). Postneoliberalism: A beginning debate. Special Edition of Devel-
opment Dialogue, (51), 5211.
Brown, P. (2006). The opportunity trap. In H. Lauder, P. Brown, J. Dillabough, & A. H. Halsey (Eds.),
Education, globalization, and social change (pp. 295307). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, P., & Lauder, H. (2006). Globalization, knowledge and the myth of the magnet economy. In H.
Lauder, P. Brown, J. Dillabough, & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Education, globalization, and social change
(pp. 295307). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, P., & Lauder, H. (2009). Economic globalization, skill formation and the consequences for higher
education. In M. W. Apple, S. J. Ball, & L. A. Gandin (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of
the sociology of education (pp. 229240). London: Routledge.
Brown, P., Lauder, H., & Ashton, D. (2008). Education, globalisation and the knowledge economy. London:
Teaching and Learning Research Programme.
Brown, P., Lauder, H., & Ashton, David. (2011). The global auction. The broken promises of education,
jobs, and incomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Callinicos, A. (2001). Against the third way. Cambridge: Polity Press.

123
734 High Educ (2014) 67:721734

Carlaw, K., Oxley, L., Walker, P., Thorns, D., & Nuth, M. (2012). Beyond the hype. Intellectual property
and the knowledge society/knowledge economy. In D. W. Livingstone & D. Guile (Eds.), The
knowledge economy and lifelong learning. A critical reader. Rotterdam: Sense.
Charlot, B. (2009). School and the pupils work. In Ssifo. Educational Sciences Journal (Vol. 10,
pp. 8794). Presented at the Conference given at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
of the University of Lisbon.
Collins, R. (1979). The credential society. New York: Academic Press.
Collins, R. (1982). Sociological insight. An introduction to non-obvious sociology. New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Collins, R. (1998). The sociology of philosophies. A global theory of intellectual change. Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Collins, R. (2013). The end of middle-class work: No more escapes. In I. Wallerstein, R. Collins, M. Mann,
G. Derluguian, & C. Calhoun (Eds.), Does capitalism have a future?. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crouch, C. (2011). The strange non-death of neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Drucker, P. (1969). The age of discontinuity: Guidelines to our changing society. London: Heinemann.
Foley, G. (1994). Adult education and capitalist reorganisation. Studies in the Education of Adults, 26(2),
121143.
Furnee, C. A., Groot, W., & van den Brink, H. M. (2008). The health effects of education: A meta-analysis.
The European Journal of Public Health, 18(4), 417421. doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckn028.
Giddens, A. (1998). The third way. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Grubb, N., & Lazerson, M. (2004). The education gospel: The economic power of schooling. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Kennedy, P. (2012). The knowledge economy. Education, work, and the struggle to (Re-)regulate the
distinction between necessary and free labour time. In D. W. Livingstone & D. Guile (Eds.), The
knowledge economy and lifelong learning. A critical reader (pp. 163183). Rotterdam: Sense.
Lin, N. (2001). Social capital: A theory of social structure and action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Livingstone, D. W. (2012). Debunking the knowledge economy. The limits of human capital theory. In D.
W. Livingstone & D. Guile (Eds.), The knowledge economy and lifelong learning. A critical reader
(pp. 85116). Rotterdam: Sense.
Livingstone, D. W., & Guile, D. (2012). The knowledge economy and lifelong learning. A critical reader.
Rotterdam: Sense.
Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2013). In Defence of the School. A Public Issue. (Trans: McMartin, J.).
Leuven: Education, Culture & Society Publishers.
Meyer, H.-D., St John, E. P., Chankseliani, M., & Uribe, L. (Eds.). (2013). Fairness in access to higher
education in a global perspective. Reconciling excellence, efficiency, and justice. Rotterdam: Sense.
Moore, R. (2004). Education and society: Issues and explorations in the sociology of education. Cambridge: Polity.
Moore, R. (2009). Towards the sociology of truth. London: Continuum.
Morrow, W. (2007). Learning to teach in South Africa. Cape Town: HSRC.
Muller, J. (2000). Reclaiming knowledge. In P. Wexler, & I. Goodson (Eds.). London and New York:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Murgatroyd, S. (2010). Wicked Problems and the work of the school. European Journal of Education 45
(2, Part 1): 259279.
Newfield, C. (2010). The structure and silence of the cognitariat. Edu-Factory Web Journal, 1026.
Riviera, L. A. (2011). Ivies, extracurriculars, and exclusion: Elite employers use of educational credentials.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. Special edition on New Directions in Educational
Credentialism, 29(1), 7190.
Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2005). The worldwide expansion of higher education in the twentieth century.
American Sociological Review, 70, 898920.
Spreen, C. A. (2001). Globalization and educational policy borrowing: Mapping outcomes-based education
in South Africa (Doctoral thesis). Columbia University.
Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. London: Collins.
Tomlinson, S. (2009). Education in a post-welfare society (2nd ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Winch, C. (2012). Curriculum design and epistemic ascent. Paper presented at the seminar: Disciplines,
Professional and School Knowledge. Final seminar of the Alternative Education Futures for a
Knowledge Society project, February 23rd 2012, London Knowledge Laboratory, Institute of Edu-
cation, University of London.
Young, M. (2008). Bringing knowledge back. In From social constructivism to social realism in the
sociology of knowledge. London and New York: Routledge.

123