Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings

Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings

Educational Research VOLUME 4 Aims & Scope Freedom of inquiry in educational research can no longer be taken for granted. Narrow definitions of what constitutes ‘scientific’ research, funding criteria that enforce particular research methods, and policy decision processes that ignore any research that is not narrowly utilitarian, in many countries, create a context that discourages scholarship of a more speculative, exploratory, or critical sort. In this series, internationally leading scholars in philosophy and history of education engage in discourse that is sophisticated and nuanced for understanding contemporary debates. Thus social research, and therefore educational research, is again focused on the distinctive nature of what it studies: a social activity where questions of meaning and value must be addressed, and where interpretation and judgment play a crucial role. This educational research takes into account the historical and cultural context and brings clarity to what actually constitutes science in this area. The timely issues that are addressed in this series bear witness to the belief that educational theory cannot help but go beyond a limited conception of empirical educational research to provide a real understanding of education as a human practice. They surpass the rather simple cause-and effect rhetoric and thus transgress the picture of performativity that currently keeps much of the talk about education captive. The authors are united in the belief that ‘there is a place within the social sciences in general’, and within the discipline of education in particular, for ‘foundational’ approaches that enable the systematic study of educational practice from a discipline-orientated approach. Educational Research: Why ‘What Works’ Doesn’t Work Series: Educational Research, Vol. 1 Smeyers, Paul; Depaepe, Marc (Eds.) 2006, VI, 195 p., Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-5307-8 Educational Research: Networks and Technologies Series: Educational Research, Vol. 2 Smeyers, Paul; Depaepe, Marc (Eds.) 2007, VI, 230 p., Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-6612-2 Educational Research: the Educationalization of Social Problems Series: Educational Research, Vol. 3 Smeyers, Paul; Depaepe, Marc (Eds.) 2008, VI, 250 p., Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-9722-5

Paul Smeyers · Marc Depaepe Editors

Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings

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Editors Prof. Paul Smeyers Universiteit Gent Faculteit Psychologie en Pedagogische Wetenschappen Dunantlaan 1 9000 Gent Belgium [email protected]

Dr. Marc Depaepe Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Campus Kortrijk Subfaculteit Psychologie en Pedagogische Sabbelaan 53 8500 Kortrijk Belgium [email protected]

ISBN 978-90-481-3248-5 e-ISBN 978-90-481-3249-2 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009936782 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Contents

1 Rhetoric and Argument in the Language of Education and of Educational Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe 2 Beyond Arguments and Ideas: Languages of Education . . . . . . Daniel Tröhler 3 Sources in the Making of Histories of Education: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Forms of Reasoning from the Historian’s Workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marc Depaepe and Frank Simon 4 Educational Formalism and the Language of Goals in American Education, Educational Reform, and Educational History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David F. Labaree 5 The Language of Education and the Language of Educational Research: The Knowledge Economy, Citizenship and Subjectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naomi Hodgson

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6 Parenting in a Technological Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Geertrui Smedts

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7 Capability and the Language of Educational Research . . . . . . . Michael Watts

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8 A Rhetoric for Educational Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lynda Stone

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9 Arguments and Proofs About Arguments and Proofs . . . . . . . . Jean Paul Van Bendegem and Kathleen Coessens

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Evidence and Argumentation in Educational Research . . . . . . . Nicholas C. Burbules

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Contents

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Half a Language: Listening in the City of Words . . . . . . . . . . Richard Smith

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Revisiting Achilles’ Sadness that No Method Can Be Found . . . . Paul Smeyers

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Reasoning from Educational Research to Policy . . . . . . . . . . . David Bridges

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Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

Rhetoric and Argument in the Language of Education and of Educational Research Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe

What does it mean to say that something has been ‘proven’ in research contexts? What is the nature of the arguments one relies on and what kind of reasoning is offered to convince readers? These questions are often posed when educational research is being scrutinized. Of course such questions do not only apply to the arena of education but also apply mutatis mutandis to research in general, scholarship and many other areas of human life. There was a time when, in dealing with these issues, one referred to one or other metaphysical or even religious stance, but nowadays this has become very unpopular. Since the so-called postmodern (Nietzschean?) critique, serious doubts have been raised about rationality itself, which for many, bound by the legacy of the Enlightenment, offered the favourable yardstick by which one could evaluate the veracity of arguments. Incredulity towards meta-narratives, however, cannot possibly be the end of the story. The scholar or researcher, having come to terms with the problems of generalizability, cannot simply indulge herself in either relativism or particularity. She should in one way or another deal with the tension (that is always there) between the particular and the universal, and between this case and what generally demands to be dealt with – the problems posed by human life in general or education in particular can neither be ignored nor left alone. The scholar/researcher has to both act and base what she does on sound thinking wherever that can be found. The contributors to this book take both the social practice of education and educational research seriously. They accept that rhetoric, in one way or another, plays a part in the complex process of argumentation that is necessarily characterized by the historical context in which one operates. In doing so, the contributors clearly distance themselves from the various kinds of positivism that have been embraced by many educational researchers, particularly since this area of scholarship turned towards the paradigm of experimentation, which, in its fashionable formulation, takes the form of randomized field trials. For the contributors to this volume it is not only means-end reasoning in itself (and its natural evolution into a technology) that is problematic but the way in which such reasoning obfuscates serious debate about P. Smeyers (B) Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_1,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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the ends of education/educational research. They show that ends cannot be avoided and thus how questions of ‘value’ should necessarily be taken into account at every stage of educational research. The contributors are also sensitive to the ‘linguistic turn’, how language (or should we say discourse) ‘creates’ a reality. They show how language constructs (though not in ex nihilo fashion) particular practices and demonstrate how these practices change. The contributors consider how these processes give shape to the field of education scholars of various kinds address in their studies. They argue that the pluralism that emanates from this development, the multifariousness that goes with it, should provide neither an alibi for inactivity nor an excuse for embracing relativism. Rather they feel that such pluralism and multifariousness present a condition that every contemporary researcher in education ought to be aware of. Obviously, our contributors want to be part of the ongoing discussion but realize more than ever that their voice is just one of many. So if the rhetorical dimension characterizes both the discourse of education and the argumentation of educational research and scholarship, what follows for the characterization of the educational debate in its many manifestations? Given the aims of this Research Community (Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education: Evaluation and Evolution of the Criteria for Education Research) how should philosophy and history of education itself be characterized and how can academics from these areas operate within the community of scholars and practitioners at large? The collection starts with two chapters both addressing meta-level issues in regard to the language(s) of education and the singling out or prioritizing of particular sources in the history of education. Daniel Tröhler argues that there are only a very limited number of fundamental modes that mould the perception of the world and the discussion about education. He argues that these modes are essentially linguistic. To support this claim, he looks at the distinction made between parole and langue and shows how this characterizes the political philosophy of the so-called Cambridge School of the history of ideas. Subsequently this linguistic-political concept is compared to Post-Modernism, in particular to Foucault’s philosophy. The paper identifies and describes three different educational languages that seem to dominate the Western discourses on education: the classical-republican and Reformed Protestant language with its core concept of public virtue, the neoAugustinian and Lutheran language with the concept of Bildung and the language of the (French) Enlightenment with its focus on scientific knowledge and public rationality. The author argues that it is disputable whether these three langues, in which educational paroles of the Western world are expressed, are the only ones and claims that it would make sense to try and identify more of them. This would make it possible to take up the important task of reconstructing how interaction with various paroles has changed langues over the last 250 years and thereby identify the arguments or paroles used by actors, agents or exponents. Addressing the workplace of the historian of education, Marc Depaepe and Frank Simon reflect on their own production of ‘histories’ of education and show how sources function as arguments and even as proofs within the ‘historiographical operation’ – a concept they credit to Michel de Certeau. Traditionally, the historical craft is characterized by tenacious research on ‘sources’, but dealing with such primary records cannot be dissociated

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from acts of interpretation. Before the Second World War, the unfortunate Marc Bloch argued that ‘understanding’ is the key word for any historical craftsman. From this perspective, the frequently discussed historiographic ‘turns’ since the 1960s and 1970s have to be qualified. It seems to Depaepe and Simon that the methodological advantage of using oral histories, ego documents, statistics, pictures, films, material objects of school culture and other ‘forgotten’ sources from everyday life in education was often exaggerated due to the enthusiasm for the ‘newness’ of the approach. On the basis of their own research experience they develop the thesis that there is no single privileged source for research in the history of education. Nuanced and contextualized ‘histories’ of education have to rest on a combination of all sorts of source material. Historical research is more than a search for the definitive source: a historian who is in the grip of sources necessarily produces descriptive works that do not go beyond explanations generated ‘from’ these sources. It is not the source that stands at the beginning of the historiographical operation but the research question, and it is this question that is decisive for the use of sources of all kinds, including traditional ones (like the old journals of education made by teachers and educators for teachers and educators – the so-called pedagogical press which is labelled by the authors as the ‘mother’ of all sources in history of education). The answer to this research question is not only and not primarily dependent on the sources that are used but instead on the interpretation formulated on the basis of these artefacts from the past. Thus the authors argue that the workplace of the historian is filled not only with sources but with an entire arsenal of tools: concepts, theories, paradigms and the like. There is no ultimate (or preferred) source as there can be no final interpretation, argument, proof and/or explanation. From this perspective, accusations, whether correct or not, of being ‘iconophobe’, do not say very much: what counts for histories of education is valid results. The next three chapters in the collection address the importance of particular kinds of language in the context of education and child rearing. David Labaree argues that schools are better at expressing social goals than at operationalizing those goals in a manner that might actually realize them. School reform efforts are better at changing the rhetorical commitment of schools to particular educational goals than at bringing the teaching and learning in schools in line with these goals. Finally, historical studies of education are better at identifying the evolving language of educational goals than at detailing the impact of these goals on the core pedagogical relation between teacher and student. Thus, Labaree argues that the language of goals dominates education, educational reform and historical research on education. His paper explores the central elements of education’s language fetish, the historical and sociological roots of this condition and its consequences for education and society. The focus is on American education, but much of the argument resonates with education in other settings, since it tries to tell a story about the social role that education is asked to play in modern liberal democracies. The analysis starts by showing how educational reform movements are primarily efforts to reorder educational goals through a review of the evolving rhetoric of reform in the United States. Drawing on the case of the movement for progressive education Labaree then shows how reformers are better at reforming educational goals than educational practice.

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He indicates how historical research on education is focused more on goals than outcomes and makes this claim by drawing on an analysis of two major histories of the progressive movement. The chapter then moves on to explore the factors that account for the failure of reforms to meet their goals. Particular attention is focused on the loose coupling of the system, the weakness of administrative control over instruction and the special problems of teaching as a practice. The chapter closes with a discussion of why we are willing to tolerate an educational system that fails to realize the goals we impose on it. The operation of ‘citizenship’ in the language of European education policy is explored by Naomi Hodgson through a tripartite analysis of the knowledge economy. She focuses first on the assumption that the knowledge economy is an economy based on a population of maximally educated individuals. A discussion of examples of literature from the field of education policy sociology on the creation of Europe as a policy space highlights the limitations of assumptions on which such an analysis is based. Hodgson seeks a broader treatment, informed by the perspective of governmentality, by focusing, second, on the role of knowledge of the self by the self. This is read in relation to the discourses of citizenship and accountability. The third section is concerned with the role of history in the construction of Europe as an entity and, therefore, the importance of attention to this in questioning how we are asked to understand ourselves as citizens. Rather than providing a critique of the selective nature of the history mobilized in the construction of European citizenship, Hodgson draws on analyses of Foucault’s work on self-writing. Hodgson is concerned with the ethical aspect of Foucault’s historical work and the possibilities for resistance this offers, possibilities that are not taken on board by orthodox approaches to governmentality (within educational research). However, she also recognizes the risk, when identifying such possibilities, of succumbing to the forms of accountability Foucault’s ideas offer resistance from. Parenting in a technological age is discussed by Geertrui Smedts. She argues that technology is not just a tool but also an amalgamation of conceptual, institutional and interactional issues that occupy the space of technical reason. In this space, the conception of parental identity is narrowed down in such a way that the place of caring is in danger of being lost. Parents are increasingly required to adopt knowledge on parenting instead of adapting it to their child’s needs. Using the Heideggerian idea of Enframing, she argues that educational experts and practitioners need to release parenting from this technological straitjacket. It should be recognized that (writing about) being a parent requires the acknowledgment that caring for your children is about questioning the borders of Enframing rather than accepting its boundaries uncritically. She continues by arguing that experts, in order to provoke parents to care, ought to create space for ethical questions concerning how the Information and Communication Technology we once managed has come to manage us. The following five chapters turn more explicitly to particular languages of educational research, to what research does, what it enables one to do and how it could or should proceed. Michael Watts focuses on capability and starts from the assertion that the hyperreal permeates the field of higher education and thus significantly influences research in this field. He argues that much educational research is

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dominated by utilitarian concepts of well-being that fail to take into account individual freedoms to make use of educational commodities in pursuit of the ‘good life’. Watts maintains that this generates adaptive preferences that inhibit individual freedoms. Here, he wants to consider what proofs and arguments can be deployed to part this veil of hyperreality when so much research informs and sustains it. In doing so, Watts turns to counterfactual arguments (what would have been the case had the facts been different) as a means of drawing other forms of reasoning into the language of higher education research. However, he claims that counterfactual arguments are ‘philosophically puzzling’ and seek to ‘elucidate the less obscure by the more obscure’. To sidestep this epistemological puzzle, he makes use of the capability approach (which informs much of his own research on higher education) and its argument for the use of interpersonal comparisons in assessing individual well-being. The counterfactual nature of the capability approach requires well-being assessments to take into account what an individual would do under different circumstances – or, in Sen’s words, what she would do if she controlled the levers of power. Would, for example, the working class student choose not to go to university if she were middle class? What choices would she make if she could see through the hyperreal? Whereas historical analyses advocated by Jon Elster take into account what individuals preferred, they overlook other forms of adaptation. The counterfactual analyses of the capability approach address what individuals ‘would’ prefer and can therefore account for forms of adaptation that would otherwise be overlooked. This places the researcher in a position of privilege and power that enables her to see through the hyperreal. Such argumentation provides a language to frame the structures within which individual well-being can flourish even as individuals confront the complexities of a hyperreal higher education system. The chapter is, in short, an argument for the use of capability arguments in educational research. The chapter by Lynda Stone, which describes a rhetoric for educational research, is divided into two parts. It frames an exemplar and its first part deals with (1) rhetoric as tradition and extension, (2) overviewing and updating the historic tradition of rhetoric and (3) posing rhetoric as integral to all inquiry. The chapter looks at the relationship between rhetoric and a number of fields including philosophy, philosophy of education and educational research. It also examines the rhetoric of ‘science’ in both weak and strong senses. Part two of the chapter principally focuses on the exemplar – Standards for reporting on empirical social science research in AERA publications. Literary critic Wayne Booth’s broad position on rhetoric and his analysis of fiction plays a special role in the formulation of the chapter’s argument. His notions of the implied author and its ethos are applied to the exemplar. The next chapter, by Jean Paul Van Bendegem and Kathleen Coessens, is on ‘arguments’ and ‘proofs’ about arguments and proofs. The authors examine the relations between argumentation on the one hand and (mathematical) proofs on the other. Thus they claim that the following observations hold: (1) that there is a strong opposition between argumentation-cum-rhetoric and (mathematical) proofs and (2) that the latter is considered more desirable than the former, because of a presumed superiority. The main part of the paper is devoted to the refutation of these two claims. A brief sketch of ‘the ideal logical world’ is presented and the authors argue that though the logical

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dream of absolute certainty has not necessarily turned into a nightmare, it now looks like a rather unpleasant story. But, so they argue, if (formal) logic is not the source of the claimed superiority, and if their refutation is solid, then another explanation is required. Why do (mathematical) proofs still, as all evidence indicates, occupy such a privileged position? It is their view that the particular way the mathematical community is organized is the key factor when trying to understand this process. The establishment of a rigid and shared modus operandi seems to bring forth the required certainty. One requires a particular and highly specialized training as a mathematician to be accepted within the mathematical community, and thus a link with education is established. In the final section, the authors want to warn against ‘over-refutation’ – Van Bendegem and Coessens are not trying to maintain that there is no distinction at all between arguments and proofs. They conclude by posing an open question to the future – will it be possible to find a common framework against which arguments and proofs can be evaluated. Nick Burbules argues that one of the potential benefits of electronic publishing is that it creates the possibility for making the raw, unfiltered data (of whatever type) that underlie a research book or article openly available to the readers of that publication. This essay focuses on the potential benefits of such an approach for developing new procedures for checking the credibility of work and for building new kinds of scholarly communities of inquiry. Richard Smith indicates that philosophers have been slow to explore the topic of listening, which in the western tradition tends to be cast as the poor relation to the power of discourse. This is all the more peculiar given the fact that the importance of listening appears to be emphasized at the very inauguration of philosophy in many of the Platonic dialogues. There it is introduced in ways that problematize any easy distinction between philosophy and dialectic on the one hand and philosophy and sophistry on the other. If we take listening seriously, employing a careful attention to words and what is done with them, the distinction between philosophy and literature also begins to look less than clear-cut. Acknowledgement of the irreducibly figurative nature of language, and thus of the language of philosophy, takes us in the same direction as Richard Rorty’s contrast between edifying and systematic philosophy and his repudiation of simplistic notions of truth. Philosophy practised in a spirit of listening would be less aggressive and less vulnerable to the attraction of scientific paradigms. It could then make common cause with interpretive social science and relish dialogue not as a semi-technical method for reaching determinate, final answers but for the sake of attuned, attentive conversation itself: a possibility which the Platonic dialogues also imagine, even as they cast it as problematic. The final two chapters investigate how the relationship between educational research and the broader field of education might be taken forward. Paul Smeyers deals with several issues pertinent to educational research – to who should one talk? How should one go about this and for what purpose? He starts by questioning why it is that the preoccupation with method still characterizes so much of the educational debate. If the arguments of philosophers and historians who have dealt with so many issues concerning educational research fail to settle the debate (assuming that their arguments are valid), why does it seem impossible to move on to a discussion of education itself? Smeyers argues that one answer to this question is

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that we are unwilling to live with complexity. Second, he maintains that often what one is really interested in is ‘usefulness’ over and above other concerns regarding what is important for human life (what is relevant, what makes sense without necessarily being useful for something else). Starting from Peter Winch’s discussion of Lewis Carroll’s What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, Smeyers analyses the claims that accompany results and ideas argued for in published collections by the Research Community, thus dealing with arguments in the philosophy and history of education. He distinguishes between arguments that can be characterized as ‘seeing the point of what is argued for’ and those addressing ‘what one should take into account’. Smeyers gives numerous examples to sustain his particular reading. He concludes (1) that the dominant mode of doing research should be a never-ending quest involving reflection on ‘method’; (2) that the logic of educational research is of (and not off) the world; (3) that research should be seen as a performative intervention; and finally (4) that educational research only adds one voice to the ongoing dialogue of all those involved in the field of education. In his chapter David Bridges addresses reasoning from Educational research to policy. His paper begins by observing (1) the frequently expressed disappointment at the failure of educational research to influence policy (2) the powerful contemporary discourse which calls for ‘evidence based practice’ and (3) the introduction of evidence from empirical research into the often rather serendipitous processes of policy formation. Bridges suggests that all of these issues invite more careful consideration regarding the way in which we might or should reason (or otherwise move) from research to policy and practice. The author draws on the ethics of belief as well as more immediately recognizable epistemological principles to make his argument. He draws on these areas to establish a normative perspective on the way in which policy ought to be made. This should be distinguished from the primary concern of most policy research that focuses on how policy is made. He therefore aligns himself with the ‘evidence based policy’ movement when making the distinction between sources that might legitimately inform policy and those that have a weaker claim on attention. However, he departs from the narrower constructions favoured by the empirically based policy movement as regards the sort of research that might count for this purpose. Thus he argues instead for a very eclectic range of resources drawn from every part of the educational research community. Such resources would include ‘evidence’ but also critique, deconstruction, narrative, individual cases, theoretical framing, etc. The paper acknowledges, however, that there is much more to policy making than can be derived in any simple way from research. Policy and policy makers are not occupying a vacuum of ideas that they are waiting for research to fill, and policy is never developed ab nihilo or derived from research via some simple algorithm. Policy makers already have a plethora of experience, ideas and advice, so they are always in the role of co-constructing the significance of research (if they pay any attention to it at all) and locating it in relation to the other sources of their thinking. Policy judgement has to be thought of as a form of practical judgement (phronesis), which can be informed by research but relies on a much wider range of understanding. These considerations, along with observation of the complex considerations, which (rightly) inform policy judgements, lead Bridges to argue for the importance

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of policy formation as a deliberative process in which a variety of voices (including, if they are lucky, those of the research community) have a role to play. Researchers should not, however, expect this process to be one in which their voices will carry special authority or one in which their participation will be entirely comfortable.

Chapter 2

Beyond Arguments and Ideas: Languages of Education Daniel Tröhler

2.1 Introduction Whether or not education counts as an academic discipline is being disputed. This uncertainty is connected with both the object of educational research – the educational field with its public discourses, organizations, and personae – and the mode of research and academic discussion. These two elements, the field and research in the field, are closely connected, because the research questions regulate (to a large extent) what constitutes the field. The dominant modes of research define the way in which the educational field is perceived. For instance, today’s globally dominant large-scale assessment research mainly defines the educational field in terms of core skills or school disciplines that are to be learnt. To put it simply, the educational field is a construction formed by those with the power to construct it. Unlike today’s educational leaders, the people in power were not always supporters of empiricism. In early 18th-century Germany, in Halle for instance, Protestant ministers dominated educational debate und thus construed the educational field in theological terms – knowledge was certainly less important than devotion. In contrast, around 1800, neo-humanism became a significant force in Germany. Neo-humanists tried to free the world from contingency by developing the ideology of pure humanity (whatever was understood by this), an end that was to be achieved by education. The catchword was Bildung. In almost the same manner as in Halle, knowledge was not crucial to the ideal of humanity, for Bildung built on aesthetic ideals instead. Greek and Latin became the central school subjects in order that the student might perfect his soul by immersing himself in the world of Greek and Roman Antiquity. This skeptical stance towards knowledge remained dominant in the German tradition up until the 20th century. It was implicit to the dominant paradigm known as Geisteswissen-schaftliche Pädagogik (Tröhler, 2003).

D. Tröhler (B) University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected]

P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_2,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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During the period that Bildung became a core educational term in Germany (see Horlacher, 2004) the discussion in France was dominated by the French Enlightenment. This approach was rational, empirical, national, and essentially based on the modern sciences, mathematics being a core educational (meaning ‘school’) subject (Osterwalder, 2007). By the middle of the 19th century in both France and Germany, the educational debate took a more nationalistic turn; each country formed the impression that it was leading the world and that its position should be strengthened by education ((Tröhler, 2006a). The national vocational education systems were erected in the late 19th century because people believed that national predominance derives from a strong economy and a strong economy is the result of better education and vocational educational practices. The question of whether or not education is an academic discipline depends on the verdict as regards to the question of whether or not it has succeeded in emancipating itself from dominant ideologies – Protestantism, Idealism, Rationalism, Nationalism – and that it has not become the slave of any new ideologies. The frequently cited ‘empirical turn’ in the 1960s with its counting, grouping, evaluating and correlating indicates such a development. Ultimately, we have statistics and diagrams that tell us what exists, what is (apparently) desirable, and what can be improved upon. However, the Protestant ministers at the beginning of the 18th century also knew what was desirable, and they also observed children meticulously noting every single impulse (both above and below the belt) in diary entries. In other words, the survey of the educational field does not sufficiently guarantee that a discourse can be called academic, even if its methods seem to enable quantitative large-scale assessment. The Protestant ministers had an ‘academic’ method that is known today as participant observation. Observation of the perceived status quo is no guarantee of academic knowledge, for observation is always observation of something according to a specific interest. The specific interest in the early 18th century was the Protestant concern for the soul. In contrast, the specific interest of PISA is backed up by what is called ‘human capital theory’, developed around 1960 and promoted by the OECD, which is currently trying to confine educational research to the production of policy knowledge (Tröhler, 2009). There is no question that in a time that is generally perceived to be rather complex, the strategy of reducing a field and simplifying its purposes is guaranteed popularity. The reduction of a field and its aims has always been a popular practice, because it elicits fantasies of feasibility. PISA and similar assessment programs have enhanced international competition between national school systems, and education has, with increasing intensity, come to adopt the role of prescribing what works best in a given location and how best practice can be implemented elsewhere.1 Whether or not this simplified discourse should still be labelled academic is a legitimate question, for an academic discourse usually seeks to understand complexity; simple things do not require any academic research. It is quite remarkable how little attention educational discourse pays to the way in which the educational field has been constructed. Instead, the field is simply taken for granted as a phenomenon that appears to the researcher. So today it is understood that education basically means schooling and that the desired aim of the school is to maximize students’ literacy in science, mathematics, and language.2

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Beyond all uncertainties about the character of the educational field there is at least one undisputed fact – namely, that as a construction the educational field has changed continuously. These changes do not represent a linear development, they are not teleological in character, and they differ in geographic/nationally different ways. This complex phenomenon of multiple educational constructions with apparently little or no cohesion triggers some considerable problems in educational research, and this in turn enhances the quest for reducing complexity. One way to deal with this is to start to collect observable constructions that are historically and internationally discernable: curricula, organization of teacher education, textbooks, school control, values and ethics of education, school architecture, public discussion, assessment concepts such as PISA and PIRLS, and so on. However, if educational research wants to go beyond historical and comparative analysis, it needs to deal with the interrelation of perceivable elements within the field. The question thus arises as to why, in which period, and under what conditions, certain solutions have been dominant whilst others have not? Why did the Americans predominantly discuss education in terms of plurality and democracy whilst the Germans focused primarily on inward totality and Bildung? Why do locally elected school boards exist predominantly in Switzerland, the United States, and some provinces in Canada and not in other parts of the world? Why does the discussion in France today surrounding political education emphasize national identity and the importance of national symbols much more strongly than the concepts that are emphasized, for instance, in England (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 1988). By the same token, why do the English emphasize the role of community whilst the French neglect this area (Osler & Starkey, 2001)? Why has Pragmatism been so broadly received in the Protestant cantons of French-speaking Switzerland, whilst being relatively ignored in the German-speaking part of Switzerland (Tröhler, 2005)? My general thesis is that beyond the globally perceivable variety of arguments, ideas, and practices, there are only a very limited number of fundamental modes for thinking about education. These fundamental modes mould the perception of the world and the discussion about education. These modes are linguistic – single modes represent different langues as distinguished from paroles. The idea that there are several fundamental langues in accordance with which we might think about education (even if the number is limited) rejects the traditional ideal of academic discourse as it was formulated in the 18th century. This discourse was particularly dominant in France, where science was believed to detect the rational laws of outer nature, the social body, and the human mind. Science could then secure national and human progress towards perfection by educating people. ‘Education’ meant teaching scientific knowledge ((Condorcet, 1794/1955, p. 196). The only two prerequisites for doing this – or so they believed – were the adoption of both ‘technical methods’ and a ‘universal language’. Technical methods are needed to group phenomena systematically, and a universal language is necessary if one wishes to be rid of the ‘disadvantages of a scientific idiom different from the vernacular’ (pp. 197ff.). The ideal form that this language would take should be analogous to algebra. The sign would be learnt ‘at the same time as the object, idea or operation that it designates’ (p. 198). What Condorcet saw as a disadvantage

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(the existence of languages) proved later to provide a means for constructing the world. Early linguists such as Benjamin Lee Whorf demonstrated this when he compared the language of Hopi Indians to the Standard European Languages ((Whorf, 1940/1956). Rather than trying to eliminate this fundamental linguistic plurality, academic research is called upon to understand the relation between langues and perceptions of the constructed world(s). I want to demonstrate this schematically using four stages. First, I introduce the linguistic distinction between parole and langue (1) and indicate how it characterizes the political philosophy of the so-called Cambridge School (2). Then I discuss the similarities and differences between this approach and what is called postmodernism. This will involve focusing on the work of Foucault and some of his disciples (3). Finally, I analyse three languages that seem to dominate Western discourses on education (4).

2.2 The Concept of Parole and Langue in Political Philosophy The distinction between construction and construal was first developed by the Genevan linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). The basic idea is that language has two distinct aspects, namely, a theoretical regulating system on the one hand, and speech on the other. The former is called langue, the latter parole: “The only problem, if I may say so, is that linguistics covers a vast area. In particular, it is made up of two parts: one which is more concerned with langue, the language system, a passive store, the other which is closer to parole, speech, an active force and the true origin of the phenomenon subsequently perceptible in the other half of language” (De Saussure, 2006, p. 196). Langue is “established socially and does not depend on the individual” (De Saussure, 2006, p. 209). Nevertheless, langue has an ‘individual’ dimension, for ‘individuals’ speak. In its social dimension langue is an inter-subjective valid institution, or in other words a system of linguistic habits implemented in the selfunderstanding of the people. In its individual dimension langue is a subjectively internalized individual language, the subjective version of the langue. On the other side, parole, too, has a social and an individual aspect. First, it means the concrete speech act, the individual realization of the langue by the individual speaker. At the same time, however, and this is the second aspect, parole in its social dimension is the place where dialogue can generate new linguistic meaning, where langue can be changed. In other words, langue and parole are in a complex relation of mutual interdependence (pp. 85ff.). Of course, nothing can be part of the langue that has never belonged to parole. On the other hand, parole is only possible as a social product due to the background provided by a certain langue. The crucial thing is that in contrast to parole, langue cannot be ‘immediately’ observed. In other words langue, though it is the womb of a concrete parole, can only be detected a posteriori of a parole by reconstructing the process of articulation.

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This linguistic idea has been adapted fruitfully to the sphere of political ideas by the Cambridge School. Based on some conclusions drawn from Thomas S. Kuhn’s paradigm theory, according to which dominant paradigms construe linear histories up to the present paradigm and ignore alternatives that historically might have been much more attractive than the histories tell us, the New Zealander John G.A. Pocock started to detect dominant and recessive languages of political discourse. First, Pocock focused on the dominant langues in 17th-century England and then on republicanism from Machiavelli through to the American Revolution (Pocock, 1957, 1975). Transforming and expanding both de Saussure’s and Kuhn’s concepts in his discussion of the political sphere, Pocock claims that history is to be understood as the interaction of langue and parole, of political langue and political speech acts. History always deals with the transmission of “acts of speech, whether oral, scribal or typographical” that depend on conditions or contexts “in which these acts are preformed” (Pocock, 1987b, pp. 19ff.). In accordance with de Saussure, Pocock indicates that political actors always depend on a langue to perform a speech act: “For anything to be said or written or printed, there must be a language to say it in; the language determines what can be said in it, but is capable of being modified by what is said in it; there is a history formed by the interactions of parole and langue” (p. 20). Political languages are modes of political thought, not political slogans or concepts but specifically used rhetoric and vocabularies, and they are to be identified as the ideological contexts of any political paroles. Two things are important here. First, by virtue of their normative structures framing the parole of the actors, languages are deeds: They construe in a normative way what is perceived as social reality. And second – and this refers more to Kuhn – several langues always exist at the same time although one always dominates. In other words, every epoch has its dominant mode of perceiving, analysing, and discussing political phenomena, and it also has alternative modes that operate in the background. Changes in regard to what is dominant do not come about unless deep crises occur that cannot be described in an appropriate way by the dominant langue. In these moments people can resort to another langue that seems to describe the circumstances in a more appropriate way. In these moments, such langues become dominant, without erasing the former dominant langue (Pocock, 1987b, p. 21, 1972, pp. 195ff.). Pocock understands this occurrence in accordance with Kuhn’s paradigm shift. As a historian, Pocock is interested in how both linguistic persistence and change occurred throughout history. Such a program demands laborious research, as the dynamic relation of parole and langue is a complex one. Texts that are traditionally classified as important have to be interpreted upon the background of the dominant langues. Complicating the research is the circumstance that not only does a time period display different langues but also that they can be mixed up within one and the same text by a given author. Therefore, the focus on classical texts can be misleading, and in order to understand such texts, it is necessary to become acquainted with hard-to-grasp pamphlets, clandestine literature, manuscripts, or ‘forgotten’ books. Research then gains an archaeological character: “The historian is in considerable measure an archaeologist; he is engaged in uncovering the presence of

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various language contexts in which discourse has from time to time been conducted” ((Pocock, 1987b, p. 23). This applies not only for the analysis of historical political discourse but for present political discourse as well.

2.3 Archaeology and Postmodernism In the field of educational research, the notions of archaeology, the concept of a ‘linguistic turn’, and discourse analysis are not usually associated with the Cambridge School. Rather, such notions are usually treated with reference to the French discussion and Foucault’s contribution to that discussion. Against the background of the idea of dominant and less dominant models, we could conclude that Foucault’s ideas have assumed a dominant position vis-à-vis the concepts of the Cambridge School. Foucault seems to use paroles of a specific langue that has become the homeland of many scholars throughout the world. In this sense, Foucault is, ironically, one of the exponents of globalization whilst assembling people that are usually sceptical about it. It is worthwhile comparing the two schools with this situation in mind. The core conviction in the French discussion is similar to the core idea of the Cambridge School: reality cannot be thought about as separate from language as Condorcet would have proclaimed. Rather, language constructs reality. As Foucault maintains in an interview: “Truth is of this world. . .it is produced due to manifold constraints and possesses power. Every society has its own order of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: it accepts certain discourses that it allows to act as true discourses” ((Foucault, 1977/1978, p. 51, freely translated here). Therefore, within the triangle of language, subjectivity, and power, historical reconstructions focus first on language, because language is not understood as a sign system that is supposed to reflect the ‘real world’ but as a system that produces meaning. So far, the concepts of the Cambridge School and Foucault are similar. The difference between them shows itself in the emphasis on power. Looking at history, Foucault accentuates discontinuity: “It seemed to me that . . . the rhythm of transformation doesn t follow the smooth, continuist schemas of development which are normally accepted” ((Foucault, 1977/1978, p. 113). To Foucault, discontinuity expresses the susceptibility of the sciences to power. However, power is not seen in the traditional way as an external category but is understood in terms of the effect that power has among academic statements – the ‘internal regime of power’ and its modification. Therefore, linguistic analysis is outperformed by the analysis of power: “Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs but that of war and battle. The history that bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning” (Ibid., p. 114). Both Pocock’s and Foucault’s theories have faced criticism. Pocock’s attempt to reconstruct the persistence of political langues has been criticized as being inhuman: “Pocock’s attempt to formulate the law-like character of paradigms can be understood as the search for the ‘deep-structure’ upon which all thought is based, and

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from which all thought is generated,” which in turn is seen to dehumanize history (Boucher, 1985, p. 186). Similar and even harsher criticism has been directed at the French (post-) structuralists including Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault (see Seifert, 1992, pp. 276ff.). As a matter of fact, Foucault’s tendency to focus on historical discontinuities whilst refraining from explaining them is problematic. Taking the example of Gregor Mendel, Foucault can show that inconsistencies have occurred: “Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not ‘in the truth’ of the biological discourse of the time: biological objects and concepts were formed by other rules. The yardstick had to be changed, a whole new level of objects in biology had to be developed in order to allow Mendel to enter the truth and his statements proved (to a great extent) to be right” ((Foucault, 1990/1992, pp. 24ff., freely translated here). Foucault traces inconsistencies and discontinuities back to displacements of power, but he does not really explain how these displacements have occurred. To come back to the example of Mendel, Foucault does not show why and how the yardstick changed. This problem becomes a little clearer if we look at an article by one of Foucault’s disciples, Paul Veyne. Veyne (1978/1992) deconstructs the traditional assumption that the Christian emperors in Rome stopped the gladiator fights. He says that history does not occur on the basis of rational or ethical principles, because such principles simply do not exist. All that exists are practices and discourses fabricating illusions about reason and morality. Veyne interprets the transition from pagan to Christian emperors as a shift from an emperor of a bestial herd to the father of a childish people: “Not on the basis of personal conviction nor due to a caprice, the emperor of the bestial herd transforms into the father of a childish herd. Stated briefly, he does not do it for ideological reasons” (Veyne, 1978/1992, p. 41, freely translated here). In this approach there are no antecedent convictions that can be applied to objects but simply practices in which objects are constructed. The crucial question then is “Where do the practices come from”? The answer is “Well, simply from the historical changes, the thousandfold conversions of historical reality, that is, from the remains of history, as all things. Foucault has not discovered any new instance with the name of ‘practice’ that has so far been unknown: He made an effort to see human practice as it is in reality” (Veyne, 1978/1992, pp. 26ff.). Let us briefly try to adopt a friendly approach to Veyne’s argument. For the moment, we shall ignore the fact that Veyne ascribes to Foucault the achievement of having discovered the path to reality (which reality?) – and focus more on the fact that this approach may be able to reconstruct historical change. However, there is still a problem. Veyne’s approach cannot explain such changes, and it does not seem possible to find intellectual alternatives. Whilst complaining about the mechanisms of oppression, German feminists, following Foucault, came to the conclusion that the only possibility for future action was a discursive guerrilla war (Seifert, 1992, p. 282). Thinking about things in this way implies that guerrilla fighters do not have ideologies that they are ready to fight for, and that even if they did, such ideologies would not have been implemented in reality. The ‘guerrilla’ metaphor reveals the limits of Foucault’s brilliant provocation. Determination is extended to a point that alternatives cannot show themselves. What human action is/involves becomes uncertain, for all actions

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are determined by the reality of the context. According to Foucault this context can change, but the conversion is simply understood in terms of power and results in menacing phrases such as ‘discursive guerrilla war’. Human interaction, inconsistencies, and problems are not seen in their productive form but only in their reactive one. As a consequence, education as a field is freed and discharged from ambitions and aims. But what then is left of the educational field, when ambitions and aims are abandoned? Of course, the ambitions and aims of the field grown out of Protestantism, the religion of the empiricists, and the enunciators of the ‘human capital theory’ all deserve critique. However, to reject the idea of ambitions and aims in general means throwing the baby out with the bath water. There is an alternative, and I want to indicate what this might involve by returning to the work of the Cambridge School. Let us consider an example that is to a certain degree comparable to Veyne’s example presented above. Taking the example of Machiavelli, Quentin Skinner asks how and why it was possible that in the context of the Renaissance somebody could seriously claim, “a prince must learn how not to be virtuous” (Skinner, 1988a, p. 61). A historian, Skinner argues, will first ask whether or not this cynical statement was rather common in Renaissance times or whether it is a more-or-less singular statement that was directed against the dominant stream of thought. If this is a common statement, one has to read Machiavelli as affirming the dominant mode of moral attitude towards political power. However, if “a prince must learn how not to be virtuous” is a singular statement then we can note that Machiavelli wanted to challenge the dominant moral point of view on political behaviour. So in a way it is an empirical question that has to be contextualized culturally – langues are modes of cultural expression. Against this background Skinner situates his methodological concept between two dominant ‘orthodox’ traditions within the history of ideas. The first tradition is Marxist and involves the recognition “that it is the context ‘of religious, political, and economic factors’ which determines the meaning of any given text”. The other tradition Skinner invokes is based “on the autonomy of the text itself as the sole necessary key of its own meaning” (Skinner, 1988a, p. 29). Skinner argues that both approaches to history produce more myths than knowledge. Following this assertion, Skinner is more critical of the second tradition, which clings to the belief that texts – or paroles, if you will – are timeless or an expression of eternal ideas. He identifies his methodological position with reference to the art historian Ernst H. Gombrich, who wrote the epigram “only where there is a way can there be a will” (Gombrich, 1961, p. 75), and with Thomas S. Kuhn, who gave us insight into the dominance of paradigms. Therefore, Skinner focuses less on the text as text but on the authors, focusing principally on what they wanted to say through their writing (Skinner, 1988a, pp. 31ff.). This turn from the text as text to the intention behind writing indicates that Skinner acknowledges that people are able to formulate ideas against the main dominant paradigms. But at the same time he refers to the exigency of limiting possible interpretations to the variety of discursive contexts. Paroles, in other words, always depend on langues, but to a certain extent authors are free not to choose the dominant langue but to refer to recessive langues.

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Skinner’s core thesis is quite similar to Pocock’s. The former argues that the meaning of a text can be interpreted adequately only if we understand its position in the discursive context in which it was written. Following John L. Austin’s speech act theory, and referring to Wittgenstein’s motto “words are deeds”, Skinner understands notions or paroles as tools employed during ideological debates (Skinner, 1988b, pp. 260ff.). Paroles fight for the dominant interpretation or construction of reality. In this sense, concepts or paroles are not simply images of a context but also construct this context. Consequently, this kind of research focuses on the use of ideas in specific contexts rather than on the interpretation of the ideas apart from contexts: “To the extent that our social world is constituted by our concepts, any successful alteration in the use of a concept will at the same time constitute a change in our social word” (Ibid., p. 276). Even though Skinner looks primarily at historical discontinuities and their reasons and dynamics, he does not accord absolute autonomy to authors. In a discussion with the critic Paul Keene, Skinner argues: “I cannot agree with Keene that authors are nothing more than ‘prisoners of the discourse within whose boundaries they take pen in hand’. I agree of course . . . that we are all limited by the concepts available to us if we wish to communicate. But it is not less true . . . that language constitutes a resource as well as a construct. This means that if we wish to do justice to those moments when a convention is challenged or a commonplace effectively subverted, we cannot simply dispense with the category of the author” (Skinner, 1988b, p. 276). Whereas Pocock focuses his research on the longe duree of langues, Skinner’s interest lies in the discontinuities. In times of crisis, people are forced to look for alternative paradigms or langues, and in that way they construe a new social world: “A point that takes on added significance when we reflect that to the extent that our social world is constituted by our concepts, any successful alteration in the use of a concept will at the same time constitute a change in our social world” (Skinner, 1988b, p. 276). To understand texts or paroles presupposes the knowledge of langues, be they historical or of the present. Of course, this method “leaves the traditional figure of the author in extremely poor health”, but at the same time the author is not solely a precipitate of his or her own context (Ibid., pp. 276ff.).

2.4 Educational Languages The idea that authors are neither free in the enlightenment sense nor caged in their own discourses is not really a surprising insight when looked at from the perspective of common sense. The very notion of ‘dominance’ logically implies that there is more than one discourse, and if the allocation of individuals to langues cannot be put down to God playing dice, it is a matter of education, enculturation, coincidence, and fortune. In other words, one might be disposed to share a single language – preferably the dominant one – but there is no guarantee that one will stick to it.

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There are many opportunities to feel at home with and in a single language, and there are biographical aspects to consider too. Just think of the dictum attributed to Winston Churchill that any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and anyone who is still a socialist at 40 has no head. Language analysis in political philosophy has made it evident that certain times or epochs present a limited number of languages, with one being dominant. As far as I can see, a similar endeavour to identify educational languages has not yet been undertaken. Olivier Reboul’s (1984) Le langage de l’éducation does not deal with languages in the sense mentioned above but with five types of argument that he calls ‘discours pédagogique’, discourses that he himself defines as a level below the abstract level of langues (Reboul, 1984, p. 10). If we take a look at the period from the 18th century to the present, we can distinguish only a limited number of paradigms that could be labelled as educational languages. Such paradigms are closely connected to visions of justice, happiness, and progress – to political, philosophical, and religious ideas and ideals that became newly formulated over the course of the 18th century. Other languages that might have been dominant or at least existent before 1700 may have been lost in the political, philosophical, and religious transformations in the 18th century. One of the oldest languages that (to a certain degree) survived these transformations is the classical republican language based on public virtues and political freedom, or on positive liberty if you like the distinction accentuated by Isaiah Berlin (1959). This classical language that was formulated by either Aristotle or Xenophon was reinforced and modified first by Machiavelli (Pocock, 1975) and at almost the same time by the Swiss Reformation. The chief voices within this reformation were Calvinism and Zwinglianism, with their inestimable influence on the idea that social problems are to be solved primarily by education (Tröhler, 2008). The focus here is on the concept of citizen of the polis, which brings together the political, religious, economic, and military aspects of life in one person. The English dissenters of the early 17th century were early adherents of this amalgam. They developed the concept of ‘school republics’, which they transferred to the Promised Land overseas. The idea of socialization within a context of virtuous, mostly non-capitalist societies is crucial within this educational language, and it is no coincidence that the production of such texts multiplies in times during which societies undergo increased capitalization. Famous witnesses to concepts of socialization were the Swiss Rousseau and Pestalozzi (Tröhler, 2006b) and the Americans Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann. Pragmatism is a school that also operates within this tradition. Everybody is supposed to be competent at everything, and in the communication between the different participants – friends in Aristotle’s concepts, brothers in the congregations, and a mixture in Rousseau’s vision – solutions are found together. It is no coincidence that Dewey’s educational and political concept neglects questions of formal procedures and focuses on mutual communication and cooperation and that Mead develops a concept of a social self; the vision is the City upon the hill, or the Kingdom of God on earth (Tröhler, 2006c).

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Another old language that survived the transformations of the 18th century emerged from the Augustinian and Neo-Augustinian traditions. This language found its way into the anti-Jesuit movement of Jansenism, whose most important stronghold was the Parisian convent of Port-Royal haven of many important authors including Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, and Blaise Pascal. All these figures identified themselves as rigorous followers of St. Augustin (Carraud, 1992) and their main focus was the insignificance of human life: “For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes, the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed” (Pascal, 1995, p. 61). Many of these important authors exerted a strong influence on specific traditions of education (Osterwalder, 2003, 2006). Neo-Augustinianism gained even greater popularity in 18th-century Germany, when the cultural, scientific, and political backwardness of the Sacrum Romanum Imperium Nationis Germanicae (Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) became evident. The intellectual reaction to these differences can be seen in the construction of Bildung, namely, the proposition that the decisive elements in life are not visible but invisible. The Lutheran (Luther being an Augustinian monk) dualism that presented two worlds and two forms of justice was reactivated in the sense that no matter what occurred in the ‘outer’ world, the important things took place in the ‘inner’ world. This inner world became the central focus in this type of educational discourse, and the core term for both the process and the end of education was Bildung. A third educational language is a child of the late 18th century, more precisely of the French Revolution. Having its roots in early modern English science after 1790 it was developed into a specific form of educational language by Condorcet and Destutt de Tracy (Osterwalder, 1992). Unlike the two other languages (the classicalReformed republican language and the Neo-Augustinian language) this language is essentially built on scientific knowledge and public rationality effectuated by this knowledge. The ideal human being is not the contemplative person having found his peace in an inner soul, as in the Neo-Augustinian tradition, nor the fully virtuous patriotic citizen, as in the classical republican tradition, but rather an individual person that is interconnected with other persons by a social contract based on rational deliberation. In this vision, the ideal political arrangement is the modern, liberal republic in which state power has to be limited, whilst the freedom of the individual citizen (in the sense of negative liberty (Berlin, 1959) comes to the fore. This arrangement implies that the steering force of social change should derive from rational public deliberation carried out amongst enlightened equal persons. The prerequisites for this state of affairs to succeed are an effective set of ‘technical methods’ and an appropriate ‘universal language’ (see introduction). According to this view of things, education does not involve either fostering virtues or developing an inward looking Bildung but instead focuses on verifiable public knowledge that should be learnt in school. The possession of scientific knowledge became the virtue of the new as compared to the old citizen (Osterwalder, in press).

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2.5 Outlook Whether or not these three langues, in which educational paroles of the Western world are expressed, are the only ones, is certainly disputable. In any case, it would make sense to try and identify more of them (if more exist). This would lead on to the important task of reconstructing how interaction with various paroles has changed langues over the last 250 years. What is the value of such an approach? Once we have a ‘map’ of the different langues used in education – be they dominant or not – it will be easier to identify the arguments or paroles used by actors, agents, or exponents. A matter of particular interest is the question of whether or not today’s dominant educational langue, used by OECD and World Bank, is a child of the natural law-based liberal langue developed in the French Revolution. We might also consider where the unmistakable religious impetus accompanying this langue comes from. For, whether this is intentional or not, the promises made by the World Bank, OECD, and other GOs are formulated in the language of redemption. This language is equally apparent in the promises made by critics of these institutions. Bringing this to light might well be a way to overcome both marks of Cain in education, the religious, and the national limitations that hinder education from being an academic discipline in a modern sense. One might find reasons for dismissing this procedure, but at least it opens up exciting possibilities. This is in spite of the fact that the procedure derives from a rather non-Protestant argument that is ‘perhaps’ not even an argument at all.

Notes 1. That this idea of transferring successful policy structures is wrong has been proved by an excellent comparative research study on the Finnish and the German school system (Overesch, 2007). 2. The general motive of this focus has its origins in the Cold War ideology of the late 1950s, as I have argued elsewhere (Tröhler, 2009).

References Berlin, I. (1959). Two concepts of liberty. In I. Berlin (Ed.), Four essays on liberty (pp. 118–172). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boucher, D. (1985). Texts in context. Revisionist methods for studying the history of ideas. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Carraud, V. (1992). Pascal et la philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. de Condorcet, A.-N.. (1955). Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. (Original work published in French 1794) De Saussure, F. (2006). Writings in general linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1978). “Wahrheit und Macht.” Interview mit Michel Foucault von A. Fontana und P. Pasquino. In M. Foucault (Ed.), Dispositive der Macht. Michel Foucault über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit (pp. 21–54). Berlin: Merve Verlag. (Original work published in Italian 1977) Foucault, M. (1992). Was ist Kritik? Berlin: Merve Verlag. (Original work published in French 1990)

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Gombrich, E. H. (1961). Art and illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horlacher, R. (2004). Bildung – a construction of a history of philosophy of education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23, 409–426. Osler, A., & Starkey, H. (2001). Citizenship education and national identities in France and England: Inclusive or exclusive? Oxford Review of Education, 27, 287–305. Osterwalder, F. (1992). Condorcet – Instruction publique und das Design der Pädagogik als öffentlich-rechtliche Wissenschaft. In J. Oelkers (Ed.), Aufklärung, Bildung und Öffentlichkeit (pp. 157–194; 28. Beiheft der Zeitschrift für Pädagogik). Weinheim: Beltz. Osterwalder, F. (2003). Die Heilung des freien Willens durch Erziehung. Erziehungstheorien im Kontext der theologischen Augustinus-Renaissance im 17. Jahrhundert. In J. Oelkers, F. Osterwalder, & H.-E. Tenorth (Eds.), Das verdrängte Erbe. Pädagogik im Kontext von Religion und Theologie (pp. 57–86). Weinheim, Basel: Beltz. Osterwalder, F. (2006). Die Sprache des Herzens. Konstituierung und Transformation der theologischen Sprache der Pädagogik. In R. Casale, D. Tröhler, & J. Oelkers (Eds.), Methoden und Kontexte. Historiographische Probleme der Bildungsforschung (pp. 155–180). Göttingen: Wallstein. Osterwalder, F. (2007). Volksschule – internationaler Diskurs und nationale Kontexte vor Rochow und Pestalozzi. In H. Schmitt, R. Horlacher, & D. Tröhler (Eds.), Pädagogische Volksaufklärung im 18. Jahrhundert im europäischen Kontext: Rochow und Pestalozzi im Vergleich (pp. 10–31). Bern: Haupt. Osterwalder, F. (in press). Tradition and change in French educational republicanism from Condorcet to Quinet and Ferry. In D. Tröhler, T. Popkewitz, & D. Labaree (Eds.), The educated child, the citizen, and the promised land: Comparative history of political cultures and schooling in the long 19th century. Overesch, A. (2007). Wie die Schulpolitik ihre Probleme (nicht) löst. Deutschland und Finnland im Vergleich. Münster: Waxmann. Pascal, B. (1995). Pensées. London: Penguin Classics. (Original work published in French 1660) Pocock, J.G.A. (1957). The ancient constitution and the feudal law: A study of English historical thought in the seventeenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1962). The history of political thought: A methodological enquiry. In P. Laslett & W. Runciman (Eds.), Philosophy, politics and society (second series) (pp. 183–202). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1972). The history of political thought: A methodological Enquiry. In P. Laslett, W.G. Runciman, & Q. Skinner (Eds.), Philosophy, politics and society (Second Series; pp. 183–292). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975). The Machiavellian moment. Florentine political thought and the Atlantic Republican tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1987a). The ancient constitution and the feudal law. A study of English historical thought in the 17th century. A reissue with a retrospect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published in 1957) Pocock, J. G. A. (1987b). The concept of a language and the métier d’historien: Some considerations on practice. In A. Pagden (Ed.), The languages of political theory in early-modern Europe (pp.19–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. (1988). Education for citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools (Crick Report). London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Reboul, O. (1984). Le langage de l’éducation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Seifert, R. (1992). Entwicklung und Probleme der feministischen Theoriebildung. Warum an der Rationalität kein Weg vorbeiführt. In G.-A. Knapp & A. Wetterer (Eds.), Traditionen Brüche. Entwicklung feministischer Theorie (pp. 255–285). Freiburg: Kore Verlag. Skinner, Q. (1988a). Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas. In J. Tully (Ed.), Meaning and context: Quentin skinner and his critics (pp. 29–67). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Skinner, Q. (1988b). A reply to my critics. In J. Tully (Ed.), Meaning and context: Quentin skinner and his critics (pp. 231–288). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tröhler, D. (2003). The discourse of German Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik – A contextual reconstruction. Paedagogica Historica. International Journal of the History of Education, XXXIX, 759–778. Tröhler, D. (2005). Langue as homeland: The Genevan reception of pragmatism. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Inventing the modern self and John Dewey. Modernities and the travelling of pragmatism in education (pp. 61–84). New York: St. Martin’s Press and Macmilan/Palgrave. Tröhler, D. (2006a). The formation and function of histories of education in continental teacher education curricula. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 2. Retrieved February 21, 2009, from http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/ jaaacs/vol2/trohler.htm Tröhler, D. (2006b). Republikanismus und Pädagogik. Pestalozzi im historischen Kontext. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt. Tröhler, D. (2006c). The  kingdom of God on earth and early Chicago pragmatism. Educational Theory, 56, 89–105. Tröhler, D. (2008). The educationalization of the modern world. Progress, passion, and the protestant promise of education. In P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: The educationalisation of social problems (pp. 31–46). Dordrecht: Springer. Tröhler, D. (2009). Harmonizing the educational globe. World polity, cultural features, and the challenges to educational research. Unpublished manuscript. Veyne, P. (1992). Foucault: Die Revolutionierung der Geschichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (Original work published in French 1978) Whorf, B. L. (1956). Science and linguistics. In J. B. Carrol (Ed.), Language, thought, and reality (pp. 207–219). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original essay published 1940)

Chapter 3

Sources in the Making of Histories of Education: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Forms of Reasoning from the Historian’s Workplace Marc Depaepe and Frank Simon

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. (Sennett, 2008, p. 9)

As we have often said in the past, historical research presents certain problems for the behavioural sciences. When we think about the history of education, can it, as the title of this book seems to suggest, be conceived of simply as a subdivision of educational research? And does the argumentative structure that is developed in this domain of knowledge automatically give rise to the construction of ‘one’, let alone, ‘the’ language of education? In our opinion, the history of education, if it wants to be valid, must in any event bear the stamp of what Michel de Certeau once called the ‘historiographical operation’ (see, e.g., Delacroix, Garcia, Dosse, & Trebitsch, 2002). And this historiography, in the literal sense of the word, does not allow itself simply to be dictated by the area to which it is applied, which of course does not prevent interdisciplinarity (commencing from the object studied) from being woven into it. Traditionally, the historical craft is characterized by tenacious source research, as described by the unfortunate Marc Bloch (1886–1944) in his Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (1998, first published in 1949): The study of the past, as opposed to the study of the present, necessarily relies on ‘indirect’ perception. Telling what has been (ton eonta legein, as Herodotus formulated it) cannot be done without the accounts of first-hand ‘witnesses’. For Leopold von Ranke, who started teaching history in 1825 at Berlin University, the historian must work on the premise that historical factuality is pre-given, i.e., he has to let the facts speak for themselves. Parenthetically, his colleague Hegel had at around the same time taken this notion of history and plunged into philosophy in search of the latter’s guiding principles. This can in part be considered responsible for the continuing differences between ‘historical’ and ‘philosophical’ readings of the past. The perception of such differences still impacts on the study of education (see, e.g., the M. Depaepe (B) Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Campus Kortrijk, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_3,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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discussion articles of Depaepe, 2007 and Standish, 2008). Of course, this legacy did not provide an insurmountable obstacle to Bloch’s doubts about what the writing of history actually amounted to: interpretation. Facts by themselves say nothing. For Bloch, ‘understanding’ was the key word, the guide and source of inspiration for research. For Bloch, the most productive treatment of sources could only take place in the future: “The most important advance that historical research has achieved in the last centuries consists probably of the increasing attention for unintentional witnesses and an almost endless accretion of new kinds of documents, which, thanks to new interdisciplinary collaboration, are now yielding their secrets.” These words, which are more than 60 years old, have not lost their prophetic value. The histories of the ordinary man and woman and their modes of functioning in everyday life were written during the 1960s and 1970s and have continued to be written and rewritten through the much discussed ‘turns’ in historiography. Such research turned to the use of oral witnesses, ego documents, and biographical material, statistics and other numerical material, visual and spatial sources, and so on. Looking back at our research careers, it occurs to us, however, that the theoretical and methodological advantages of these ‘turns’ in regard to source material were often exaggerated because of the enthusiasm for the new. With changing trends, historians had to demonstrate that generations of historians had overlooked important ways of interpreting the past. It is this historiographical development that we wish to describe here so as to make a contribution to a better understanding of the language of research in the history of education. Thus, what drives us to the workshop of the historian of education is not, in the first place, a concern to secure our own place in the gallery of the history of the discipline. Rather, our motivation derives from the fact that one can speak knowledgeably about the use of sources only on the basis of one’s own research experience. Up to this point in time, this research experience has indicated that there is no one single privileged source but that a nuanced and contextualized history of education rests in any event on a combination of all sorts of source material. Therefore, in what follows, we will not simply focus on one single form of source (for example, autobiographies, copybooks, objects of material school culture, visual material, etc.; see in this respect, e.g., Lawn & Grosvenor, 2005; Mietzner, Myers, & Peim, 2005). Our approach is different. It includes, as we said, reflection on more than three decades of our collaboration, which is perhaps quite unique in the field of the history of education but, as regards Flemish and international contexts, has turned out to be not at all unfruitful. Rather than wanting to compete with each other as ‘rivals’ within the same field, we, as representatives of the two most important universities in Flanders, worked together from the outset. Thus, we hoped to be able to give Belgian output within the field of history of education more weight abroad. Still, this kind of strategic consideration was not the primary motivating factor behind our collaboration but seems more like a rhetorical projection after the event. Our collaboration rested on the intrinsic pleasures of the craft for which we had acquired a permanent taste in the context of an interuniversity research project (under the leadership of Maurits De Vroede [1922–2001]) from the late

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1970s onwards. It is in this sense that the motto at the head of this article must be read. With Richard Sennett (2008), we can do nothing other than testify, on the basis of our own experience, that craftsmanship is at the foundation of the motivation to execute a job well for its own sake. It was an enduring, intrinsic motivation that developed from reading the journals of education that appeared in Belgium, a source that professor De Vroede called the ‘pedagogical periodicals’ and became for us ‘the mother of all sources’.

3.1 Pedagogical Periodicals: The Mother of All Sources During the academic year 1969–1970, De Vroede began the process of opening up the pedagogical periodicals. In our opinion, he correctly described the six impressive, hefty repertoria that resulted from this process as the beating heart of “the pedagogical life in Belgium” (see De Vroede et al., 1973–1987). For this project, he engaged an entire team of researchers from Leuven, his own workshop, and Ghent. Each researcher was charged with reading and reporting on a number of journals on formation and education that had appeared in Belgium since 1815. By delving into these sources, his ‘collaborators’ became au fait with the many facets of 19th and 20th century Belgian history of education. Indeed, pedagogical periodicals constituted not only a mirror of the times, but they were also in most cases as educational journals by educators (schoolmen rather than schoolwomen) and for educators (schoolwomen rather than schoolmen at least for what concerns primary education in the 20th century) true guides to the theory as well as the practice of education. Thus, we feel we may indeed describe this ‘pedagogical press’ as the ‘mother’ of all sources for the history of education. Of course, the essential reason for allocating such a title derives from the richness of this specific source. Little or nothing of what came to the surface in the pedagogical life in Belgium escaped the attention of the journal editors and their colleagues of the time. In their many articles, they drew attention to and problematized the sore points and sensitivities that characterized everyday realities confronted by education providers, which enables these ‘periodicals’ to be deemed a true goldmine for educational historiography. Indisputably, many of the texts published in the pedagogical press had a normative character; they were, ultimately, conceived from the supply side of formation and education and thus often expressed the intention of an educational objective or philosophy. Nevertheless, as we have indicated elsewhere (Depaepe et al., 2000; Dams, Depaepe, & Simon, 2002), via an intelligent, generally indirect reading of the arguments (and expositions) used, it is possible to capture ‘normality’ through this ‘normativity’ of the source. A question of the extent to which normative messages, proclaimed there, reflected ‘normality’ inevitably always crept in due to issues of framing and contextualization. A teacher who, by means of an article in an educational journal wanted to praise one or another magic charm for maintaining discipline in the class, could not avoid also saying many things about this very class in passing: how it was organized, what it looked like, and so on. Undoubtedly, such teachers may have highly exaggerated the importance and the effects of the

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praised method and extolled its educational objective, but the contours of the historical class and school reality did not escape them. This ‘context’ is unavoidably present as the background of the teacher’s ‘text’ and allows itself to be readily investigated by all sorts of discursive techniques (close reading, etc.) designed to interpret the propagated message. From this perspective, the ‘serial’ character of the pedagogical journals, which, in some cases, continued to appear for even more than a century, is also an important advantage. Because these journals often had a very specific ‘mission’ – some were explicitly founded to propagate a specific philosophy, ideology, and/or related vision of education. One can determine how that message developed at the level of ‘rhetoric’ (if you will, the discourse of the ‘text’) and how this was translated concretely into the everyday ‘reality’ (of the practical-organizational ‘con’-text) and to what tensions, shifts, paradoxes, ironies, etc., all this gave rise to. In this sense, the journals provide a relatively homogenous space – the articles came about under the editorship of like-minded people – a solid basis for ‘diachronic’ research (if one wants to do ‘developmental research’), which, moreover can be done in large measure in a ‘depersonalised’ manner. Indeed, the filter of the edition applied in most cases as an ideological buffer for what could/might be published and what could/might be turned down. This is why each journal generally recruited from the same circle of authors and also why a conscious or unconscious censorship was applied. Journals are not only a serial source but also a ‘closed’ source that permits all sorts of quantitative (and/or quantifiable) operations to be conducted: from the simplest calculation of percentages (for example, the portion of the articles written by men or women, by teachers, by inspectors, by university graduates, or the share of the articles about a specific subject within one or another content category and so on) up to and with the construction of more complicated models and presentations (for example, sociograms and cartographies of authors, editorial staff, etc., covering various journals). Our research did not go into such detail as regards the cataloguing of the Belgian pedagogical press. As a collection of paper documents from the 1970s, this repertorium did not, as yet, allow for the advantages (search functions, for example) that modern electronic processing would have made possible. The characterization given in the repertorium for each journal thus, in large measure, derives from the manner in which the individual author, one of the collaborators of the research collective, developed it. It is true that various guiding or ‘corrective’ interventions took place at the editorial level, but this did not remove the randomness of what was included and what was not included in the description. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies for the subject register included as index (in addition to the index of names: persons, authors, and places together). In contrast – and this was certainly an innovation in regard to pedagogical periodicals – systematic research was done on the precise period in which the journal appeared, how the cover, the title, and the subtitle evolved, how the editorial board was composed, who led it and who served as secretary, which organization or group supported it, who functioned as printer and publisher, what colleagues wrote specific articles for the journal (including the book reviews), and so on. This not only exercised the heuristic skills of the researchers

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(for example, the ability to identify authors who signed only with their initials) but also their interpretative skills. Moreover, researchers had to excerpt the entire journal. In fact they had to go through all articles, reviews, etc., and read them carefully in order to be able to characterize them. Performing such an activity showed that they were truly immersed in the concepts and practices characteristic of the zeitgeist. In short, it is not surprising that the publication of these imposing ‘yellow books’ (so named by the users later on because of the colour of the covers in which they were published) inspired similar projects in other countries (France, Portugal, etc.). In Belgium, the opening up of sources for the history of education led to further exploration by core members of the same research group (see Van Rompaey, 2003). This took place during the 1990s in close collaboration with the Christian Educational Union (COV: Christelijke Onderwijsvakbond) – which, moreover, is an equally unique story. The COV was founded in 1893. In 1983, a project group was established within the union that would occupy itself in a professional and independent manner with the history of primary and preschool education in general and that of the teacher in particular. All of this was done in view of the celebration of the approaching centennial of the union in 1993.

3.2 Bibliographies of Works and Sources: Focusing (Still Too Much) on a Definitive Synthesis As long as Professor De Vroede led this group, there was no doubt as to the direction in which the work should proceed: all relevant sources had to be made available by means of tools for otherwise no systematic research was possible. Indeed, the object was to write a virtually ‘definitive’ synthesis that would live on as ‘[the] history of primary education’ and would constitute a milestone in general historiography. Such a conception of historical enquiry undoubtedly rested on the inspiration that De Vroede had received in his own training as a historian. Moreover, this was further nourished by the attention that had been given in 1960s’ Belgium to the compilation of a repertorium of the ‘ordinary’ press (Van Eenoo & Vermeersch, 1962). The same historiographical tradition also accounts for the almost compulsive craving for completeness that characterized the publication of the ‘yellow book’ discussed above. Anything that had ever appeared about education had to be included in it. The sources available to the historian had to be studied in their entirety. This was due to the fact that the prevailing conception of historical research demanded more than just the description of the developments studied – it also demanded their explanation. Rounding off the projects, which began in 1983, a bilingual bibliography of works about the history of the Belgian pre-school, primary, and teacher-training education was published in (De Vroede, Lory, & Simon, 1988). This publication was complemented in 1991 by a bibliography of primary (written) sources (Depaepe, De Vroede, Lory, & Simon, 1991). It included pedagogically oriented monographs,

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brochures, governmental publications, and compendia of legislation on education, curricula, and so on. Analogous to the ‘tools’ that our group developed, similar work (i.e., data) was made available on the international scene. Such meticulous work (by our group and others) marked the construction of the infrastructure of research in the history of education by means of national and international associations virtually everywhere in Europe and in the United States during the pre-electronic era. Making sources available certainly appeared to be the core task of researchers in that area. Such sources provided the solid ground under the feet of historians who, generally speaking, were not deprived of ambitions regarding the survival of their work, yet wanted to give something back to the community that had invested in the research.

3.3 Educational Statistics: A Policy-Coloured Source for Research into Long-Term Processes That Can Hardly Stand Alone In tandem with the spirit of ‘cliometric’ trends that were emerging in other countries, by the end of the 1970s, we were already interested in working with educational statistics. During the first half of the 1990s, this resulted in the making available of Belgian educational statistics for primary education. This took place in collaboration with the COV and owed much to the efforts of a skilled research assistant (who figured as the main author: see Minten et al., 1991–1996) – a condition upon which the success or failure of such extensive and labour-intensive projects often depends. Moreover, these efforts yielded international appreciation and had an impact on a similar plan for secondary education. However, these factors did not represent the greatest benefit of the project. Unquestionably, this lay in the properly grounded source criticism that accompanied the publication of the figures. Our own longterm research using benefited from this criticism. This is apparent in (amongst other things) our work on the feminization process (see, e.g., Depaepe, Lauwers, Simon, Hellinckx, & Van Rompaey, 2007). In our project, the opening up of educational statistics involved making available ‘homogenous’ (i.e., comparable within the categories applied historically) data series concerning the number of schools, the number of teachers, and the number of pupils on the basis of the national counts that were officially prescribed for primary education in Belgium by law since 1842. In practice, we compiled data in our publication using vertical, lengthwise, serial, or diachronic forms of presentation (by means of tables and graphs). These data were previously published ‘horizontally’, i.e., related to each calendar year in the triennial reports on primary education. The reports had to be submitted (by law) by the Minister of Education to the Parliament. They gave information about the evolution of schools in compliance with the current legal framework, in itself distinctive in terms of the various governing authorities. Details were given for each province and often also distinguishing between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas. However, it is obvious that the 19th-century ‘objectification’ of

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educational policy striven for by means of the publication of official figures did not escape the educational political agenda of the time. On the contrary, the generation of the numerical material, if you will, the ‘fabrication of the statistics’ (see Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2001), constituted an element of the policy strategy designed to promote the political objectives of the time. Therefore, we contextualized and read this policy-coloured governmental source as such. According to the telling testimony of the former school inspector Leo Roels (a prominent figure in the Belgian educational landscape who participated in the foundation of the Decrolyan-inspired curriculum of 1936), the compilation of the elementary statistical data from the sources was not always a sinecure. Staff (teachers, administrators, as well as inspectors) asked to cooperate, did not always provide correct and accurate information. In addition to factors effecting accuracy such as ‘routine’, ‘incomprehension’, and ‘fantasy’, self-interest among the school personnel was naturally also operative. The discourse stemming from such self-interest (which derived from the desire to preserve classes and/or schools) often involved emphasis on the ‘greater’ importance of the ‘network’ (or the pillar) to which the institution belonged. Such a discourse is particularly noticeable in the period prior to the introduction of compulsory education (introduced in Belgium in 1914) and in the period where it was not stringently enforced. We can also see from other research (see Depaepe et al., 2000) that the politicalideological struggle surrounding primary education in 19th-century Belgium contributed to the foundation of the ‘pillarization’ of society. At the same time, this struggle brought the different views of education held by members of the Catholic and non-Catholic camps to the surface. For Catholic educators, moral formation outweighed the acquisition of knowledge whereas for non-Catholics, this relationship was inverted. Moreover, the Catholics strove for decentralization of power as regards education, while the non-Catholics (and particularly the progressive-radical wing of the liberal party) propagated the centralization of the nation-state as the policy model. It was thus no coincidence that in official reports after 1879 (once the non-Catholics had come to power) figures pertaining to the ‘free’ (i.e. denominational, i.e. Catholic) schools were no longer recorded. Because of the new measures that were put into place, Catholic schools fell outside the control and subsidization apparatus of the state, and people (apparently) acted as though they no longer existed. In response to this, the Catholics prepared for a genuine ‘school war’ based on the rhetoric surrounding ‘the innocent soul of the child’. They launched a data battle with the authorities in order to demonstrate (through a variety of publications) the power of their form of education. Thus the use of statistical data played a part in the school war and figured in the government’s struggle for a homogenizing national memory that would triumph over a differentiated local memory. Though this may be the case, our feminization research has, as noted, demonstrated that the publication of such homogenous data can be a goldmine for historical research over the long term. On the basis of such ‘empirical’ data, we can undermine stereotypical and generally non-historical conceptions of the past. For example, claims that the ‘problem’ of feminization only raised its head in recent times. From 1898 onwards, there have been more female teachers (following an almost linear

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increasing curve) working in Belgian primary education than male. It was only in the 1920s that this growth was slightly moderated. This was presumably due to all sorts of social factors including the looming economic recession and the ban on marriage that was imposed on female teachers working in Catholic schools. Evidently, quantitative data about the number and percentage of female teachers says nothing about the historical context in which this evolution took place. Thus, for example, it reveals nothing about the relations of laity to religious on the work floor. Nor does it say anything about the extent to which joining the profession constituted an opportunity to climb up the social ladder via teaching, and even to play, from a feminist point of view, an emancipatory pioneering role. Such insights also and primarily in relation to the pedagogical ‘paradox’ of feminism as opposed to feminization – the advancing emancipation of women could not hold back the sex-specific division of professions – can only be generated through the combination of all sorts of sources. Therefore, with a view to the positioning of the social significance of teachers (female but also male) – the more ‘modest’ synthesis that we ourselves aimed for within the working group on the occasion of the centennial of the union (Depaepe, De Vroede, & Simon, 1993) – we conducted a historical survey with a statistically relevant sample of the parties at the beginning of the 1990s. This yielded basic material covering five generations and pertained to family origins, social backgrounds, educational levels, social integration, and the cultural production of teachers. As far as female teachers were concerned, one of our research collaborators later interviewed a number of privileged witnesses discussing their roles in the union and their experiences of the marriage ban that continued to exist in Catholic primary education in Flanders until 1963 (see Van Rompaey, Depaepe, & Simon, 2009). The leaders of the Union (who funded the research) had witnessed a strong increase in the number of women making up the membership and perceived the relevance of this ‘historical’ process. However, this did not mean that our research in the history of education suddenly became policy oriented. On the contrary, for theoretical, methodological, and ideological reasons this did not happen and never will happen. In regard to oral historiography, we were certainly not just starting out. For the construction of our historical synthesis around the social position of the teacher, which we had operationalized in several sub-questions, we could, for example, make use of around a hundred interviews of oral witnesses. These interviews had been conducted earlier in the framework of research into the development of professional teacher organizations. We have recently dusted off the technique of oral history, and it appears in the framework for the study of the ‘progressive pedagogical heritage’ in Flanders (De Coster, Depaepe, & Simon, 2009). This technique also informs our investigation of the structuring elements behind the experience of the school past (Depaepe, Simon, Surmont, & Van Gorp, 2007). We shall return to both of these matters later, but let us be clear here: oral-witness statements, just as much as statistics are unable to give answers to all of our research questions. Although these sources often shed light on certain grey areas that are not illuminated by written sources (such as the nature of the interpersonal relationship between the various educational actors), due to their a posteriori character and the accompanying discolouration (they are, after all, ‘constructions’ of a past that has ‘evaporated’), they

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necessarily have to be approached via a historical critique. Of course such a critique can only emerge through a confrontation with other source material. In many cases, oral-witness statements – as shown in our study of the progressive pedagogical heritage – are, moreover, examples of autobiographical material (as such, they show some resemblance to ego documents) and must be contextualized in relation to the life histories of the people involved (in our case, the still ‘special’ group of leftist intellectuals of the 1960s). In short, it is the mix of multifaceted source material that offers the best guarantee for adequate answers. Let us not go too far ahead of ourselves and momentarily turn back to the educational statistics. Here we can, in any case, conclude that the ‘historical-critical’ production of a homogenous data series would be far from superfluous. But carrying out such work is, of course, not as simple as it might seem. Our experience of working on the complementary project for secondary education was testament to this (D’hoker et al., 2006). That project certainly did not yield as comprehensive results as the one concerning primary education. The situation of secondary education in Belgium is so complicated (this is due to the historically determined ‘freedom of education’ and the elitist importance that was attached to it) that compiling meaningful statistical data charting its development is certainly very difficult, if not impossible. Because of the rather meagre resources and the large turnover of personnel involved in the project, we were compelled to focus on what was truly comparable (that is, that for which there were truly serial data: the period after the Second World War, which we closed with the year 2000, the terminus ad quem). For the time being, its prehistory remains undeveloped terrain. It may be one of the ironies and paradoxes of the globalizing, neo-conservative society that there is little money to be found for such long-term and labour-intensive projects, an irony that, moreover, applies for the entire sector of educational historiography. Apparently, such well thought out cultural/historical projects that run over the long term have a limited appeal for the shortsighted policy makers of the present. Of course, in addition to the time factor, the critical content that emerges from these projects can also be disturbing to, or irrelevant and useless for contemporary politics. Of course, we should note that, in the meantime, the same neo-conservative policy makers have made statistics an essential policy instrument in regard to education. Here we have in mind the influence of the many European performance indicators, quality controls, and evaluations in the framework of Pisa and Timms, the statistical analyses of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of the OECD, etc. and the many normative implications that such standardizing brings with it (but that is material for another article).

3.4 The Textbook: Assert the Appreciation but Also the Historicity as well as the Contextualization of a Source During the second half of the 1990s, we invested a great deal of time and energy in researching the school ‘textbook’ – self-evidently a first-class source for historical research in education that, as such, had already been the object of analogous projects

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in other countries. France, Spain (followed by Latin America), and Germany took the lead and similar studies were undertaken in Canada – many useful analogies could be drawn between the Belgian and Canadian situations (see Depaepe, D’hoker, & Simon, 2003). In spite of various starts and preliminary studies, our predecessors did not succeed in adequately mapping the historical production of the Belgian textbook. This was due to several factors. First, there was here, as elsewhere, little interest on the part of the academic historians in such a schoolish source. Second, as regards the Belgian situation, an enormous number of textbooks had been produced. Again, this related to both the decentralization policy of the Catholic Church and the relative independence of local authorities. This meant that publishers in virtually every city or large town published textbooks. On the basis of a provisional inventory databank, we estimate that at least 30,000 textbooks were used in Belgium for primary and secondary education in the period before the First World War. For these reasons, the publication of a ‘repertorium’ appeared to us to be a very difficult job, a true via dolorosa. The notion of a calvary was also prompted by, on the one hand, the many difficulties that we had encountered in being able to obtain ongoing financial support for our projects and, on the other, in attracting personnel prepared to continue to work with the uncertain status of a very temporary and not very wellpaid job. As regards the content, too, we felt that attempting to publish a detailed repertorium was not a very realistic goal. In contrast to what is going on internationally, we finally opted for a more realistic, more practical, and, in any case, less comprehensive approach. Instead of setting out to describe all of the textbooks published in Belgium (based on the bibliographical lists of the known publications), we took only those textbooks that we ourselves had manually processed in four major collections from Flanders and Brussels (for the period 1830–1880). This did not go as smoothly as anticipated, because our colleagues often by dint of a detour via old-fashioned note card files had to penetrate the material reality of the textbook. Moreover, our approach deviated in another way from what was being propagated internationally. Following our work on many textbooks (we ultimately described almost 4,000 titles in our repertorium), we published few indexes to the published textbook file. We felt that a list of authors would suffice for those who wished to use this resource. In our opinion, using subject indexes creates the disadvantage of working with supra-historical (and thereby a-historical) categories. This not only applies to indications of the so-called courses under which the textbooks come but also applies to the introduction of educational levels for which the individual textbooks were intended. Beginning with the latter, when one considers such forms of classification, one starts from the present situation (for example, preschool, primary, secondary, technical, vocational, higher, and university education), but this categorization is inevitably ‘presentist’ in nature. It is imposed from the present onto the past and thereby distorts the historical process behind the formation of educational levels. The same problem applies to the (often-professed) categorizations of scientific disciplines and their respective didactic translations for education.

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If one proclaims them to be supra-historical categories from a contemporary standpoint, one cannot see the paradigmatic developments, modes, and turns that have occurred over time within these general supra-categories nor the differentiations that have been manifested horizontally within the monolithically conceived disciplinary matrix. To give a concrete example, does it really make historical sense to simply place ‘bible history’, ‘liturgy’, ‘Eucharistic crusade’, ‘dogma’, ‘theology’, ‘catechism’, etc. under one and the same name – ‘religion’? In our opinion, what the authors had in mind when writing is best determined from looking at the title and the subtitle of their textbooks. This method is most pertinent when looking at 19th-century production. When these titles can be made available electronically (for example, by means of registration on a CD-ROM disk), waltzing through them with a search function will be straightforward enough. Of course, sufficient familiarity with the content will be required on the part of the user. Whoever wants to use textbooks for historical research in education has to have sufficient preliminary knowledge of the area. Indeed, he must also be able to develop adequate questions to pose in regard to the sources. The material will not primarily impose such questions. Certain subject indexes may limit the range of enquiry, but this is problematic as these unavoidably betray the research agenda of the compilers. That, too, was a reason why we ultimately dropped it. In the meantime, whether all of this will result in better history of education research on the international forum remains very much the question. As we have repeatedly argued in the framework of the Internationale Gesellschaft für historische und systematische Schulbuchforschung in Ichenhausen, Germany, and of the Ibero-American group PatreManes, such research involves much more than simply describing the content of textbooks themselves (Depaepe & Van Gorp, 2009). It is important that one does not permit oneself to be held prisoner by a single source, however rich and important that source may be. Whoever wishes to draw out the pedagogical and didactic practices in the classroom via the textbook cannot do without the existing literature and the classic sources that have been amply discussed above. This certainly applies for one who wishes to place educational practice in its broader social context. Here, we can refer to our attempts to interpret the textbook in the colonial contexts of the Belgian Congo as an example (and the school songs that sometimes served when actual textbooks were lacking: Depaepe, Briffaerts, Kita Kyankenge Masandi, & Vinck, 2003; Kita Kyankenge Masandi & Depaepe, 2004). Here, statistics, governmental publications, having been printed with and without declarations of pedagogical intent, inspectors’ reports, and chronicles dug up from archives of teaching congregations played a prominent role, as did ego documents – letters from missionaries, for example – as well as oral witnesses of those who had to undergo colonial education (see, e.g. Vinck, Briffaerts, Herman, & Depaepe, 2006). All of this will not immediately strike the historical researcher as surprising. Education, as a social event, occurred not only at the classroom level but was, as discussed earlier with regard to statistics, very clearly imbedded in the politicalideological framework of the 19th century. More striking, perhaps, is the observation

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that this conclusion also continues to apply for anyone who wishes to study educational practice (schoolish behaviour itself) both as a relative and as an autonomous phenomenon. From a content analysis of the textbooks themselves (in pre-structured categories or not), one need not expect a faithful reconstruction of the pedagogical past in the classroom, let alone an impetus for any theory formation around it. Nor, in this regard, can one do much with the knowledge that in virtually all reading lessons around the world, mother did the dishes while father sat reading his newspaper (Depaepe & Van Gorp, 2009). Within the framework of cooperation with the union we have finally taken the pedagogical ‘micro-level’ of the class as the object of our research. As a supplement to our study of the social position of the teacher (Depaepe et al., 1993), we particularly wanted to know what his everyday activities on the shop floor looked like in their concrete form. Our assumption, which was later confirmed, was that we would be able to discern a considerable degree of continuity. Indeed this is what other authors had already demonstrated in the United States and in Europe (Depaepe et al., 2000). The study that emerged at the end of the 1990s rested on many kinds of source material that we had prepared with various working instruments. Nevertheless, the periodicals again prevailed – and this ‘was’ unique – as the ‘mother of all sources’ in the history of education. By means of ‘close reading’ (the technique mentioned above), we compared a number of journals that were selected to present a variety of conflicting viewpoints – Catholic vs. non-Catholic, conservative vs. modern, and Dutch-language vs. French-language. We studied journals from three key periods – the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1960s. We discovered that despite the various contexts, there was a very strong line of continuity regarding formation and educational behaviour. By considering both ‘pedagogical’ and ‘didactic’ factors, we felt that we had contributed something of value in respect of the existing studies over what is called the ‘grammar of schooling’. Previous studies had, admittedly, pointed to the tough historical structures of education but, in our opinion, had failed to appreciate sufficiently the pedagogical semantic within which this didactic grammar was immersed. This pronounced preference for the pedagogical periodicals as opposed to the latest ‘turns’, such as the interest in the visual (see Catteeuw, Dams, Depaepe, & Simon, 2005), was not appreciated everywhere. In this regard, we were even accused of ‘iconophobia’ (Del Pozo & del Mar, 2006). Had we failed to appreciate a number of ‘modes’ or ‘trends’, or even missed genuine paradigms?

3.5 Material Sources of Education: More than Artefacts from the Educational Memory At the beginning of this century, the ‘materialities of schooling’ became a growing concern for researchers (see Lawn & Grosvenor, 2005). Such concern was directed towards a mishmash of ‘artefacts’, remnants of a pedagogical (generally ‘schoolish’) past that often have symbolic significance: school desks, slates,

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slate-pencils, pens, inkpots, blackboards, blackboard erasers, wall posters, and other wall decorations, photographs of the king and the queen, flags, crucifixes, and measures of content. Such artefacts also include children’s drawings and assignments, copybooks and schoolbags, dustcoats, gym shoes, gymnastic equipment and gear, the school bell, and so on. Since the 1970s and 1980s, many of these things have been collected, preserved, and exhibited in school museums, which sprung out of the ground like mushrooms in the last decades of the 20th century. Amassing such collections is obviously important, as is the development of museum expertise in regard to this material. However, it is important that such enterprises do not result in nostalgic naval-gazing or a narcissistic longing for the ‘the good old days’ (when ‘back then’ generally coincides with the period of one’s own childhood). We are more than a little concerned by a trend for generating income from the interest of older people who can enjoy themselves by ‘returning’ to ‘the school of yesteryear’. Particularly in Germany one may witness retired teachers and ‘pupils’ (i.e., the visiting older people) playing the game of dated stereotypical school practices. In our opinion, museums should, in any event, select their content, as well as the activities they offer, with reference to scholarly research. As regards the making available of material sources, we ourselves have contributed by means of a study of wall charts and exercise books (e.g., Herman, Surmont, Depaepe, Simon, & Van Gorp, 2008). But historical research is more than a search for the ‘ultimate’ source. A new approach to educational historiography can never come from the sources themselves: one who remains imprisoned in his or her sources necessarily produces very descriptive work whose explanations are simply derived ‘from the sources’. Is this what contemporary history of education needs? As early as 1996, Tenorth (1996) praised the ‘handwork’ in history of education. This praise related to the patient handling of sources. However, Tenorth simultaneously pilloried the lack of theoretical content in the discipline. We concur with his thoughts on this matter. It is not the source that stands at the beginning of the historiographical operation (following Certeau) but rather the research question, and it is this question that determines the use of sources (as we argued above, the use of a plurality of them). Moreover, the answer to a research question is not only and (probably) not primarily dependent on the source used but on the (hermeneutical) interpretation that is formulated on the basis of these sources from the past. This interpretation is generated through the use of an entire arsenal of tools: concepts, theories, and paradigms. Rather than conducting discussions over what constitutes the best source, it is perhaps better to concentrate on the theoretical side of educational historiography, for as Tenorth notes, theoretical development within the history of education has been somewhat laboured. At most, one finds a number of ‘imported’ theories (such as ‘Foucauldian normalization’), but little theoretical work is done from within the discipline. With our study of everyday action – as well as with our interpretation of the concept of ‘pedagogization’ (Depaepe, Herman, Surmont, Van Gorp, & Simon, 2008) – we aimed to contribute to the theoretical development of the discipline.

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3.6 By Way of Conclusion: Beyond Iconophobia . . . There is no ultimate source just as there is no ultimate interpretation, form of argumentation, proof, and/or explanation. Such things have never existed. In psychology, psychoanalysis and behaviourism were, at some point, very much in fashion, but now they have given way to the neurological explanatory patterns, which, of course, are just as reductionist. Neurobiology and cognitive psychology now provide the governing repertoire of concepts. ‘Commonsense’ explanations and stories, epitomized by the historical craft, are felt to be deficient and are often relegated to ‘folk psychology’ (which, ironically enough, was developed by Wundt, himself the founding father of experimental psychology). The ‘posicionamiento iconofóbico’ ascribed to us (Del Pozo & del Mar, 2006, p. 295) thus has little to rest on and is perhaps caused by over-enthusiasm on the part of our ‘accusers’ to work with the so-called new sources (the kick of ‘discovery’). Let us not forget that photography has a long tradition of theory formation and analysis and is bound up with a variety of methodological approaches. These admittedly require coordination. We have also never stated that one cannot or must not use iconographic sources. Rather, we insist on the fact that the faith in the omnipotence of one source sometimes leads to one-sided interpretations where the context is not fully appreciated. Attention to discursive analysis of visual sources, this certainly applies to photographs, is far more pressing than is the case with written sources. In photographic ‘language’, the singular, the concrete, the accidental, and the mise-en-scène are radicalized and rendered absolute by the medium. But these photographs and films can hardly be interpreted without giving attention to the supporting message. With regard to our research into the history of the classroom, we found caricatured images from novels as well as documentary and publicity/advertising messages that were ‘taken from life’. But it is self-evident that the publicity/advertising messages were clad ‘in their Sunday best’ presenting a cleaned-up picture of reality. This should not prevent us from taking that medium seriously. It is not simply the message that must be problematized for historical research. By using a variety of sources, one is better able to distance oneself from the story of the original actor in order to interrogate the story ‘under way’ and therefore change the actual story and the actual explanation more substantially. The irony of history, moreover, has it that we, with the organization of ISCHE XX in 1998 (Depaepe & Henkens, 2000), wanted to give an impulse to the valorization of visual sources within international educational historiography. Indeed, we have often used these sources in our research up to the present (see, e.g., Devlieger, Grosvenor, Simon, Van Hove, & Vanobbergen, 2008). Like anyone, we do not like to be wrongly accused of something. In order to satisfy our accusers, we will here use their own weapons to dispose of a stubbornly held position. Within the canonized historiography of the open-air school, the idea prevails that the observable changes in school construction have profoundly affected educational practice. To a progressive architecture belongs a progressive pedagogy. The book that resulted from an international interdisciplinary colloquium on the history of the open-air schools in Paris (Châtelet, Lerch, & Luc, 2003) emphasizes

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this point. Unfortunately, the critical message presented there (Depaepe & Simon, 2003) has not prevented the development of research questions and themes (inspired by a few unquestioned assumptions) from being central to the discussion of this area. Such unquestioned assumptions include the notions that open-air schools were ‘laboratoires d’expériences pédagogiques’ from which renewal X in/of education automatically flowed and also that the architecture of these schools was associated with favourable consequences on the pedagogical-didactic level. The ‘originality’ and ‘extensiveness’ of the concept of the open-air school – for it had, indeed, long been present in many countries – as is ‘eloquently’ illustrated by the sources of the time, were hardly challenged in most of the contributions to the book. The governing discourse on open-air schooling persists in clinging on to an almost naïve faith in the open-air school as an instrument of progress. However, the researcher who looks at contextualized reality from the perspective of educational historiography does indeed see that the ‘images speak for themselves’: totally classic education with more air. It makes no difference if one is an iconophobe or an iconophile as long as the results of the research are valid.

References Bloch, M. (1998). Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (préface de Jacques Le Goff). Paris: Armand Collin. Catteeuw, K., Dams, K., Depaepe, M., & Simon, F. (2005). Filming the black box: Primary schools on film in Belgium: A first assessment of unused sources. In U. Mietzner, K. Myers, & N. Peim (Eds.), Visual history. Images of education (pp. 203–231). Oxford: Peter Lang. Châtelet, A. M., Lerch, D., & Luc, J. N. (Eds.). (2003). L’école de plein air. Une expérience pédagogique et architecturale dans l’Europe du XXe siècle. [Open-Air schools. An educational and architectural venture in twentieth-century Europe]. Paris: Editions Recherches. Dams, K., Depaepe, M., & Simon, F. (2002). By indirections finding directions out: Classroom history, sources and objectives. In W. Jamrozek & D. Zoladz-Strzelczyk (Eds.), Dialogue with the past. To professor Jan Hellwig in memoriam (pp. 57–92). Posnan: Adam Micikiewicz University Press. De Coster, T., Depaepe, M., & Simon, F. (2009). “Alternative” education in Flanders (1960–2000). Transformation of knowledge in a neo-liberal context. Paedagogica Historica, 45 (in press). Delacroix, C., Garcia, P., Dosse, F., & Trebitsch, M. (2002). Michel de Certeau, les chemins de l’histoire. Brussels: Complexe. Del Pozo, A., & del Mar, M. (2006). Imágenes e historia de la educación: construcción, reconstrucción y representación de las prácticas escolares en el aula. Historia de la Educación. Revista interuniversitaria, 25, 291–315. Depaepe, M., et al. (2000). Order in progress. Everyday education practice in primary schools – Belgium, 1880–1970. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Depaepe, M. (2007). Philosophy and history of education: Time to bridge the gap? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39, 28–43. Depaepe, M., Briffaerts, J., Kita Kyankenge Masandi, P., & Vinck, H. (2003). Manuels et chansons scolaires au Congo Belge. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Depaepe, M., De Vroede, M., Lory, J., & Simon, F. (1991). Bibliographie de sources pour l’histoire de l’enseignement préscolaire, primaire, normal et spécial en Belgique 1830– 1959. Bibliografie van bronnen voor de geschiedenis van het voorschools, lager, normaal- en buitengewoon onderwijs in België 1830–1959. Ghent: C.S.H.P.

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Depaepe, M., De Vroede, M., & Simon, F. (Eds.). (1993). Geen trede meer om op te staan. De maatschappelijke positie van onderwijzers en onderwijzeressen tijdens de voorbije eeuw. Kapellen: Uitgeverij Pelckmans. Depaepe, M., D’hoker, M., & Simon, F. (2003). Manuels scolaires belges 1830–1880. Répertoire. Belgische leerboeken 1830–1880. Repertorium (Vols. 2). Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief/Archives générales du Royaume. Depaepe, M., & Henkens, B. (2000). The History of education and the challenge of the visual. Paedagogica Historica, 36, 11–17. Depaepe, M., Herman, F., Surmont, M., Van Gorp, A., & Simon, F. (2008). About pedagogization: From the perspective of the history of education. In P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: The educationalization of social problems (pp. 13–30). Dordrecht: Springer. Depaepe, M., Lauwers, H., Simon, F., Hellinckx, B., & Van Rompaey, L. (2007). Mapa de la feminización de la enseñanza primaria en Bélgica. Tempora. Revista de Sociología de la Educación, 10, 87–114. Depaepe, M., & Simon, F. (2003). Les écoles de plein air en Belgique. Un phénomène historicopédagogique mineur, reflètant des processus socio-historiques majeures? [Open-air schools in Belgium. A marginal phenomenon in educational history reflecting larger social and historical processes?]. In A. M. Châtelet, D. Lerch, & J. N. Luc (Eds.), L’école de plein air. Une expérience pédagogique et architecturale dans l’Europe du XXe siècle. [Open-Air schools. An educational and architectural venture in twentieth-century Europe] (pp. 80–95). Paris: Editions Recherches. Depaepe, M., Simon, F., Surmont, M., & Van Gorp, A. (2007). “Menschen in Welten”. Ordnungsstrukturen des Pädagogischen auf dem Weg zwischen Haus und Schule. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 52. Beiheft, 96–109. Depaepe, M., & Van Gorp, A. (2009). Introduction: In search of the real nature of textbooks. In A. Van Gorp & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Auf der Suche nach der wahren Art von Textbüchern (pp. 16–23). Bad Heilbrunn: Verlag Julius Klinkhardt. Devlieger, P., Grosvenor, I., Simon, F., Van Hove, G., & Vanobbergen, B. (2008). Visualising disability in the past. Paedagogica Historica, 44, 747–760. De Vroede, M., et al. (1973–1987). Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van het pedagogisch leven in België: de periodieken (1815–1940) (Vol. 6). Leuven/Ghent: Seminaries voor Historische (en Vergelijkende) Pedagogiek/Leuven University Press. De Vroede, M., Lory, J., & Simon, F. (1988). Bibliographie de l’histoire de l’enseignement préscolaire, primaire, normal et spécial en Belgique 1774–1986. Bibliografie van de geschiedenis van het voorschools, lager, normaal- en buitengewoon onderwijs. 1774–1986. Leuven: Acco. D’hoker, M., et al. (2006). De statistieken van het onderwijs in België. Het Algemeen Secundair Onderwijs, 1945–2000. Les statistiques de l’enseignement en Belgique. L’enseignement secondaire de Formation générale, 1945–2000 (2 Vols.). Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief/Archives générales du Royaume. Herman, F., Surmont, M., Depaepe, M., Simon, F., & Van Gorp, A. (2008). Remembering the schoolmaster’s blood-red pen. The story of exercise books and the story of children of the time. History of Education & Children’s Literature, 2(2), 351–375. Kita Kyankenge Masandi, P., & Depaepe, M. (2004). La chanson scolaire au Congo Belge. Enthologie (préface Filip De Boeck). Paris: L’Harmattan. Lawn, M., & Grosvenor, I. (Eds.). (2005). Materialities of schooling: Design, technology, objects, routines. Oxford: Symposium Books. Mietzner, U., Myers, K., & Peim, N. (Eds.). (2005). Visual history. Images of education. Oxford: Peter Lang. Minten, L. (1991–1996). Les statistiques de l’enseignement en Belgique. L’enseignement primaire 1830-1992 (Vols. 5). Brussels: Archives générales du Royaume. Popkewitz, T. S., & Lindblad, S. (2001). Educational statistics, equity problem and systems of reason: Relations of governing education and social inclusion and exclusion. In S. Lindblad &

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T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), Statistical information and systems of reason on education and social inclusion and exclusion in international and national contexts (pp. 331–350). Uppsala: Uppsala University, Department of Education. Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Standish, P. (2008). Chroniclers and critics. Paedagogica Historica, 44, 661–675. Tenorth, H.-E. (1996). Lob des Handwerks. Kritik der Theorie – Zur Lage der pädagogischen Historiographie in Deutschland. Paedagogica Historica, 32, 343–361. Van Eenoo, R., & Vermeersch, A. (1962). Bibliografisch repertorium van de Belgische pers: 1789– 1914. Leuven: Nauwelaerts. Van Rompaey, L. (2003). Strijd voor waardering. Het COV van 1893 tot 1983. Antwerp: Garant. Van Rompaey, L., Depaepe, M., & Simon, F. (2009). A different kind of activism: The position of catholic women teachers in their union, Belgium, 1950–1965. Sens Public. Revue Internationale. International webjournal. (in press) Vinck, H., Briffaerts, J., Herman, F., & Depaepe, M. (2006). Expériences scolaires au Congo Belge. Etude explorative. Annales Aequatoria, 27, 5–101.

Chapter 4

Educational Formalism and the Language of Goals in American Education, Educational Reform, and Educational History David F. Labaree

Schools are better at expressing social goals than at operationalizing those goals in a manner that might actually realize them. School reform efforts are better at changing the rhetorical commitment of schools to particular educational goals than at bringing the teaching and learning in schools in line with these goals. And historical studies of education are better at identifying the evolving language of educational goals than at detailing the impact of these goals on the core pedagogical relation between teacher and student. Thus the language of goals dominates education, educational reform, and historical research on education. In this paper, I explore the central elements of education’s language fetish, the historical and sociological roots of this condition, and its consequences for education and society. The focus will be on American education; but much of the argument resonates with education in other settings, since it tries to tell a story about the social role that education is asked to play in modern liberal democracies. At its heart, this is a story grounded in paradox. Education is perhaps the greatest institutional success of the modern era. It grew from a modest and marginal position in the 18th century to the center of modern societies in the 21st century, where it consumes an enormous share of the time and treasure of both states and citizens. Key to its institutional success has been its ability to embrace and embody the social goals that have been imposed upon it. Yet education has been remarkably unsuccessful at implementing these goals in the classroom practices of education and at realizing these goals in the social outcomes of education. How are we to understand the success of this institution in light of its failure to do what we asked of it? One way of thinking about this, I suggest, is that education may not be doing what we ask, but it is doing what we want. We want an institution that will pursue our social goals in a way that is in line with the individualism at the heart of the liberal ideal, aiming to solve social problems by seeking to change the hearts, minds, and capacities of individual students.1 Another way of putting this is that we want an institution where we can express our social goals without violating D.F. Labaree (B) School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA e-mail: [email protected] P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_4,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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the principle of individual choice that lies at the center of the social structure, even if this comes at the cost of failing to achieve these goals. So education can serve as a point of civic pride, a showplace for our ideals, and a medium for engaging in uplifting but ultimately harmless dispute about alternative visions of the good life. At the same time, it can also serve as a convenient whipping boy, which we can blame for its failure to achieve our highest aspirations for ourselves as a society. In this sense, then, we can understand the whole grand educational enterprise as an exercise in formalism. We assign formal responsibility to education for solving our most pressing social problems in light of our highest social ideals, with the tacit understanding that by educationalizing these problem-solving efforts we are seeking a solution that is more formal than substantive. We are saying that we are willing to accept what education can produce – new programs, new curricula, new institutions, new degrees, new educational opportunities – in place of solutions that might make real changes in the ways in which we distribute social power, wealth, and honor.

4.1 Education is an Expression of the Social Goals of Liberal Democracy The language of educational goals arises from the core tensions within a liberal democracy.2 One of those tensions is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands of capitalist markets. A related issue is the requirement that society be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own interests. In the American setting, these tensions have played out through the politics of education in the form of a struggle among three major social goals for the educational system. One goal is democratic equality, which sees education as a mechanism for producing capable citizens. Another is social efficiency, which sees education as a mechanism for developing productive workers. A third is social mobility, which sees education as a mechanism for individuals to reinforce or enhance their social position. Democratic equality represents the political side of our liberal democratic values, focusing on the role of education in building a nation, forming a republican community, and providing citizens with the wide range of capabilities required for effective participation in democratic decision making. The other two goals represent the market side of liberal democracy. Social efficiency captures the perspective of employers and taxpayers, who are concerned about the role of education in producing the human capital that is required by the modern economy and that is essential for economic growth and general prosperity. From this angle the issue is for education to provide for the full range of productive skills and forms of knowledge required in the complex occupational structure of modern capitalism. Social mobility captures the perspective of educational consumers and prospective employees,

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who are concerned about the role of educational credentials in signaling to the market which individuals have the productive skills that qualify them for the jobs with highest levels of power, money, and prestige. The collectivist side of liberal democracy is expressed by a combination of democratic equality and social efficiency. Both aim at having education provide broad social benefits, with both conceiving of education as a public good. Investing in the political capital of the citizenry and the human capital of the workforce benefits everyone in society, including those families who do not have children in school. In contrast, the social mobility goal represents the individualist side of liberal democracy. From this perspective, education is a private good, whose benefits accrue only to the student who receives educational services and owns the resulting educational credentials, and its primary function is to provide educational consumers with privileged access to higher level jobs in a zero-sum competition with other prospective employees. With this mix of goals imposed on it, education in liberal democracies has come to look like an institution at odds with itself. After all, it is being asked simultaneously to serve politics and markets, promote equality and inequality, construct itself and, as a public and private good, serve collective interests and individual interests. Politically, its structure should be flat, its curriculum common, and enrolment universal; economically, its structure should be hierarchical, its curriculum stratified, and enrolment scaled by high rates of attrition. From the perspective of democratic equality and social efficiency, its aim is socialization, to provide knowledge that is usable for citizens and workers; from the perspective of social mobility, its aim is selection, to provide credentials that allow access to good jobs, independent of any learning that might have occurred in acquiring these credentials. In this sense, then, these educational goals represent the contradictions embedded in any liberal democracy, contradictions that cannot be resolved without removing either the society’s liberalism or its democracy. Therefore when we project our liberal democratic goals on schools, we want them to take each of these goals seriously but not to implement any one of them beyond modest limits, since to do so would be to put the other equally valued goals in significant jeopardy. This is what I meant when I said earlier that education accomplishes what we want rather than what we say. We ask it to promote social equality, but we want it to do so in a way that does not threaten individual liberty or private interests. We ask it to promote individual opportunity, but we want it to do so in a way that does not threaten the integrity of the nation or the efficiency of the economy. As a result, the educational system is an abject failure in its ability to achieve any one of its primary social goals. It is also a failure in its ability to solve the social problems assigned to it, since these problems cannot be solved in a manner that simultaneously satisfies all three goals. In particular, social problems rooted in the nature of the social structure simply cannot be resolved by deploying educational programs to change individuals. The apparently dysfunctional outcomes of the educational system, therefore, are not the result of bad planning, deception, or political cynicism; they are an institutional expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind.

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4.2 Educational Reform Movements Are Efforts to Reorder Educational Goals Since schools in a liberal democracy arise as expressions of a set of goals that are in tension with each other, educational reform movements take the form of efforts to rearrange the relative priority of these goals in light of pressing contemporaneous concerns. The fight is all about the language of goals. In this section, I explore how the language of educational goals has evolved during the course of educational reform movements in the US over the last 150 years: the common school movement (1820–1860), the progressive movement (1900–1950), the desegregation movement (1950–1980), and the standards and school choice movements (from 1980 to the present).3 The story starts in the early 19th century with a republican vision of education for civic virtue and ends in the early 21st century with a consumerist vision of education for equal opportunity. This rhetorical transformation was characterized by two main shifts, each of which occurred at two levels. First, the overall balance in the purposes of schooling shifted from a political rationale (democratic equality, to shore up the new republic) to a market rationale (promoting social efficiency and social mobility). And the political rationale itself evolved from a substantive vision of education for civic virtue to a procedural vision of education for equal opportunity. Second, in a closely related change, the rhetorical emphasis shifted from viewing education as a public good to viewing it as a private good. And the understanding of education as a public good itself evolved from a politically grounded definition (democratic equality, seen as education for republican community) to a market-grounded definition (social efficiency, seen as education for human capital). For the common school movement in the second quarter of the 19th century, the primary goal for education was to create a republican community, which was particularly necessary and problematic in a new republic with a rapidly growing market economy. Horace Mann put it this way in his 1848 annual report: “Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men – the balance-wheel of the social machinery” (Cremin, 1957, p. 87). He went on to say that “by enlarging the cultivated class or caste. . ., it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society” (p. 87). This contribution is critical, he argued, if we are going to engage in the “laborious” but critical effort “to make Republicans” (p. 92). In an earlier report he also referred to the economic benefits of education, but in a pointedly backhanded fashion, emphasizing that “This view, so far from being the highest which can be taken of the beneficent influences of education, may, perhaps, be justly regarded as the lowest.” (Cremin, 1957, p. 81). For the dominant branch of the progressive education movement in the early 20th century, the main goal of education had shifted from political to economic, from democratic equality to social efficiency. In the primary document of administrative progressive reform, The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (1918), we hear that “The purpose of democracy is so to organize society that each member may develop his personality primarily through activities designed for the well-being

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of his fellow members and of society as a whole. . .” (p. 3). And it follows that the purpose of education is to “develop in each individual the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he will find his place. . .” (p. 3). The report makes the nature of that place clear: “As a worker, he must adjust himself to a more complex economic order” (p. 1). The high school curriculum should facilitate this process by becoming differentiated, and “The basis of this differentiation should be, in the broad sense of the term, vocational. . .” (p. 16). With the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, the political vision of education returned to center stage, but this time not in service of developing republican community but in opening up social opportunity for blacks who had been denied this opportunity by segregation. The supreme court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) spelled out a vision of education as the gatekeeper to the workforce and thus the key to social mobility: “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Whereas progressives used political grounds to support a view of education for social efficiency, the Brown decision used political grounds (equal rights) to put forward a vision of education for social mobility. This made education an issue of consumer rights, since segregation denied some people access to educational credentials that could open access to good jobs. It also shifted the focus from education as a public good, which was the vision of both the common school and progressive movements, to education as a private good. As the decision made clear, the beneficiaries of this expanded access to education was not society as a whole but the minorities who had been denied such access in the past. The standards movement emerged in the 1980s with the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983), which argued to restore social efficiency as the primary goal of American education. The problem was that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people” (p. 7), and the answer was to shore up U.S. educational production of human capital to enable it to “compete. . .for international standing and markets. . .” (p. 8). At the start of the 21st century, the standards movement expanded its base of political support by supplementing its appeal to social efficiency with an appeal to social mobility drawn from the equity language of civil rights. This combination became embodied in a law whose name captured the rhetorical shift, The No Child Left Behind Act (Public Law 107-110). The opening section of the law depicts the vision of educational standards as a civil right: “The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments” (2002). The school choice movement also emerged in the 1980s. Like the standards movement, it adopted a market perspective on education, but it did so in a more radical manner by arguing to abandon political control over schools in favour of market control. The central texts of the movement (e.g., Chubb & Moe, 1990) argued that

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by empowering the educational consumer to exercise dominion over schools, choice would increase the quality of education. Parallel with the rhetorical shift in the standards movement, the choice movement also came to adopt the political language of civil rights to support its argument for consumer control, asserting that the latter would increase social equity by allowing all parents to demand and receive the kinds of schools they need (an option otherwise available only to wealthy parents). As one black leader put it, “We must give low-income and working-class parents the power to choose schools – public or private, nonsectarian or religious – where their children will succeed” (Fuller, 2002). In the past century and a half, the language of goals in American educational reform has shifted from a political vision to a market vision of education, from a focus on education as a way to create citizens for an emerging republic to a focus on education as a way to allow consumers to get ahead in a market society. Overall, the goal of democratic equality has ceded ground to the goals of social efficiency and social mobility. In the process, the rhetorical weight has also shifted from education as a public good to education as a private good; yet at the same time the definition of education as a public good has shifted from a political vision of education for nation building to a market vision of education for human capital production. But the political vision of education has not disappeared. Instead, there has been a shift from seeing education a source of political community to seeing it as a source of individual opportunity.

4.3 Reform Is Better at Changing Educational Goals than Educational Practices Educational reform movements have focused on reordering the relative priority of educational goals, and their impact on education (at least in the US) has rarely extended beyond the rhetorical level. In this section, I examine why the primary impact of American educational reform efforts on elementary and secondary schooling has been at the periphery rather than at the core of this institution.4 These pressures have been able to exert a major impact on the rhetoric of education, and the most effective reform efforts have had some impact on the formal structure of schooling; but they typically have had little impact on how teachers teach and even less on what students learn. I present a four-level model for understanding the relative inability of school reform in the US to reach the core of teaching and learning in classrooms. Then I examine the movement for progressive education in the US in the first half of the 20th century as a case for understanding the limitations of reform. It is useful to think of the educational system as consisting of four levels, extending from the upper periphery all the way down to the core functions of teaching and learning. The putative aim of educational reform is to work its way down through the layers, with its success measured by how many layers it manages to change. My argument is that educational reforms only rarely get past the first level and almost

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never past the second. At the top is the level of educational rhetoric. This is where most reform efforts begin (and frequently end), with statements of principle, educational visions, rationales for change, frameworks for representing that change, and norms for reconstructed educational practice. Next is the level of formal structure. This is where reform rhetoric needs to be translated into key components of the organizational structure of schooling at the district level, such as local educational policies, organizational units, curriculum frameworks, classroom textbooks, and professional development programs. Third is the level of teaching practice. This is where reform ideas, if they succeed in passing through the machinery of the school district largely unscathed, need to pass through the door of the self-contained classroom in order to merge into the professional practice of teaching. Last of all is the level of student learning. Even if a particular reform effort improbably manages to shape the rhetoric of schooling, alter the structure of some school districts, and penetrate the practice of teachers in some classrooms, it still needs to transform the learning that students take away from their classroom experience if it is going to be declared a success.

4.3.1 The Case of Educational Progressivism Initially an outgrowth of the political movement known as progressivism, the movement for progressive education emerged at the end of the 19th century in the US, became a major force in the first decade of the 20th century, and lasted for another 50 years. David Tyack identified two major tendencies in this movement, which he called administrative and pedagogical. These two strands of the progressive education movement were strikingly different in their effect on the American system of schooling. Ellen Lagemann put the difference this way: “I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the US during the 20th century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost” (Lagemann, 1989, p. 185). If Dewey and the pedagogical progressives lost the fight for reshaping the structure of schools, they nonetheless exerted a major and continuing impact on the rhetoric of education. In contrast, Thorndike and the administrative progressives managed to effect enduring changes in both rhetoric and the formal structure of schooling, but had a limited impact on the core of teaching and learning. The two strands of progressivism had several orientations in common, which helped justify the common label applied to them and which often put them on the same side in reform efforts. One is that they both shared a grounding in developmentalism. Another is that they both detested the practice of basing school subjects in academic disciplines instead of tailoring these subjects to the practical needs of modern life. The two strands of progressivism, however, took these two common orientations in very different directions. Pedagogical progressives (Dewey, William Kilpatrick, Harold Rugg) saw developmentalism as a rationale for rejecting the traditional curriculum in favour of classroom processes that would harness individual student interests and abilities and would foster engaged, self-directed learning.

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A broad vein of romanticism runs through this form of progressivism, which saw learning as a natural process that would occur best if artificial mechanisms like schools and curricula would just get out of the way of children’s natural urge to learn. Administrative progressives eschewed the romanticism of their pedagogical counterparts in favour of a hard-headed utilitarianism. Instead of Dewey’s focus on naturalistic teaching and learning, they tended to focus on school governance, professional administration, and scientifically designed formal curriculum. The two main principles of the administrative progressives (Thorndike, David Snedden, Elwood Cubberley) were social efficiency (schooling for work) and differentiation (tailoring curriculum to student abilities and projected future roles).

4.3.2 Administrative Progressives In the first half of the 20th century, administrative progressives had a substantial effect at the rhetorical level. In particular, they gave public credibility to the idea that the primary goals of education are the production of human capital and the promotion of social efficiency. The movement’s most prominent rhetorical expression, The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, made these points with force and clarity. The vision of social efficiency achieved prominence during the progressive era and continued into the present as a central theme in the politics of American education. Administrative progressive reform reached past the rhetorical level and also exerted a substantial impact at the formal-structural level of the school system, with particular emphasis on the organization of school systems and the structure of the formal curriculum. They succeeded in professionalizing school administration and consolidating governance in the hands of small elite school boards. And their impact on curriculum was significant if less dramatic. They managed to diversify traditional school subjects in order to shift from narrow preparation in academic disciplines to broad preparation for work and life. The evidence is strong that the administrative progressives had a major impact on American schooling at the rhetorical and structural levels, but the evidence suggests a much weaker impact at the levels of teaching and learning in classrooms. One reason for this is that their primary focus was elsewhere. This was a movement aimed at the formal structure of schooling and not at the instructional core. Many of its leaders were school superintendents and its primary reform target was other superintendents. There was an assumption that teachers will do what the administrators and curricula require, but there was no real effort to address the problem of how to bring teaching in line with administrative expectations. Student learning was also something that was assumed by the administrative progressives instead of being actively facilitated as a central part of the reform process. This strand of the progressive movement was grounded in Thorndike’s theory of learning, which argued that learning is largely not transferable. Thorndike argued that students’ learning is dependent on the content to which they are exposed. The beauty of this theory was

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that it put curriculum in the driver’s seat. Once you had set up a carefully designed curriculum to cover all the knowledge they needed, learning naturally followed. Teachers were just there to deliver the curriculum; it was the curriculum that taught the students.

4.3.3 Pedagogical Progressives In the first half of the 20th century, pedagogical progressives had almost no success in shaping schooling at the level of formal structure. The best evidence for this is the success of the administrative progressives at the same level. For the success of the one denoted the failure of the other. In particular the differentiated curriculum introduced by the administrators was abhorrent to the pedagogical progressives, who wanted to tailor instruction to the interests and initiative of the child and promote a naturalistic student-directed pursuit of learning. The pedagogical progressives also had little luck in introducing their reforms at the levels of classroom practice and student learning. But unlike the administrators, this was not for want of trying. Larry Cuban (1993) and Arthur Zilversmit (1993) are two historians who have examined the impact of pedagogical progressives on the practice of teaching, and both concluded that this impact was modest and transitory. If the pedagogical progressives largely failed in their primary aim, to reshape teaching and learning in public school classrooms around the principles of childcentered instruction, they did succeed in effecting reform at the rhetorical level. Zilversmit makes this point in his assessment of the pedagogues’ failure at the structural level: “The ultimate failure was that so much of progressivism’s apparent success was rhetorical. While some schools and individual teachers had heeded Dewey’s call for a more child-centred school, most had given only lip service to these ideas while continuing older practices.” When combined with the impact that administrative progressives had on the structure of schooling, this meant that American educators had come to use the child-centered language of discovery, engagement, and inquiry to talk about a structure of schooling that is deeply grounded in the social efficiency principles of differentiation and human capital production.

4.4 Historical Research on Education Is Focused More on Goals than Outcomes If educational reform movements have focused on reordering the relative priority of educational goals, and if their impact on education has only marginally extended beyond the rhetorical level, then it naturally follows that historical accounts of education reform also focus attention primarily on detailing disputes over the language of goals. To explore this idea, I examine two major historical texts, both of

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which focus on the case of the American movement for progressive education. The Transformation of the School, by Lawrence Cremin (1961), is the canonical history of the movement, which gives it a largely positive spin. Left Back, by Diane Ravitch (2000), is a revisionist history, which provides a distinctly negative spin. Both, however, focus almost entirely on the language of goals. At the start of his concluding chapter, Cremin summarizes the state of the progressive project at the middle of the 20th century, by saying that American educators had by then all come to talk about education in the language of progressivism (the strand I have been calling pedagogical progressivism): There is a “conventional wisdom,” to borrow from John Kenneth Galbraith, in education as well as economics, and by the end of World War II progressivism had come to be that conventional wisdom. Discussions of educational policy were liberally spiced with phrases like “recognizing individual differences,” “personality development,” “the whole child,” “social and emotional growth,” “creative self-expression,” “the needs of learners,” “intrinsic motivation,” “persistent life situations,” “bridging the gap between home and school,” “teaching children, not subjects,” “adjusting the school to the child,” “real life experiences,” “teacherpupil relationships,” and “staff planning.” Such phrases were a cant, to be sure, the peculiar jargon of the pedagogues. But they were more than that, for they signified that Dewey’s forecast of a day when progressive education would eventually be accepted as good education had now finally come to pass. (Cremin, 1961, p. 328; emphasis in original)

In the last sentence, Cremin tries to stretch this rhetorical accomplishment into something more substantive. But the weight of this paragraph – in conjunction with the weight of the historical evidence he presents throughout his book – suggests strongly that the impact was primarily limited to the way American educators talked about schooling rather than the way they practiced it. And his own analysis in the book focuses primarily on the developing language – and to a lesser extent the developing organizational forms – of progressivism in American education. The chapter headings in the book tells a story about the language of goals in the progressive movement: Chapter 1, “Traditions of Popular Education,” about the intellectual precursors to progressivism; Chapter 2, “Education and Industry,” about social efficiency as human capital development in response to changes in industry; Chapter 3, “Culture and Community,” about social efficiency in community development via the settlement house model; Chapter 4, “Science, Darwinism, and Education,” about the influence of the ideology of social Darwinism; Chapter 5, “Pedagogical Pioneers,” about the early leading figures in progressive thought; Chapter 6, “Scientists, Sentimentalists, and Radicals,” about the disputes in the 20s and 30s between administrative and pedagogical progressives; Chapter 7, “The Organization of Dissent,” about the ideological battles within the Progressive Education Association (PEA); Chapter 8, “The Changing Pedagogical Mainstream,” about the impact of progressivism on schools; and Chapter 9, “The Crisis in Public Education,” about the aftermath of the dissolution of the PEA in 1955. Only Chapter 8 even attempts to explore the impact of progressive ideas on schools, and even here the account is sketchy and largely limited to a list of structural changes in school organization rather than changes in classroom teaching and learning. He lists 10 changes: extension of the educational system;

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the junior high school; elaboration of the curriculum with non-academic subjects; growth of the extra-curriculum; ability grouping of students; the project method; elaboration of curricular materials; elaboration of school buildings, with laboratories, shops, gymnasiums, and kitchens; professional preparation of teachers; and extended educational bureaucracy (Cremin, 1961, pp. 306–308). Whereas Cremin provides a sympathetic account of progressivism in The Transformation of the School, Diane Ravitch emphasizes the negative consequences of progressivism in her book, Left Back. But like Cremin, she too focuses on the language of goals in the progressive movement. Overall, she argues that the movement’s ideas reshaped educational discourse in a way that diminished the intellectual aims of education in favor of a focus on “job training, social planning, political reform, social sorting, personality adjustment, and social efficiency” (Ravitch, 2000, p. 459). In short, it emphasized social efficiency at the expense of democratic equality (preparing people for citizenship) and social mobility (providing universal access to social opportunity). She blames the progressives for infusing education with antiintellectualism and vocationalism, pushing it to abandon the mission of spreading academic learning, and differentiating access to knowledge in a manner that disadvantaged the working class and minorities. But, like Cremin, she tells us almost nothing about the actual impact of progressivism on teaching and learning in classrooms, instead focusing on the ideas about the goals of education that were the subject of debate among reformers and educators and scholars. Her primary contribution to the discussion is her effort to give voice to a group of actors who were largely ignored by Cremin – William Torrey Harris, William Bagley, Isaac Kandel, and Robert Maynard Hutchins – men who put forward goals for education that were markedly at odds with those of the progressives. Cremin and Ravitch are not alone in writing histories of education that are largely about the language of goals rather than about the practice of education and its social outcomes. My own work also fits this model. My first two books (Labaree, 1988, 1997) examined the conflict over goals in this history of American education and the growing dominance of the social mobility goal in shaping educational discourse and the formal structure of schooling. My third book (Labaree, 2004) examined the discursive formation of the idea of the American school of education and its roots in the conflicting educational goals of social efficiency (train a large number of teachers quickly and cheaply) and social mobility (give students educational access to social opportunities well beyond teaching). We historians of education spend most of out time showing how the talk about education changed, and we assume that the structure, content, practice, and outcomes of education must have changed at the same time. When we have finished talking about the history of educational talk, we feel we have produced a history of education. Why does the historiography of education look like this? In part it is because writing about goals and the rhetoric of reform is an easy way out for historians. With its national scope, reform rhetoric acts as an efficient mechanism for historians to use in representing the essence of a reform movement; the rhetoricians can conveniently serve the role of movement leaders in the stories historians tell about reform; and the reform documents are easy to find in the library. As a result, most

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histories of reform are largely histories of reform rhetoric, saying little about the changes farther down in the system. But to conclude from this that historians are lazy is not entirely fair, since they may be correct in thinking that the history of education is in many ways a history of goals. Schools emerge as expressions of our highest goals and aspirations. They formalize and institutionalize these goals in curriculums and programs, tests and textbooks, organizational structures and physical plants, and professional roles and bureaucratic procedures. They become sites of contestation, where we fight about redefining and rearranging the priorities for these goals in exercises we call educational reform movements. We show our seriousness about these goals by the fact that we have been willing to create one of the giant institutions of modern social life for this purpose, along with several large professions (such as teaching and school administration) and a series of supporting industries (such as textbook publishing and test development). In addition, we are willing to devote to education a large share of state and private resources and anywhere from 12 to 25 years of the life of every member of society.

4.5 The Generalized Failure to Accomplish Educational Goals So where does this leave us? The central problem confronting both educational reformers and educational historians in their relentless focus on the language of educational goals is that schools have not come close to realizing these goals. Consider the fate of the three goals I have identified as central in the educational systems of modern liberal democracies. Democratic equality: Perhaps the strongest case for an educational goal that has actually had an impact on school and society is the goal of democratic equality. At the formative stage in the construction of a nation state, virtually anywhere in the world, education seems to have an important role to play. A variety of historical studies make a strong case in support of this proposition, including Tyack (1966), Meyer, Tyack, Nagel, and Gordon (1979), Ramirez and Boli (1987), Ramirez (1997), and Cummings (1997). The key contribution in this regard seems to be the formation of a national citizenry out of a collection of local identities, and the primary mechanism is to bring a disparate group of individuals in the community together under one roof and expose them to a common curriculum and a common set of social experiences. These are among the few things that schools do well. The content of the course of study and the nature of the pedagogy is less important than the fact of commonality. But once the state is in motion and citizenship is no longer problematic, the ongoing contribution of school to the goal of democratic equality is harder to establish. Social efficiency: In the discourse of educational policy, the goal of social efficiency is alive and well. It is one of the fundamental beliefs of contemporary economics, international development agencies, and the politics of education that education plays a central role in economic development as a valuable investment

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in human capital (e.g., Schultz, 2000/1961; Hanushek & Kimko, 2000). Whereas this may be the case at particular points of development (like the start of industrialization) and for particular kinds of education (elementary schooling), the evidence is less convincing for this proposition at a general level. Studies such as those by Rubinson and Browne (1996) and Ramirez, Luo, Schofer, and Meyer (2006) suggest a more complex story. Maybe educational investment spurs economic growth, but maybe societies start investing more heavily in education as a result of economic growth – because they can afford to and because to do so is a sign of their emergence as a modern nation state. Social mobility: In liberal democracies, hope springs eternal that expanding educational opportunity will increase social mobility and reduce social inequality. As we have seen, this was a prime factor in the rhetoric of the American educational reform movements for desegregation, standards, and choice. But the evidence for this hope is simply not there. Education does provide opportunity for individuals to improve their social position, but this does not translate into change in the social structure. Rates of social mobility have not increased over time as educational opportunity has increased, and societies with more expansive educational systems do not have higher mobility rates. As Raymond Boudon (1986) and Blossfeld and Shavit (2000) have shown, the problem is that increases in access to education affect everyone so that those who have more education continue to enjoy that advantage as educational attainment increases across the board. The same lack of effect appears in relation to social equality as well, since the Gini index of inequality seems to be unrelated to degree of educational access, either across societies or within societies over time. These three goals, however, do gain expression in educational systems in at least two significant ways. First, they maintain a highly visible presence in the rhetoric of education, as the politics of education continuously pushes these goals onto the schools, and the schools themselves actively express their allegiance to these same goals. Second, schools adopt the form of these goals into their structure and process. Democratic equality persists in the formalism of social studies classes, public ceremonies, and an array of political symbols. Social efficiency persists in the formalism of vocational classes, career days, and standards-based testing. Social mobility persists in the formalism of student hierarchies arranged according to their accumulations of grades, credits, and degrees.

4.6 Roots of the Failure to Realize Educational Goals A central reason for the failure of the educational system to realize the social goals expressed in it, as I pointed out earlier, is that these goals cannot be realized simultaneously. Democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility logically push schools in three different directions. They cannot organize their structure and process primarily in line with any one of these goals – much less bring out social outcomes in line with that goal – without violating the other goals. At best, schools can effect a muddled compromise in organizational structure and in educational

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practices, which give a formal nod in the direction of each of these goals without actually embracing any of them. In this kind of compromised institutional setting, failure to achieve any one of these goals is the norm. In particular, social problems rooted in social structure are remarkably resistant to solutions grounded in educational efforts to change individual skills and attitudes. This is the fundamental political problem at the core of the apparent failure of both schooling and school reform. But there is another layer of impediment that lies between educational goals and their fulfilment, and that is the tension between education’s institutionalized goals and its organizational practices.5 It is a story about cause and effect, and especially about the paradoxical impact of the latter on the former. Schools gain their origins from social goals, which they dutifully express in an institutional form. This results in the development of school organization, curriculums, pedagogies, professional roles, and a complex set of occupational and organizational interests. At this point, schools and educators are no longer simply the object of social desire; they become major actors in the story. As such, they shape what happens in education in light of their own interests, organizational needs, professional norms, and pedagogical practices. And this then becomes a major issue in educational reform. Such reforms are what happen after schooling is already in motion organizationally, when society seeks to assign new ideals to education or revive old ones that seem to be in disuse, thus initiating an effort to transform the institution toward the pursuit of different ends. But now society is no longer able simply to project its values onto the institution it created to express these values; instead it must negotiate an interaction with an ongoing enterprise. As a result, reform has to change both the values embedded in education and the formal structure itself, yet both may well resist There are two kinds of organizational impediments to the realization of educational goals and the success of educational reforms. One has to do with characteristics of the particular form of school organization that arises in different national settings. The other has to do with characteristics of the practice of teaching that may be more independent of time and place.

4.6.1 Organizational Factors That Impede Goal Realization in the American Setting Let me begin with two organizational elements that are particularly prominent in the American setting and that have a marked impact of the ability of policy makers and reformers to have their way with schools in the US.

4.6.2 Loose Coupling As Karl Weick (1976) and Charles Bidwell (1965) have shown, the organization of American schooling is a loosely coupled system. In a tightly coupled system, like a nuclear power plant or a petroleum processing facility, changes or actions in one

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part of the system quickly travel to other parts. But this is not the way things work in American schools, where the parts of the system operate as semiautonomous segments rather than integrated components of a single entity. Historically in the US, state systems of schooling have operated quite independently of each other, and they are only tangentially connected with the federal government. Likewise, school districts have had their own governance structure, funding sources, political constituencies, hiring authority, and organizational cultures, largely buffered from intrusions by state authorities and quite separate from other districts. Within districts, individual schools have a similar degree of independence from each other, as parallel but self-contained segments of schooling, and they are also protected from much intrusion from the district administration by their physical isolation from the district office and by their ability to deliver schooling to a particular community on their own. Within schools, individual classrooms act as separate instructional modules, which are independent of each other and which are cut off from the school principal by their distinctive function (instruction) and their physical location (behind the walls of the classroom). And within classrooms, individual students act as separate units of teaching and learning, each bringing distinctive abilities and motivation to the learning process and thus offering distinctive challenges to the teacher independent of the other students in the class. The relative independence of states from the federal government, districts from the state government, schools from the district, classrooms from the principal, and students from the teacher provides functional semi-autonomy for both teachers and students in relation to all of the layers above them in the organizational structure of schooling.

4.6.3 Weak Administrative Control over Instruction Another historically distinctive characteristic of American schooling is the relatively weak control that school administrators exert over instruction. In part, of course, this administrative weakness is a function of loose coupling. But there is an additional component that weakens the impact of administrators over teaching. The structure of teaching-as-work in the US is such that school administrators have traditionally been lacking the basic levers of power that enable employers in most occupational settings to motivate employee compliance with their boss’s wishes. In most jobs, the employer can manipulate some combination of two core mechanisms to make sure that employees do as they are told. One is fear, the other greed. Fear works at an elemental level: Follow direction or face termination. Principals in American schools, however, traditionally have held a weak hand in deploying the fear factor against teachers. The contract with the teachers’ union makes it extraordinarily difficult to fire a teacher after she has completed an initial probationary period of three years and attained tenure. Firing is so onerous that most principals do not even try it. So this leaves only lesser forms of punishment, which are

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a weak weapon in the ongoing effort to get teachers to teach the mandated curriculum in the desired manner. If fear provides the stick for the employer, greed provides the carrot. It is equally simple in its operation: Follow direction and gain rewards. Jobs in most complex organizations offer an array of possible rewards for the employees who perform well, but the two primary modes are pay and promotion. In American public schools, however, administrators traditionally have had no discretion in allocating either pay or promotion. Pay levels are defined by union contracts, and traditionally they are based on only two criteria: the number of years the teacher has served and the number of graduate credits earned. And promotion is also largely unavailable to administrators. Teaching is a horizontal profession in the US, where the only form of advancement is to leave teaching and become an administrator.

4.6.4 Another Impediment: The Peculiar Nature of Teaching as a Practice An additional organizational element that impedes efforts to bring schools in line with reform goals is that teaching is an odd form of professional practice. The primary problem of this practice is that it will not work unless the teacher is effective at establishing a special kind of personal relationship with the individual students in the class. Without this kind of relationship, students will not learn what schools want them to learn. And teachers can only establish these kinds of pedagogically effective relationships if they are allowed the discretionary space to do so. They need the autonomy to figure out a way of doing things that works best for the individual students in the class and for the special situations of time and place. Thus a central dilemma of school reform: If reformers are going to have an impact on the instructional core of schooling instead of limiting themselves to the rhetorical or structural levels of the system, they need to change how teachers teach in classrooms; but intruding on teachers in this way threatens to undermine the degree of teacher discretion that is necessary to foster effective learning. In exploring these issues, I draw on work by Willard Waller (1932/1965), Dan Lortie (1975), and David Cohen (1988). One factor that promotes teacher autonomy is the sheer complexity of the task of teaching a class full of students. Even when students are sorted into grades by age and into classes by ability, they still bring an enormous range of salient characteristics to the learning process. Another major factor reinforcing teacher autonomy is that teachers’ success as professionals is entirely dependent on the cooperation of their students. Teachers do not succeed unless students learn, and students only learn if they choose to. This need to gain cooperation is made more difficult because the student is a conscript. Unlike most professionals, whose clients voluntarily seek their help, teachers are working with students who are there in the classroom because of coercion: from compulsory attendance laws, from parental pressure, from a labour market that requires a good education to get a good job.

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The need to motivate the active cooperation of conscripted clients means that teachers cannot afford to establish the kind of professional distance from the client that doctors, lawyers, and accountants seek to maintain, since this kind of emotionally neutral relationship only works with clients who are passive and voluntary. The student must want to learn what the teacher is teaching, so the teacher’s first job is to find a way to instil this desire. The teacher’s imperative to establish a professionally functional personal relationship with students puts teaching in an occupational category that Arlie Hochschild (1983) calls “emotion management” work. Teachers need to engage in a kind of deep acting, by forming a teaching persona that is useful in inducing affection from the student and channelling this relationship into learning. To work well, this persona has to be an extension of the teacher’s self and must come across to the students as natural and authentic. Developing such a persona is a central task of becoming a teacher. The teacher persona is not something that a teacher puts on lightly or sheds with ease. As a result, we should not be surprised to find that teachers in general tend to resist efforts by reformers to change the way they teach. To do so is to change who they are.

4.7 Why Do We Tolerate an Educational System That Fails to Realize Our Goals? I have been arguing that schools, school reforms, and school histories all focus on the language of goals rather than on the substantive educational and social outcomes of schooling. This is because, when we get right down to it, a liberal democracy is primarily interested in having the educational system embrace and institutionalize the central values of the culture in its language and in the system’s formal structure. In line with institutional theory (Meyer, 1977; Meyer & Rowan, 1977, 1983), I am arguing that we hold schools responsible for expressing our values rather than for actually realizing them in practice, that schools are institutional expressions of cultural values whose persistence is less a result of their effectiveness in carrying out those goals in practice than in their ability to represent those goals in formal terms. They are expert at meeting our expectations of what school is rather than at implementing the goals that they represent. To say that schools are ineffective in realizing social goals, however, is not to say that schools do not have an effect. In fact, they have been remarkably effective at reshaping society in their own image. By educationalizing social ideals and problems, we have educationalized society itself. How does school shape society? One source of education’s impact is funding. Governments spend an extraordinary portion of their annual budgets on the educational system, from preschool through the most advanced graduate programs at universities. Families and individuals invest an enormous amount of money in direct costs for school supplies, tutoring, test preparation, uniforms, college counselling, and especially for college tuition, fees,

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and loans. And then there is the opportunity cost of what they could have been earning if they were not in school. A second source of education’s impact is time. Education devours somewhere between 12 and 25 years of a person’s life in a modern developed society just in attending classes. In addition, the institution absorbs the efforts of the largest profession in modern societies, educators, plus a large number of collateral personnel that support the educational enterprise. A third source of education’s impact is process. Education forces families and governments and businesses to organize themselves around academic schedules, academic priorities, academic activities, academic procedures, and academic credentials. The grammar of schooling (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) is not just a structure that shapes education and preserves its form over time; it is also a discursive and behavioral pattern that shapes the way society functions. This process of educationalizing society is in part an unintended consequence of the process of educational organization building, kicked off by our need to find institutional expression of our ideals and our faith in the efficacy of individual solutions to social problems. But this process does have its social uses, which help reinforce and preserve the expansion of education once it is in motion. The educationalization of society integrates society around a set of common experiences, processes, and curricular languages. It stabilizes and legitimizes a social structure of inequality that otherwise may drive us into open conflict. It stabilizes and legitimizes government by providing an institution which can be assigned difficult social problems and which can be blamed when these problems are not solved. It provides orderly and credible processes for people to live their lives, by giving employers grounds for selecting a workforce, workers a mechanism for pursuing jobs, families a mechanism for passing on privilege and seeking social opportunity, even if the rhetorical rationales for these processes (human capital, individual merit) lack credibility. Most of all, it gives us a mechanism for expressing serious concern about social problems without actually doing anything effective to solve those problems. In this sense, then, the ability of schools to formalize substance – to turn anything important into a school subject or a school program or a school credential – is at the heart of their success in educationalizing society. Therefore, the history of education is the history of formalism, as Emile Durkheim (1938/1969) noted toward the end of his magisterial review of The Evolution of Educational Thought. In this way we can explain a law to which I have frequently drawn attention and which, in fact, governs the whole of our academic evolution. This is the fact that from the eighth century onwards we have moved from one educational formalism to another educational formalism without ever managing to break the circle. In different periods this formalism has been successively based on grammar, on logic or dialectic, then on literature; but in different forms it has always been formalism which has triumphed. By this I mean that throughout this whole period the aim of education has always been not to give the child positive knowledge, the best available conception of the way specific things really are, but to generate in him skills which are wholly formalistic, whether these consist in the art of debate or the art of self-expression. (p. 280)

Education transforms social goals into institutionalized expressions of those goals.

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Even though it does not realize these goals, education does create a set of educational forms – structures, processes, currencies, and languages – that play useful roles for society. The grammar of schooling is not only an expression of the organizational inertia of the educational system but also a mechanism by which it shapes society. So the focus on the language of goals in the historiography of education is in part a case of being trapped in education’s own language fetish; but in part it is also a fair representation of education’s central role in society as an institution dedicated to the formalistic expression of these goals.

Notes 1. I am grateful to my colleague, Francisco Ramirez, for suggesting that individualism is at the heart of our tendency to seek solutions to social problems by means of education. 2. This section draws on Labaree (1997). 3. This section draws on Labaree (2008). 4. This section draws on Labaree (2007). 5. The discussion in this section draws on Labaree (2008).

References Bidwell, C. E. (1965). The school as a formal organization. In J. M. March (Ed.), Handbook of organizations (pp. 972–1018). Chicago: Rand McNally. Blossfeld, H. P., & Shavit, Y. (2000). Persisting barriers: Changes in educational opportunities. In R. Arum & I. Beattie (Eds.), The structure of schooling (pp. 245–259). Mountain View: Mayfield. Boudon, R. (1986). Education, mobility, and sociological theory. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 261–274). New York: Greenwood. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. (1954). 347 U.S. 483. Chubb, J. E., & Moe, T. M. (1990). Politics, markets, and America’s schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Cohen, D. K. (1988). Teaching practice: Plus ça change. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Contributing to educational change: Perspectives on research and practice (pp. 27–84). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918). Cardinal principles of secondary education. Washington, DC: National Education Association. Cremin, L. A. (Ed.). (1957). The republic and the school: Horace Mann on the education of free men. New York: Teachers College Press. Cremin, L. A. (1961). The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education, 1976–1957. New York: Vintage. Cuban, L. (1993). How teachers taught: Constancy and change in American classrooms, 1890– 1980 (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Cummings, W. (1997). Patterns of modern education. In W. Cummings & N. McGinn (Eds.), International handbook of education and development: Preparing schools, students, and nations for the twenty-first century (pp. 63–85). New York: Pergamon. Durkheim, E. (1938/1969). The evolution of educational thought: Lectures on the formation and development of secondary education in France. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fuller, H. (2002). Full court press. Education Next, 2(3; Fall), 88. http://educationnext.org/ fullcourtpress/accessed 9-21-09.

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Hanushek, E., & Kimko, D. (2000, December). Schooling, labor force quality, and the growth of nations. American Economic Review, 90, 1184–1208. Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Labaree, D.F. (1988). The making of an American high school: The credentials market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1920. New Haven: Yale University Press. Labaree, D. F. (1997, Spring). Public good, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 39–81. Labaree, D. F. (2004). The trouble with ed schools. New Haven: Yake University press. Labaree, D. F. (2007). Citizens and consumers: Changing visions of virtue and opportunity in U.S. education in the 19th and 20th centuries. Paper presented at conference on “Republican and Non-Republican Imaginations,” University of Applied Sciences, Zurich. Labaree, D. F. (2008). Limits on the impact of educational reform: The case of progressivism and U.S. Schools, 1900–1950. In C. Crotti & F. Osterwalder (Eds.), Das Jahrhundert der Schulreformen: Internationale und nationale Perspektiven, 1900–1950 (pp. 105–133). Bern: Haupt. Lagemann, E. C. (1989). The plural worlds of educational research. History of Education Quarterly, 29(2), 185–214. Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago. Meyer, J. W. (1977). The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83(1), 55–77. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340–363. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1983). The structure of educational organizations. In J. W. Meyer & W. R. Scott (Eds.), Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 71–97). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Meyer, J. W., Tyack, D., Nagel, J., & Gordon, A. (1979). Public education as nation-building in America: Enrollments and bureaucratization in the American states, 1870–1930, American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 591–613. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. No Child Left Behind Act. (2002). Public Law 107–110. Ramirez, F. O. (1997). The nation-state, citizenship, and educational change: Institutionalization and globalization. In W. Cummings & N. McGinn (Eds.), International handbook of education and development: Preparing schools, students, and nations for the twenty-first century (pp. 47–62). New York: Pergamon. Ramirez, F. O., & Boli, J. (1987). The political construction of mass schooling: European origins and worldwide institutionalization. Sociology of Education, 60(1), 2–18. Ramirez, F. O., Luo, X., Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2006). Student achievement and national economic growth. American Journal of Education, 113, 1–29. Ravitch, D. (2000). Left back: A century of failed school reforms. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rubinson, R., & Browne, I. (1996). Education and the economy. In N. Smelser & R. Swedborg (Eds.), The handbook of economic sociology (pp. 581–599). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schultz, T. W. (2000/1961). Investment in human capital. In R. Arum & I. Beattie (Eds.), The structure of schooling (pp. 46–55). Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing. Tyack, D. (1996). Forming the national character. Harvard Education Review, 36, 29–41. Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995) Tinkering toward Utopia: Reflections on a century of public school reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Waller, W. (1932/1965). The sociology of teaching. New York: Wiley. Weick, K. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely-coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, 1–19. Zilversmit, A. (1993). Changing schools: Progressive education theory and practice, 1930–1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 5

The Language of Education and the Language of Educational Research: The Knowledge Economy, Citizenship and Subjectivation Naomi Hodgson

5.1 Introduction The entry of the European Commission1 into the field of education policy coincided with the creation of European citizenship as a legal category, following the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Subsequently, European and member state education policy has been concerned with the formation of the knowledge economy, with European citizens asked increasingly to understand themselves according to the discourse of the ‘entrepreneurial self’. I draw attention here to a current language of education policy and of educational research in which the meaning of citizenship has shifted from a legal definition to operate governmentally in the construction of Europe as an economic entity in the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy will be discussed here in relation to what I identify as its three constitutive elements: first, an economy based on a population of educated individuals; second, an economy based on knowledge of the self by the self and the ‘state’ (be it European or national); third, its basis on a historically constituted body of (and approach to) knowledge. I take the first of these as being the most common understanding of the knowledge economy, and I draw on literature from the field of education policy sociology concerned with Europe as a policy space in education. With reference to two papers by Martin Lawn, I show how the study of European education policy is approached in this field, in relation to the nation-state/Europe tension, notions of space and borderlessness and the way in which this policy is seen to focus on the individual. This suggests some underlying assumptions about the state and the individual. I am concerned to problematise these underlying assumptions of the analysis because of the role, also identified by Lawn, of educational research itself in constituting the European education policy space.

N. Hodgson (B) Institute of Education, University of London, London, England e-mail: [email protected]

P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_5,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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In the second part, on the basis of this problematisation, I move on from an understanding of the knowledge economy as an economy of knowledge (qualifications accrued, density of expertise) to consider the knowledge economy as also constituted by particular forms of knowledge of the self. As Foucault’s historical account of governmentality shows, the focus on the individual that Lawn identifies in European education policy does not represent a significant shift in the focus of government. The explicitness of such policy aims, however, may be significant if seen in line with other forms of work on the self characteristic of the knowledge economy that seek to make aspects of the self explicit in a particular kind of accountability. The focus on the individual is expressed in, what in many respects is, a distinctive way in European education policy – the individual is asked to be entrepreneurial as a way of demonstrating his or her citizenship. European citizenship then, as Lawn identifies, is no longer understood in relation to the nation-state but to a set of values attributed to a space. Drawing on Foucault, Drummond (2003) and Masschelein and Simons (2002) point to implications of this mode of subjectivation and thus indicate what the term citizenship means or does in this context. An example provided by Patricia White (2008a) helps to illustrate current discourses of citizenship operative across educational and social policy in the UK and the relationship between the two. This example shows how education is used across policy areas to meet the demands of the knowledge economy. I wish, however, to avoid (what appears to be an increasing danger in the discussion of education policy in terms of governmentality) an analysis in which governmentality appears to be both the hypothesis and the conclusion. I wish to show how reference to Foucault’s broader thinking can avoid this and point to possibilities of resistance to such forms of subjectivation. In the final part of the paper, then, I turn to the historical aspect of the knowledge economy. I do not wish to provide a historical contextualisation of it as such but am concerned with the role of history in the construction of the idea of Europe and European citizenship and how attention to it is central to any possibility of rigorous critique. I refer to recent work by Ambrosio (2008) and Masschelein (2007) to show how Foucault’s ideas have been taken up to explore forms of resistance in educational practice.

5.2 An Economy of Knowledge Recent work in education policy sociology reflects a concern across the field of educational research with the shifting locus of power from the national to the European level and its implications for education. Increased focus on European integration and European-level policy results not only from academic interest in the social, political and educational implications of such changes but also from the European-level funding of research on Europe. This gives rise to new fields of expertise – policy studies, European studies – and shapes the orientation of fields such as education

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policy sociology. Two recent papers by Martin Lawn (2001, 2003) in which the formation of a new space of European policy making is considered provide the basis of the discussion here focussed on the first – and the most often assumed – aspect of the knowledge economy, as the maximisation of knowledge for the benefit of a competitive economy. I will draw upon three particular aspects of Lawn’s analyses here relating to the sense of rupture and newness he identifies in this policy context: first, the nationstate/European state tension; second, space and borderlessness; and third, the shift of European policy to focus on the individual.

5.2.1 Nation-State and European State Lawn identifies a shift between previous discourses of European integration and those of the 21st century. He sees a similarity in approach between European Union approaches to state and identity formation and those of the nation-state over the previous two centuries: This strategy of promoting a European shared cultural identity reflected traditional nation state strategies in the way they edited their national histories and pedagogized them, and in their obligation to create cultural identities and boundaries of place. The educational space is imagined as a flow of cultural information through educational sites; it needs new emphases on communication but it is formed on identity, fixed within differently located but shared spaces of European civilization. Situating national identities within a new European space, reflecting residual European cultural capital, can deepen identity, and thereby affinity. It legitimated the market by creating the shared cultural space as a core governing discourse. (Lawn, 2003, p. 328)

Lawn focuses on the shift from this continuity between the nation-state and Europe to a globalised Europe seeking to define itself in terms of a knowledge economy. His analysis suggests a superseding of the nation-state by Europe, as traditional nation-state “strategies are insufficient due to the expansion of global capital, production flows, international governance and regulation and marketisation of services” (Lawn, 2001, p. 176). The result, however, is a somewhat static and traditional picture of the nationstate as bounded and inward-looking rather than as complicit in these processes. While the EU may have its own founding ideologies and momentum, it is constructed by these nation-states – or at least representatives of them. To focus the analysis on a shift from nation-state to European state then oversimplifies or skews the analysis. As Foucault has suggested, in seeking to understand how power operates the state is often afforded too central a role. It is assumed to be a given for the operation of power, rather than something constituted by particular power relations. This can be seen, for example, in the way that discourses of citizenship in both the nation-state and European Union do not seek an either/or affiliation among its citizens. Instead, one is asked to understand one’s citizenship according to certain values attributed to a space. Lawn identifies this aspect in his analysis, suggesting

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that the identity sought in the knowledge economy relates to particular knowledge and competencies: “The dominant strand of identity is now focussed more on individuated qualities, projected into a new space, than on a located citizen” (Lawn, 2001, p. 177).

5.2.2 Space and Borderlessness Lawn’s (2001) discussion focuses on the EU as a new education policy space: The space can be described as fluid, heterogeneous and polymorphic yet it is recognisably a new space. . .Just because it exists within a space without boundaries does not mean it does not exist. Its antecedents existed within the nation’s boundaries and were not so self-conscious. When the space exists within transnational governance, networks and partnerships and outside the old national and local ways, it becomes more opaque and at the same time more obvious. (Lawn, 2001, p. 174)

Lawn is concerned with the idea of borderless education, “a term that has been used to describe the ways in which the traditional borders of education are being traversed by new developments that cross geographical or conceptual borders”, informed by Manuel Castells’ conceptualisation of the network society (Lawn, 2001, p. 174). The self-consciousness that Lawn refers to suggests a concern for how the European Union appears to those inside and outside, as it strives to define what it is, and what it wants to mean and to whom. The technological borderlessness both defies and enables the construction of the EU as an entity within the knowledge economy. The idea of physical borderlessness is more problematic, however, especially when the desire to foster a European identity and the role that “citizenship” plays across educational and social policy discourses are considered. As the discussion of the role of history in the construction of European citizenship in the third section will show, European integration has sought to stress internal cultural unity and shared values. As Shore (2000) notes, “as national barriers have come down, the walls separating the EU from its ‘Others’ have grown higher” (Shore, 2000, p. 80). By implication, the construction of the EU differentiates between the member states and those beyond its borders. The fluidity Lawn refers to is constituted by the underlying economic inclusion that comes of a state’s entry into the European Union. It is not an unqualified condition, therefore, but a fluidity afforded to those who are included; becoming a member state requires meeting particular demands, the production of particular forms of knowledge, in order to become comparable. As Jan Masschelein has recently suggested (Masschelein, 2008), to not be represented within the comparative league tables of educational benchmarks, as well as other economic and demographic statistics, is to be excluded. The fluidity is an indication of the need to be adaptable within the globalised knowledge economy; this is the means of operation and survival of networks in Castells’ theory that Lawn draws on. The construction of the knowledge economy in this context operationalises the common assets of the member states in order to create an economic entity comparable with, at present, the USA and Japan. European citizenship is constructed, therefore, through

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both the economic and the cultural spheres, as distinct from what is not European, including particular values such as a certain orientation to learning.

5.2.3 The Focus on the Individual Lawn argues that seeking to construct the EU as, and as part of, a knowledge economy was a solution to the lack of institutional power it held in education, and provided a commonality of purpose between citizens of member states, which it could pursue as a governance strategy. In such a strategy it is assumed, as Nikolas Rose (1999) has identified, that the individual wants to be educated (Rose, 1999, p. 88). Lawn identifies a shift of policy focus, therefore, from the national institution to the individual: “Education could be redefined, no longer a public good, it could be an individual necessity” (Lawn, 2003, p. 330). The “competitiveness and decisiveness” required of citizens of the new Europe were situated in the individual. The EU as an economic entity required the identification of education as a shared value: Education and skills are indispensable to achieving economic success, civic responsibility and social cohesion. The relation between citizenship and lifelong learning, now bound together within the European lifelong learning area, is expressed in the metaphor of the passport. It is the passport which defines citizenship and signifies power. . .The passport to mobility and into active citizenship will be education and lifelong learning. (Lawn, 2003, p. 332)

Continuing the metaphor, knowledge is the currency within this new European space. The identification of the shift to focus on the individual in Lawn’s account is instructive of the focus of European education policy; however, it is not necessarily the distinctive aspect of its discourse. The centrality of the state in Lawn’s analysis means that a displacement of the nation-state is sought and thus the focus on the individual is seen as constitutive of this. As Foucault identified, however, a shift to focus on the individual, as an element of population, as the object of government occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries. What seems distinctive in current policy discourse then is not the focus on the individual but the explicit reference to and address of the individual and the language in which this individual is depicted, as entrepreneurial and in terms of one’s citizenship, where citizenship goes beyond the legal meaning of one’s nationality or country of residence. This shift in the meaning of citizenship is discussed further in the next section. Lawn’s analysis concludes at the level of the individual as acted on by the nascent European state, perhaps reflecting a traditional sociological division between individual and state. The analysis, therefore, focuses more on the shift in state formation and the resulting supranational policy-making entity than on the implications for the individual in relation to the self that such policy demands. The state remains central to the analysis rather than the operation of the relations of power and their implications. I am concerned to problematise these aspects of the analysis due to the role, also identified by Lawn, of educational research itself in constituting the European education policy space. An understanding of the implications of the knowledge

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economy for how the individual addressed in European education policy is constituted is necessary to move beyond a state-individual dichotomy. The analyses referred to below will illustrate the way in which, following Foucault’s thought, this focus on the individual can be usefully pursued.

5.3 Knowledge of the Self Lawn’s account treats the focus of policy on the individual as an aspect of the newness and rupture that the creation of the European policy space represents. The individual appears as an autonomous and self-determining entity, in contrast to the traditional citizen of the nation-state. The values to which this individual is asked to orient himself are thus ultimately economically valuable learning and productivity. This is not a simple shift of focus of allegiance from the nation to the European state. The accounts referred to in this section problematise the focus on the state and the individual as fixed entities in policy analysis by focusing on the role of and the implications for the understanding of the individual in the knowledge economy. I turn first to an example of the way in which the discourse of citizenship in the knowledge economy operates across educational and social policy. To illustrate this I refer to the construction of two different forms of citizenship education that currently exist in the UK. One is taught in schools, and the other, more recently introduced, is for those wishing to become British citizens, to be naturalised. Patricia White has recently provided a reading of the text produced for the purpose of preparing these prospective citizens.2 Her analysis focuses on the differences between a first draft of the text Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship, published in 2004 and a second edition published in 2007. White’s description of the first edition suggests that it shared many characteristics with the school citizenship curriculum in terms of its tone and message. For example, tolerance as a characteristic of the UK and one expected of its citizens is stressed; the multi-faith nature of the House of Lords representatives was given as an example of this; and the importance of community involvement was discussed. This 2004 version “suggests a dynamic society in which everything is not as good as it could be but in which it is possible to change things and which welcomes active citizens prepared to take civic initiatives” (White, 2008a). This would appear to be broadly commensurate with the citizen demanded by the knowledge economy in which one’s life is understood as a dynamic process in which one is actively involved for the good of the community, be that local, national or supranational. As such, it is the nature of citizenship also promoted in the school curriculum in the UK. But White identifies a shift from this to a “you-will-need-to-toe-the-line-if-youlive-here-approach” in the 2007 edition (White, 2008a). References to tolerance for example are omitted as is reference to the presence of multi-faith representation: The invisibility of tolerance in [the 2007 edition] gives the impression that the UK is a place where tolerance is not a value particularly highlighted, as [the 2004 edition] suggested it was. As far as one can judge, prospective citizens will not be expected to be deeply

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committed to this value. They simply need to toe the line and make sure they are not a problem. (White, 2008a)

Would-be citizens may not be reading the text in terms of what is not included, however, and as such are addressed by the language in terms of what is expected of them. This second edition of the text seems to convey citizenship in terms of basic rights and responsibilities. The difference between the current publication for prospective citizens and the citizenship education provided in schools is representative of a commodification in the language of citizenship. Echoing the evolutionary understandings of the historical development of citizenship, seen, for example, in the work of Marshall (1950) and in the contemporary discourse of rights and responsibilities, the text for prospective citizens (in the legal sense of the term) appears to offer a basic level of access to entitlement compared to the school curriculum, where a different order of rights and responsibilities, such as political involvement in pressure groups or volunteering, becomes available for those who prove their worth. There appears then a confusion or a conflation of citizenship as legal status and as ethical ideal in the idea of educating for citizenship in its various forms. Those who hold citizenship by birth are not subject to examination to determine whether they can keep it and do not lose it regardless of how they behave. Sanctions operate in terms of withdrawal of certain freedoms, or explicit action upon freedom (e.g. imprisonment, electronic tagging and curfew) and being addressed in terms of different modes of subjection. Those entering the UK from within the EU are not British citizens but are afforded certain rights that non-EU nationals are not. Those wishing to become citizens, after meeting residence requirements and passing examinations in English and citizenship, are invited to attend a naturalisation ceremony. The UK Border Agency explains the rationale for the introduction of the ceremony: Why ceremonies? Before 2004, an oath or affirmation of allegiance was made privately in the presence of a person who had the power to witness oaths. A certificate of registration or naturalisation as a British citizen was then sent to the successful applicant by post. Becoming a British citizen is a significant event and should be celebrated in a meaningful way. At the ceremony, you will be welcomed into your local community and meet other people in the area who are becoming British citizens. (http://www.bia.homeoffice. gov.uk/britishcitizenship/applying/ceremony/)

The ceremony also entails a pledge of allegiance: When you attend your ceremony you are required to make an oath of allegiance (or you can make an affirmation if you prefer not to swear by God) and a pledge. The words of the oath, affirmation and pledge are all given below. You may wish to practise [sic] saying the oath or affirmation, and the pledge, before you attend the ceremony. Oath of allegiance I (name) swear by Almighty God that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law. Affirmation of allegiance

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N. Hodgson I (name) do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law. Pledge I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil [sic] my duties and obligations as a British citizen. (http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/ applying/ceremony/)

Again, this is not a requirement of British-born citizens (although the idea was recently suggested in a government-commissioned report by Lord Goldsmith (2008)). Citizenship in the legal sense remains determined by the nation-state. Affirmation of citizenship has moved from a private to a public ceremony. As well as making explicit one’s commitment then by learning about “life in the UK”, the new citizen must publicly declare their commitment. Such ceremonies correspond with the demand for visibility and transparency (the self-consciousness that Lawn referred to), both of the individual and the practices of the state. The demand for accountability, the need to be explicit as suggested in the previous section, can be said to be a characteristic of the knowledge economy that does mark a shift from previous modes of governance. John Drummond refers to Foucault’s understanding of the ethical relation of the self to the self to consider the implications of this for education. Drummond is concerned with the way in which the knowledge economy informs the moral codes according to which we are asked to govern our conduct, “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself (rapport à soi)” (Foucault, 1986, p. 352 cited in Drummond, 2003, p. 60). The commodification of knowledge within the knowledge economy has also brought about a shift in the relationship between knowledge and knower, as educational systems “become less grounded in people qua people (lecturers and students) and more in the regulated transparency of competence and outcomes”: knowledge, as a commodity, becomes, as it were, exteriorised from the knower; ‘treated’ separately from the knower. Knowledge becomes the benchmark or the skill to which the learner/worker must step forward, and not without a degree of respect, or even unquestioning reverence. (Drummond, 2003, p. 59)

Drummond suggests that, in the educational context, the mode of subjection within the knowledge economy, that is “the way people are invited to recognise their moral obligations” in a given context (Foucault, 1986, p. 353 cited in Drummond, 2003, p. 60), is found in “lifelong learning” and “quality assurance”, which gives rise to concepts such as “evidence-based practice”, “audit trail” and “accreditation of prior learning” (APL), terms which “have more or less been interiorised into the cultures of the academy and practice” but which “have very little to do with education in a substantive sense” (Drummond, 2003, p. 61). Continuing professional development is another example of such forms of work on the self, of the existence of “a lack that sustains us, as if our worth must be consistently reaffirmed”, which Drummond suggests amounts to the commodification of the self (Drummond, 2003, p. 61).

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Drummond’s analysis indicates the centrality of the second aspect of the knowledge economy as an economy based on a particular orientation of knowledge of the self by the self. The commodification and accountability that Drummond identifies are taken up by Masschelein and Simons (2002) to indicate implications of the European education policy specifically for the relation of the self to the self. They point to the shift in the meaning of citizenship from its legal sense evident in how the individual is addressed by such policy language. Masschelein and Simons (2002) refer to the 1999 Bologna Declaration that sought to create a European space of higher education, which asked citizens of this space to see themselves as “entrepreneurial individuals”. They suggest that a kind of immunisation is produced in the creation of the entrepreneurial self and that this brings with it a closure rather than the opening up that is assumed in the discourse of globalisation (Masschelein & Simons, 2002, pp. 590–591). Learning agreements and individual learner profiles are examples of instruments that enable taking “individuals into account” (Masschelein & Simons, 2002, p. 596). Masschelein and Simons stress the literal sense in which this takes place: “people are becoming calculable – not least calculable by themselves – and in this way become manageable and governable, not only by the government of the state or of the school but also by themselves” (Masschelein & Simons, 2002, p. 596). As Lawn identified, policy is focused at the level of the individual. Masschelein and Simons go further to point out that individuality is central to this entrepreneurial form of self-government but that it is not, however, anti-social: “On the contrary: relations towards one’s friends and loved ones come to be seen as useful, indeed crucial – for personal happiness, for social effectiveness, for the well-being of nations” (Masschelein & Simons, 2002, p. 596). Further, they note, “The classical distinction between economic and social relations becomes obsolete since the social relations are themselves seen as results of enterprising activities” (Masschelein & Simons, 2002, p. 597). This observation points to the way in which a discourse of citizenship – the way in which one is expected to live with others – operates in informing the orientation of the entrepreneurial self. The individual and the role of education in the knowledge economy then do not refer solely to the school child or the student. The language of lifelong learning does not refer to education restricted to its institutional sense. This is a demand that crosses all areas of our life and the duration of it: Investment in learning not only contributes to self-actualisation but at the same time delivers competencies that enable people to operate in their labour environment and in society as a whole. Thus, Stewart Ransom can claim that ‘the good (learning) person is a good citizen’ (Ransom, 1992 quoted in Masschelein & Simons, 2002, p. 598) Work on the self then is oriented towards one’s psychological and physical well-being and personal fulfilment in order to enable efficient and appropriate contribution to the labour environment and society. As Drummond has suggested: The notion of technologies of the self is, of course, nothing new: we are familiar with such things as regimes of training, diet, meditation, prayer, fasting, exercise, abstinence, penance and so forth. In this cultural sense, such activities are seen as means to an end with regard

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The creation of the European space of higher education contributes to the demarcation of “Europe”, the EU, as a competitive market, a distinctly active space within the global economy, and of the individuals within it, who are subject to increasingly streamlined forms of assessment and measurement in order that benchmarking and comparison can orient these entrepreneurial selves and institutions. It is a condition of our freedom then – it is our responsibility as citizens – that we meet these demands. There is a danger in such an analysis, however, that, by identifying the lifelong and life-wide nature of the demands of the knowledge economy understood from the perspective of governmentality, the analysis becomes totalising. I wish to avoid what seems to be an increasing tendency for analysis in these terms, of governmentality being both the hypothesis and the conclusion, without the possibility of resistance being considered. This requires seeing Foucault’s understanding of governmentality in the context of his broader thinking and in addressing what is meant by critique, particularly as such critical studies as have been referred to here, from Lawn in sociology to the philosophical work of Masschelein and Simons and Drummond, are identified as being part of the knowledge economy themselves and identify ethical problems with the way in which we are individualized by the policy that creates such a context. I now consider the knowledge economy in relation to history and the role it plays in the creation of the European citizen as subject.

5.4 Historical Knowledge Cris Shore’s ethnography of the institutions of the European Union illustrates how education has been used in the construction of European citizenship through the promotion of a particular history. Shore identifies a particular EU historiography in EU-funded history textbooks, which “represents the last three thousand years of European history, and therein European identity, as a moral success story”: The end product of a progressive ascent through history – albeit a highly selective history – from ancient Greece and Rome, to the spread of Christianity, the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the triumph of liberal democracy. These key episodes thus become palimpsests for an essential European cultural community: a ‘core Europe’ whose common bonds lie in its shared heritage, moral ascendancy and cultural continuity. (Shore, 2000, p. 57)

Shore is concerned with the way in which culture came to play an increasing role in discourses of European integration from the 1970s onwards, as it was realised that a European consciousness would not naturally evolve from economic and political integration. At this time, the European Community had no legal jurisdiction over cultural policy; however, it was becoming apparent that “ordinary Europeans

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were. . .lacking sufficient consciousness of their European heritage and identity, and the Commission sought to remedy this” (Shore, 2000, pp. 46–47). The European emblem and flag are examples of the symbols developed to further instil the concept of Europe among the populace. The rationale for the emblem was as follows: Twelve was a symbol of perfection and plenitude, associated equally with the apostles, the sons of Jacob, the tables of the Roman legislator, the labours of Hercules, the hours of the day, the months of the year, or the signs of the Zodiac. Lastly, the circular layout denoted union. (Forum 3/89:8 cited in Löken, 1992:6). (Shore, 2000, p. 47)

It is also, Shore notes, “a Christian symbol representing the Virgin Mary’s halo (Revelation 12, p. 1)” (Shore, 2000, p. 47). This rationale gives an indication of the nature of the history on which European policy has drawn in the creation of the notion of European citizenship. Shore suggests that rather than EU policy makers “embodying the thinking of a new age in human history”, their approach indicates “an altogether more conservative current of 19th century social evolutionist thought” (Shore, 2000, p. 50). To follow on from the discussion of the role of the knowledge of the self in the knowledge economy the discussion here is informed by Foucault’s approach to the study of history and the ways in which the discourses of history constitute particular truths about a European essence and the role of the individual in relation to it. In this discussion of the relation of the individual to history, I seek to highlight the possibility of resistance central to Foucault’s understanding of power, with reference to both education and educational research. I draw on the work of Masschelein (2007) and Ambrosio (2008) to show uses of Foucault that point to a reappropriation of accountability in educational practice. This requires seeing education as not restricted to a formal institutional sense but seeing it as lifelong learning in a richer sense than is found in policy, indicating a willingness and ethical purpose to learning throughout one’s life. John Ambrosio gives an example of an attempt to move beyond diagnosis towards suggesting implications of Foucault’s thought for critical educational practice. He writes of Foucault: In his view, we transform ourselves by identifying the historical contingencies that have made us what we are, and by continually testing the cultural limits of what we can tolerate knowing, doing and being. (Ambrosio, 2008, p. 255)

The possibility of resistance lies in Foucault’s understanding of freedom as the ontological condition of ethics, indicating the possibility of choosing whether and how to act: “Freedom is not the self-possession of individuals and institutions, nor a terminal state of existence, but the experience of one’s relation to oneself in the constitution of subjectivity” (Ambrosio, 2008, p. 258). The exercise of this freedom, Ambrosio suggests, is not possible unless we interrogate the cultural inscriptions that keep us trapped in our own history (Ambrosio, 2008, p. 259). Ambrosio draws on Foucault’s analysis of the Greek practice of hypomnemata. This writing as askesis took the form of a notebook in which one wrote what one read, heard and thought, on which one could later reflect, problematising one’s own practice and learning from it. This is, therefore, not an account of oneself through which one

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presents one’s best assets or accounts for their actions. It is written in search of ethical rather than entrepreneurial subjectivity. For Ambrosio, this provides a model for educators (but also for the individual more generally) to transform their pedagogical relations: “we must continually monitor our own behaviour to ensure that it is consistent with the criteria of our own ethics of existence” (Ambrosio, 2008, p. 265). This work on the self is only meaningful if it engenders ethical unity, that is consistency between how we think and act. Ambrosio’s analysis suggests implications for the relationship between citizenship and education as it is currently conceived in policy: Foucault’s conception of ethical self-formation requires that we shift the pedagogical focus of moral development from establishing universal principles of knowledge and agency to changing the relation of the self to itself through a constant writing activity in which educators collect and reflect upon what they read and hear from others. The aim of Foucault’s ethics is to transform deeply ingrained customs, habits, dispositions, sensibilities, and ways of perceiving that limit the exercise of freedom. (Ambrosio, 2008, p. 265)

There is a risk, however, to which Ambrosio’s reading succumbs, of operationalising Foucault’s ideas according to current preoccupations with ethics and reflective practice. Ambrosio’s references to monitoring and reflection suggest the use of Foucault’s analysis in service of the form of accountability he would wish to critique. It further instils such a relation to the self rather than seeking a richer understanding of the form of accounting for oneself which Foucault indicates in the practice of hypomnemata. Jan Masschelein also focuses on Foucault’s understanding of writing practices as forms of work on the self but understood more fully in relation to Foucault’s understanding of critique as desubjectivation and refusal. Again, this shows a form of writing and knowledge of the self not as gaining of knowledge as part of a binary, as the resolution of ignorance, but as writing as an action that works on the individual, on the mode of being of the subject herself (Masschelein, 2007, p. 148). This requires an orientation to reading and writing shaped by a willingness to be transformed, exemplified in Foucault’s understanding of his books as “experience books”. This draws attention to the underlying assumptions and ethical implications of what are termed truth or demonstration books, which aim to inform, to put forward a truth and therefore to justify it. This implies what Foucault terms a “pastoral attitude”: the writer assumes the role of the knowing teacher and addresses one who takes the position of the learner. An inequality is thereby installed, which gains its legitimacy from a particular regime of truth organised according to such binary distinctions (Masschelein, 2007, p. 152). Neither reader nor writer is put at stake. The writing of an experience book, however, was for Foucault a philosophical exercise, one of askesis, in which he did not take the position of the teacher but an attitude of ex-position, suggesting the destabilising of one’s subjectivity, testing its limits. Foucault is not referring here to the forms of self-narrative currently prevalent in research and social and educational practice. These are a version of the truth book: taking one’s personal experience and aiming to teach with it, to transcribe it into truth. Such a relation to the self in reading and writing is referred to as a “limit

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experience”. It transforms us irreversibly, but this is not (or not always) a revelatory event. Masschelein writes, “we should prevent ourselves from dramatizing this limit experience – it is not lyricism of transgression – while at the same time taking care that we do not render them harmless” (Masschelein, 2007, p. 157). This is an example of the relation of the self to the self Foucault intends when he refers to agonism, an attitude of “permanent provocation” (Foucault in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, p. 222), living our life in relation to self and others as a constant negotiation of the self in relations of power acknowledging our freedom as existing in our ability to make ethical choices.

5.5 Conclusion The tripartite analysis of the knowledge economy I have provided here draws attention to the operation of the language in which European citizenship is articulated in this context. The term “citizenship” has been appropriated to operate more explicitly governmentally and thereby to demand a particular relationship of the citizen to education and to itself. I have attempted to move beyond an understanding of the knowledge economy restricted to the economic value of a maximally educated population to a fuller account of the mode of subjectivation it presents, which moves beyond the state–individual dichotomy and the understanding of the economic restricted to its fiscal sense. The discussion of the knowledge economy in the field of education policy sociology as exemplified by the work of Martin Lawn indicates a focus on the rupture that such change represents. The borderless education that Lawn refers to, however, is constructed within a definite European space (albeit enlarging incrementally) defined against that which is culturally not European and that with which it is economically competitive. “Citizenship” then operates within this governmental space as a technology according to which we are asked to account for ourselves. This is shown in Patricia White’s account of the apparent difference between the education of a citizen and a not-yet citizen. In this way, citizenship takes on a different meaning from its strictly legal sense. It is as citizens that we are now addressed in a particular way through the constitutive discourses of the knowledge economy. Lawn’s analyses were conducted in the language of governmentality (the influence of Foucault is not explicitly stated but the references to governance, discourse and technologies, for example, suggest that this is a language that has become orthodox in policy analysis). His identification of the focus on the individual in European policy did not lead to a focus on how such policy operates or what it demands of the individual, beyond what is made explicit in the policy language itself. The implication that the focus of policy on the individual marks a shift in governmental practice draws attention away from the ways in which current policy works on the individual according to the rationality of the knowledge economy. An account of the knowledge economy, therefore, requires a focus on the knowledge of the self it requires and the implications of this.

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The governmentality perspective, informing my identification of the role of knowledge of the self as important to an understanding of the operation of the knowledge economy, is increasingly employed in educational research to explain the relationship between the knowledge demanded by particular forms of accountability and the power relations this produces. There is a danger, however, that the use of a governmentality perspective may become an orthodoxy in the study of this area; governmentality often seems to appear as the hypothesis and the conclusion. This is perhaps due, despite a focus on the subjectivation of the individual in such accounts, to “governmentality” starting to operate as a theory applied to fixed contexts and not as an idea situated within a broader ethical dimension of Foucault’s work. The possibility of resistance is often not pointed to. The analysis in the third section aimed, therefore, bothto draw attention to the role of history in the construction of the European citizen and to show how a form of resistance might be effected by paying particular attention to it. The history mobilised by the EU that Shore criticises is typically seen as problematic due to its selective nature, the histories it excludes and the inevitable linear trajectory it represents. The philosophical canon is central to this history and thus underpins many of the assumptions upon which the construction of Europe is based. In the final part of the chapter, the accounts of Foucault’s work by Ambrosio and Masschelein are referred to to show that readings of such historical texts offer possibilities for a reoriented relation to the self and to education. Ambrosio’s account, however, illustrates the risk within educational research itself of succumbing to the form of accountability Foucault would seek to resist.

Notes 1. This refers to the legislative body of the European Union. The European Union superseded the European Economic Community and came into existence following the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. 2. The references to White (2008a) in the text refer to a draft paper presented at the Institute of Education, London. A reference to a final published version (White, 2008b) is given at the end of the paper.

References Ambrosio, J. (2008). Writing the self: Ethical self-formation and the undefined work of freedom. Educational Theory, 58, 251–267. Drummond, J. (2003). Care of the self in a knowledge economy: Higher education, vocation and the ethics of Michel Foucault. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35, 57–69. Foucault, M. (1982). Afterword: The subject and power. In J. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–226). Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1986). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of a work in progress. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 340–372). London: Penguin. Goldsmith, Q. C., Lord, P. (2008). Citizenship: Our common bond. UK Ministry of Justice http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/citizenship-report-full.pdf published 11/03/08, accessed 9th May 2008.

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Lawn, M. (2001). Borderless education: Imagining a European education space in a time of brands and networks. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 22(2), 173–184. Lawn, M. (2003). The “usefulness” of learning: The struggle over governance, meaning and the European education space. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 24(3), 325–336. Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and social class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Masschelein, J. (2007). Experience and the limits of governmentality. In J. Masschelein, M. Simons, U. Bröckling, & L. Pongratz (Eds.), The Learning society from the perspective of governmentality (pp. 147–162). Oxford: Blackwell. Masschelein, J. (2008). Learning in environments, the need for positioning knowledge and governing education through ex/inclusion. Paper presented at the Institute of Education, University of London, 20th February 2008. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2002). An adequate education in a globalised world? A note on immunisation against being-together. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36, 589–608. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shore, C. (2000). Building Europe: The cultural politics of European integration, London: Routledge. UK Border Agency. (2008). http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/applying/ ceremony/. Accessed 9th May 2008. White, P. (2008a). Conceptualising the new citizen. Paper presented at the Institute of Education, University of London, 9th January 2008. White, P. (2008b). Immigrants into citizens. Political Quarterly, 79(2), 221–232.

Chapter 6

Parenting in a Technological Age Geertrui Smedts

6.1 Introduction Education is marked by continuity in thoughts and approach mostly (Depaepe, 1998). It nevertheless also bears in it the tendencies of its time. The education of the 19th and 20th centuries’ children was marked by upcoming educationalization (Depaepe, 1998) and medicalization (Petrina, 2006). Although these tendencies are still present today, as continuity is education’s main feature, there is also the upcoming trend of technologization. Education has inevitably become highly technological in the era of information and communication technology (ICT) in life in general. At school, computers and the Internet are being introduced in more and more classes to support subject learning. Teachers do their best to keep up to date with ICT, while in the home parents are urged to reflect upon how to integrate ICT in the education of their children too. The benefits of technolization, however, are not as self-evident in the home as they are elsewhere. Some parents interviewed about introducing or having the Internet at home were not fully at ease with the new technology and the way it is gaining ground. They did not just wonder how to introduce ICT into the education of their children, but also asked why they should. From two parents of different families: Many of the teachers are very Internet minded, but we think they should teach their pupils to search in books instead of on the Internet. It has disappeared, that medium of books, although it is valuable too. [. . .] Because education wants to keep up with modern trends, everything has to be done with computers all of a sudden. I think the school is not giving any counterweight to the advance of computerization, they are not attracted to other media anymore. Teachers are rather trying to search for ways to integrate the computer more and more without thinking about why they should do that.1

G. Smedts (B) Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] Prieviously published in Ethics and Education, Volume 3, Issue 2 October 2008, pp. 121–134 (reprinted with permission of the editor, Richard Smith).

P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_6,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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These parents’ statements make two points clear. First, the teachers of whom the parents are talking here are exemplary of what is happening in society: we are technologically overwhelmed and feel we must ask how to integrate technologies in our lives. Nevertheless, the parents here show that technologies might not be as self-evidently good as we generally assume them to be, i.e. that what we consider ‘normal’ or ‘valuable’ (for our children) in fact can be questioned. Second, the status of ‘parent’ goes with the responsibility to raise a child. And it is children that make their parents into people who are perfectly placed to question the value of the ideas and conventions of parenting that we are surrounded by. That is so, as Suissa (2006) argues, because what is considered appropriate for children in general (according to these ideas and conventions) might not be seen as the best for one’s own child. Indeed, the claim a child makes on her parents, the sentiment of care she awakens (Noddings, 2003), makes parents the ideal inquirers into these values, ideas and conventions. The intention of this paper then is to shed light on technologization in education in order to pinpoint the way our identity is at stake in its advance. The challenge to our identity comes with a narrowed conception of what it is to be an educator. Teachers are the first victims of this, but parents too are easily seduced into becoming mere executors of technologization. Nonetheless, having outlined the picture as it presents itself today it will be argued that this narrowed conception can hardly be maintained by the individual, in particular a parent. Thus professionals who work with parents should address them not just as pawns in the system that can be steered by technical reason, but very differently as people who are capable of independent practical judgement.

6.2 The Essence of Technology Is Nothing Technological The Guardian of 27 March 2008 reports on the “first national strategy for child internet safety, including a streamlined system for classifying computer video games and codes of practice for social networking sites” (Wintour, 2008, p. 1). The strategy is constructed by Great Britain’s famous psychologist Tanya Byron, who supports parents in their attempts to protect their children from the dangers of ICT. In her report, she argues that it is essential to reduce the availability of harmful material, to accelerate the implementation of technical tools that help parents to control their children’s use of the new technologies, and to help children become resilient to harmful materials (Byron, 2008). This government-inspired strategy shows that the Internet is not just a neutral tool with the capacity to promote efficiency, convenience or fun. Its very existence does something to us and requires our response. Heidegger, in ‘The question concerning technology’ (1993), identified this process, arguing that technological devices and tools such as computers and the Internet are not the essence of technology. “The essence of technology is nothing technological”, he says (Heidegger in Introna & Zalta, 2005, 2.1). Technological devices serve us in four ways: they constitute material aid, they shape things, they serve the end that we envisage, and they produce the wished-for effect. Thus technology is

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in fact “a way of revealing” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 12). If we give heed to this, then the essence of technology opens itself to us. Besides helping and entertaining us, the computers and the Internet are, in their turn, changing us, altering our relations, demanding renewed strategies for education, for example. The first requirement, then, is to gain a better understanding of what technology is about and just what it ‘brings forth’. The process Heidegger recognized is not new. Petrina (2006), in his historiographic discussion of the medicalization of education, describes how practices in schools become medicalized. He argues, for example, that physical education, dietetics and school hygiene are subtle though influential instances of medicalization. These instances show that medicalization does not mean that there are always medical experts (i.e. doctors) involved in the issues that have been medicalized. Rather, it is a matter of “defining a problem in medical terms, using medical language to describe a problem, adopting a medical framework to understand a problem, or using a medical intervention to ‘treat’ it” (Conrad, 1992, p. 211). Conrad (1992) distinguishes three levels on which medicalization takes place: (1) the conceptual level, referring to the fact that it is a matter of language being shared and widely used, (2) the institutional level, meaning that organizations adopt a medical approach, and people are being effectively monitored and diagnosed, and (3) the interactional level, which means that there is an expert/non-expert relation being constructed in which the expert determines the issues as medical and treats them as such. Medicalization is a type of social construct which “brackets the assumption that there is any a priori reality ‘out there’ to be discovered” (Conrad, 1992, pp. 211– 212). As Petrina (2006, p. 530) concludes, “the medicalization of education was basically a historical accomplishment established on contingencies”. Just as medicalization occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, so technologization stands in the spotlight at the end of that century. Like medicalization, technologization is, in Heidegger’s terminology, ‘a way of revealing’ that has entered into our lives on the conceptual, institutional and interactional level. By now, technologization has reached the point that technical reason is being shared and used amongst us all, so that educational experts, such as Supernanny,2 adopt a technical, means-end approach to parenting and thus address parents as educational entrepreneurs who are to learn ‘what works’ as determined by experts’ knowledge. We have arrived at an age in which technologization is the way in which we understand education and what it means to be a parent. When our computer fails to work at a certain point, we feel lost, not knowing how to work, how to get on, without it. Or once you have a mobile phone, it is hard to recall how life was before. Technological devices determine how we live, how we make appointments with people and how we manage our work. Introna and Zalta (2005) call this ‘technological determinism’. As I have explained, however, what is being determined goes beyond merely what can be done technologically, i.e.

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accomplished with the new tools. Technology also has an impact on the context in which it is used. When we see technology as a way of revealing, we take the road of a phenomenological approach towards ICT (Introna & Zalta, 2005). This view does justice to the fact that technology is more than an artefact or tool: it reveals us in a certain way, i.e. makes us understand things in a particular way. Technologization “incorporates a particular relationship between men and reality, in which a specific interpretation of what counts as real holds sway” (Lambeir, 2004, pp. 98–99). The interpretation of reality today follows technical reason, of which more is mentioned below. Technical reason drives our thinking and actions. Put differently, technology is what makes us ‘unfree’ or chained or, in Heidegger’s word, ‘Enframed’. It shows the boundaries within which, and under the control of which, we can act, boundaries whose edges mark limits and both set out and eliminate possibilities (Sennett, 2008). These are not like the medieval city walls, for example, that kept enemies or barbarians out. The boundaries of which I am writing ‘enframe’ us; they delineate for us ways of being, establishing them as necessary because we “have no platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves” (Pirsig, 1974, p. 73). Thinking about the Internet and how to introduce it in education cannot but be thought within the established technologized schematism. That is how teachers only come to question how to introduce it and not why. Even if we ask the question why, there are limits to the answers that can be given. “If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory” (Pirsig, 1974, p. 102). When we ask why we should introduce the Internet, the answers will be formulated in terms of what works for the system. For example, introducing the Internet at school is good for children’s later life, as they will be able to look for information efficiently if they are taught the skills early on. Introducing them to the Internet supports the system, i.e. it makes ‘what works’ work better. The Internet itself stays untouched in this questioning and answering. Efforts to question the system will support the system, wanting to maintain it in order to ‘improve the world’. Technology and technologization are indeed like a mobile phone. Now we have it, we do not remember what things were like without it and therefore cannot think on or beyond the edges. We simply accept the boundaries. Today, our boundaries are not city walls but conceptual, institutional and interactional boundaries. We lay down rules for actions in definitions, reports, laws and agreements. It is this set of definitions and reasons that tell us what to do and what not to do. This generalized reason we dwell upon is what Dreyfus (1998) calls ‘artificial language’. Boolean logic is exemplary. Imagine searching for how to educate your child with the Internet, which is still quite new in education and thus raises questions in parents’ minds. You enter general(ized) terms such as ‘child’, ‘Internet’, ‘education’ and ‘safety’ together with AND, OR, or NOT so as to combine some words and exclude others. The question raised (how to educate with the Internet?) and the approach used (working with general, decontextualized terms) stipulate abstractly what it means to be a parent with the Internet: the search results delineate either specific directions about what to do so as to educate children in order to keep them safe or courses for educators to take in which the right directions are taught.

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It is not just on the Internet that parenting is approached and expressed in a decontextualized, abstract way. Books on education and the Internet such as My Child Online (Pardoen & Pijpers, 2005), articles on parenting in newspapers, government initiatives such as Byron’s report and so on unambiguously set out what parents are to do in order to be good parents, i.e. in order to live within the boundaries of the appropriate. The technological language in the publications is “concerned to find the best means towards established ends [. . .]. It is fair to call the discovery of ‘what works’ its dominant, and often its exclusive, interest” (Smith, 2006, p. 161). Smith calls the way of reasoning characteristic of this technological language ‘technical reason’.

6.3 What Parenting Means The whole system of rational discourse is implicated in the statements put forth by any researcher, by anyone who endeavours to think rationally. Each one speaks as a representative of the common discourse. His own insights and utterances become part of the anonymous discourse of universal reason. (Lingis, 1994, pp. 3–4)

Artificial language with its technical way of reasoning makes our talk decontextualized. Lingis (1994) says it turns us into representatives of a rational system. In order to act within the boundaries of the appropriate and acceptable, the human being is “stripped of its inner beauty and truth, and only true or meaningful to us as means to an end” (Lambeir, 2004, p. 101). Technologization has made us, as Heidegger put it, into the ‘tools of our tools’ (Introna & Zalta, 2005). We become part of technologization, and we ourselves have become technologized. We ‘contingently but necessarily’ take part in the same community that holds technical reason in common. It is technical reason that enables us to communicate and to improve what works. What it means to be a parent, i.e. the parent’s identity, is then narrowed down to being a pawn of the system, a pawn that does certain things that ‘work’. Without attempting to outline the overwhelming amount of specific Internet education measures that advise parents about what to do, it is helpful just to touch on one aspect so as to understand the idea of technical reason within parenting. Themes on the agenda for 9- to 13-year-olds, for example, include making a homepage or website, playing online, communicating online, seeking information and consideration of the amount of time spent online. The themes are similar for teenagers. Within each of the themes, directives are given, explained in detail and justified further. Basic rules for chat and MSN for teenagers that parents should pass on are, for example (Pardoen & Pijpers, 2006, p. 146, my translation), Chat and MSN Give as little as possible personal information. That means no (e-mail) addresses, names (not of your school either), telephone numbers, passwords, hobbies, photos etc. You do not know what might be done with it. Stay decent and honest. Ignore flames, discrimination and sexual allusions and involve the provider as soon as possible [if these occur]. Do not post provocative messages or threats yourself.

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Those directions provide parents with ways to teach their children appropriate attitudes, in this case in the context of online chat. However, formulating what their children ought to do and ought not to do is just part of the parents’ job. It is stressed that there are measures that should be taken to improve one’s own parental attitudes too (Pardoen & Pijpers, 2006, p. 108, my translation): Ideally you would know as much as your children do, but in practice, it is hard to achieve that. If you are unsure about your knowledge of the Internet, then try at least to be open to what your children can teach you. Your children will appreciate that.

Taking a proper interest would then be to “learn enough about the Internet yourself to understand what your children are doing. Make yourself familiar with the most important possibilities. Start chatting, MSN, surfing, downloading and sharing mp3 files” (Pardoen & Pijpers, 2006, p. 108). The parent here is asked to accept the Internet, to act as a pawn, as a parent within the system (just as teachers do according to the parents quoted above). In the field of the Internet and gaming, especially, where parents are conceived as ‘the Internet immigrants’ and children as ‘the Internet natives’, parents are worried that they do not have the ability to educate their children appropriately (Wintour, 2008, p. 1). Consequently, they depend on ‘what works’ according to educational experts (who are gatekeepers of the system). Unsurprisingly, when considering directions to ‘what works’, Couchman (1983, p. 288) notices that merely to be a parent is nothing; to parent, everything. Children must no longer think of themselves as having parents; rather they are parented. Whichever side one takes, parenting, in word as in deed, clearly seems here to stay.

This quotation suggests that today being a parent is equated to doing parenting things, i.e. it is parenting. And parenting is the crucial idea today: when you ‘Google’ the word you are given an astonishing 68 million results. The common content behind these is the notion of directions or techniques of parenting. To make this point even clearer: the first five hits link parenting to Everything you need to raise a happy, healthy family. Get expert advice on child development (parenting.com). Free parenting help, tips, advice, guidance, support and resources for discipline problems, behavior troubles, school issues . . . (parenting.org). It has recently become a very popular topic due to the need to clarify the process of bringing up a child at home (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/parenting). From trying to conceive through your child’s teen years [sic], iVillage Pregnancy & Parenting offers up-to-date and informative articles, features, expert advice . . . (parenting.ivillage.com). Having trouble relating to your teen? Got a two year-old and can’t kick the tantrums? Check out ‘Today’s Parenting’ for weekly advice and practical tips (msnbc.msn.com/id/3041445/). Practical solutions to help with the challenges of everyday parenting-including expert advice as well as tips from other mums and dads (bbc.co.uk/parenting).

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These contemporary Google search results emphasize the message Couchman delivered 25 years ago: being is doing. Parents’ identity is no longer derived (solely) from having the responsibility to raise a child. On the contrary even in times when adoption and foster parenting are considered normal, the identity of parents is instead linked to the idea that parents are to do something; it is about an activity, i.e. a process (Lambeir & Ramaekers, 2007, p. 106). Parenting demands an ongoing attitude, which stretches over the whole of being a parent and is “an attitude of something like an ‘educational entrepreneur’” (Lambeir & Ramaekers, 2007, p. 105). These entrepreneurs are expected to enhance their own knowledge and skills in order to be called responsible or good parents. It is their task to follow what is presented in the publications and initiatives such as Pardoen and Pijpers’ book, My child online. Parents’ identity is thus entrepreneurially filled in. It is about following the manuals, following the lines as set up by the educational experts and practitioners, “[m]ake yourself familiar with the most important possibilities” (Pardoen & Pijpers, 2006, p. 108), to the end of keeping children safe. Knowing who to be is knowing what to do. And by making yourself acquainted with all the rules as delineated by educational experts, you can become fully intelligible to yourself. Parenting, Arcilla (2006, p. 3) argues, stands for the conviction that [u]nless one is intelligible to oneself-which I take to mean not that one necessarily possesses complete knowledge of who one is, rather that one experiences no serious problem understanding one’s identity-one cannot be in good conscience confident that one is responsive enough to all the responsibilities that belong to one, let alone presume that one is in a position to judge the intelligible status of others.

Only the parent that has listened to the experts, then, is considered a good or responsible parent who can reliably judge what to do for her children (Wubs, 2004). Being self-intelligible is what the idea of the educational entrepreneur amounts to. This characteristic comes with a marginal note though. The educational entrepreneur is, in De Mul’s phrase, a ‘homo zappens’ (in Van den Boomen, 2000, p. 21), whose reading consists of staring at a screen, with the prevailing thought: non-information and overflow. The human image that goes along with that is of a man surfing himself into a stupor in front of the ever-changing screens and becoming empty-headed in the process.

Our surfing from one page to the other is like zapping from educational directive to educational directive. Instead of processing the information at hand, homo zappens vacantly accepts whatever is on offer without judging what is valuable in his specific situation. It is enough to listen to experts in order to be called a good parent. This general technologized attitude is described by Introna and Zalta (2005, 2.2): A thermostat on the wall that we simply set at a comfortable temperature now replaces the process of chopping wood, building the fire and maintaining it. Our relationship with the environment is now reduced to, and disclosed to us as, a control that we simply set to our liking. In this way devices, ‘de-world’ our relationship with things by disconnecting us from the full actuality (or contextuality) of everyday life. . . . Contemporary humans surrounded by devices are doomed increasingly to relate to the world in a disengaged manner.

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The information technologies provide us with an easy way to avoid being committed. For one, you can read what is on offer and just adopt it. You just surf the web and find out what to do. And at times when you have to be accountable for what you do, it is easiest and safest to let experts speak for you and to let them be accountable:“I have done as the directions told me”. You can hide behind what works and do not have to be committed or involved yourself. Translated to parenting, the entrepreneurial attitude leads parents to simply adopt the tools and directions as constructed by educational experts. Consequently, being a parent is reduced to adoption of what works according to the manual, i.e. the fit-for-purpose educational books. Parenting does not involve thinking through the directions at one’s disposal – just do it! Consequently, Feenberg (2000) rightly notes that “the generalization of the device paradigm, its substitution for simpler ways in every context of daily life, has a deadening effect”. We do not reflect anymore on how our houses are heated; we live it instead of knowing it. Dreyfus explains in On the Internet (2001, pp. 6–7), a title which refers both to ‘what happens to a surfer on the Internet’ and to ‘what the Internet does to us as people in general’, that if the Net becomes too big, . . . we might, at the same time, necessarily lose some of our crucial capacities: our ability to make sense of things so as to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, our sense of the seriousness of success and failure that is necessary for learning, and our need to get a maximum grip on the world that gives us our sense of the reality of things. Furthermore, we would be tempted to avoid the risk of genuine commitment, and so lose our sense of what gives meaning to our lives.

Deadening our vital capacities, the Internet – or technologization – makes us ever more stupid, as Van den Boomen (2000) says. Technologization causes parents to parent rather than to be parents. If parents act like educational entrepreneurs, i.e. if they are parenting rather than being parents, their ultimate problem is to take on the task ‘economically’, i.e. use the means that have been proved to work to the end of raising their child efficiently and effectively. This ‘what works’ attitude is like that of the disengaged mechanic, an idea I derive from Pirsig (1974). In his book, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values’, which discusses the relation of man and technology, Pirsig (1974, p. 35) argues that the mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in here. We were all spectators.

The spectatorship Pirsig (1974) indicates shows – as Introna demonstrates with the thermostat – that we are only partly engaged with the world, i.e. with what is truly valuable for ourselves and our children. ‘Does the Internet truly make us (feel) better?’ is a question that is hardly asked by teachers, educational experts and so on. Thus Introna and Zalta (2005) argue that we relate to the world in a disengaged manner. Parenting, as presented to us by educational experts and practitioners, stands for a disengaged way of being involved in education. Indeed, what is required is that we just engage within Enframing and do not question Enframing as such. It is not

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required that we truly care. Parenting, for me, stands for disengaged, uninvolved questioning how to introduce the Internet and not whether it is a good thing to introduce it at all.

6.4 The Borders of Parenting Parents, however, as illustrated by the interview excerpts at the beginning of this paper, do question the value of the Internet. They do care. That is so, Suissa (2006) argues, because what is considered appropriate for children in general (according to the system), might not be seen as the best for one’s own child. Indeed, the claim a child makes on her parents, the sentiment of care she awakens (Noddings, 2003), makes parents into the value inquirers of technologization, as I noted above. Parents understand that technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. (Pirsig, 1974, pp. 166–167)

Although enframing gives the illusion that boundaries are untransgressable, i.e. that ‘everything has to be done with computers all of a sudden’, Enframing is about boundaries and borders. Borders stand for the places where exchange is possible and where people can become more interactive (Sennett, 2008). The borders are the place (or space) where parents pause for breath to think things through. Their children call them to engage on the borders, and therefore they refuse to let their parental identity be narrowed down to entrepreneurialism or doing parenting things. They thus claim that our techno-rational community, dedicated to ‘what works’, has its limits. Educational books such as My child online cannot offer all the answers for all children. It can be argued, by contrast, that certain forms of technology actually invite us to explore the borders. Sennett (2008) takes the example of Linux, which is a cooperation of a number of computer language programmers. They do not work ‘by the book’, but work intuitively. They let themselves be invited by the infinite numbers of ways to progress. Consequently, they have no means-to-an-end relationship with Linux, but extend their capacities for the sake of extending them. They expand their rationality because they are not committed merely to ‘what works’. They need to go through trial and error over and over again. In this way Linux represents the invitation of technologies or of technologization. The Internet too does not have a linear ‘what works’ mindset, although Boolean logic gives the impression that it does. On the contrary, the hyperlinks of the Internet can bring you to a wholly different outcome than you asked for in the first place. The invitation thus is to consider multiple ways to progress, to combine mind and matter, to be open to the suggestions of the hyperlinks and to think intuitively. This

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exploration does not require abandoning technical reason or artificial language but needs care and the personal involvement of the surfer. In this way, technology can show us multiple ways to progress, either demanding of its users interaction and interactiveness within the boundaries (in the case of Microsoft programs that define and control everything to make it easier for their users) but sometimes take us onto the very borders too (in the case of Linux, which demands commitment and care as opposed to the disengaged clicking Microsoft seems to encourage). Perhaps it is too easy to be as critical as the parents mentioned above. In general, we do prefer Microsoft’s preset Windows that guide us, Internet featherbrains that we are, and not the indeterminate Linux mindset in which we have to search for answers. It is far easier to let your parental identity be determined by the directives on offer – not least because when doing so, one knows one is acting like a good parent, i.e. appropriately. Nevertheless, all parents sooner or later are confronted with the limits of the system and feel invited by, feel the claim on them made by, their child and the child’s needs. It is when parents find that ‘what works’ stops working that the limits of technologization become manifest and a possible subject for discussion, because at that point they feel it is just they who are to educate their children with the Internet at home. What happens at the borders of enframing then is best compared to “the community of people who have nothing in common” (Lingis, 1994). This community, Lingis says, comes into full view when someone is sitting at the deathbed of someone they love. Sitting by the bed, one cannot say things ‘rationally’ as no words suffice to comfort the dying – nothing ‘works’. But that does not matter, Lingis (1994) argues, as it is not important what one says but that one is there to say something. It is important that you are there to do something and that you let yourself be invited to explore words to utter. It is not a matter of doing something but of doing something. You are then not a representative speaker of a particular discourse. You are not a pawn who mumbles some formulaic lines found in a guide. You are just you. This demands courage and putting you, your being and selfhood, at risk. In Lingis’ words: To enter into conversation with another is to lay down one’s arms and one’s defences; to throw open the gates of one’s own positions; to expose oneself to the other, the outsider; and to lay oneself open to surprises, contestation, and inculpation. It is to risk what one found or produced in common. (Lingis, 1994, p. 87)

The determined, narrow identity – what we have in common – is put at risk. That is what a 110 teachers, psychologists, authors and others did in publishing an open letter – ‘open’ as in exposing their selves – in the UK’s Daily Telegraph (September 2006) in their concern about the ‘death of childhood’ (Fenton, 2006). Their concern was not the risks children encounter especially, but ‘the world they are brought up in’, ‘a fast-moving, hyper-competitive culture’, and the ‘screen-based life’ that writers contrast with real food, real play, first-hand experience and regular interactions with significant adults (Abbs et al., 2006). At the deathbed of childhood (and compare Lingis’s idea of sitting at someone’s deathbed) the authors saw that technologization must somewhere come to an end.

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It is in view of technologization’s all-embracing grip that the authors fear for childhood and that in this paper I express my fears for parents’ identity. If parents act like entrepreneurs, the question of what is appropriate or ethical is never fully raised and thus it is effectively denied altogether. From this point of view, the concept of parenting, as the reduction of what it means to be a parent to ‘what works’, is unethical. There are writers who, by contrast, call for an ethic that is primordial and everpresent. Pirsig, for example, writes: it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring for what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. (Pirsig, 1974, p. 35)

Here Pirsig (1974) touches on the way that the idea of care is pushed into the background by technologization, which has obliterated the important insight that caring for a child is bound up with intuition and receptivity rather than with moral reasoning or abstract thinking. Noddings (2003, pp. 24–25) re-establishes the insight that the one-caring desires the well-being of the cared-for and acts (or abstains from actingmakes an internal act or commitment) to promote that well-being. She is inclined to the other. An observer, however, cannot see the crucial motive and may misread the attitudinal signs.

Being a parent is about an inclination to the child, guided by human affections, weaknesses and anxieties that someone else cannot directly see. The essential insight here is that ‘I must do something’, which is non-rational and subjective, and which is not the same as the conviction that ‘something must be done’, which is rational and objective. To make her point clearer, Noddings (2003, p. 26) reiterates the danger of disengaged entrepreneurship, emphasizing that ‘one of the greatest dangers to caring may be premature switching to a rational-objective mode’ and that ‘if rational-objective thinking is to be put in the service of caring, we must at the right moments turn it away from the abstract toward which it tends and back to the concrete’. The thought that ‘I must do something’ is a matter of doing something with what one knows. It is not a question of generating new knowledge, but of doing something with the knowledge, i.e. acknowledging rather than knowing (Cavell, 1999). In contrast with parenting, then, being a parent is about moving back and forth between technical reason and practical judgement: “good practical judgement does not impose rigid categories or principles on the subject matter but is always responsive to it. Flexibility is closely connected with alertness. Both involve sensitivity or attunement rather than mastery or dominion . . . our judgements have to be adapted to the particularities of the situation rather than relying on general rules or principles exclusively” (Smith, 2006, pp. 168–169). Noddings (2003) adds that the caring attitude is deeply rooted in all of us, as it is the first and most primordial attitude to life. Caring is an inherent receptive mode that, though it is endangered by technologization, precedes technologization in all its aspects and so can always be recalled. Noddings’ conception of being a good

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parent then is that it is located in the consciousness, prior to action, of the one caring and not in abstract advice or directions as formulated by educational experts. Words such as engrossment, alertness, sensitivity, and attunement, and especially the idea that ‘I must do something’, are what make a parent a parent and not a pawn who acts entrepreneurially. Noddings (2003) thus calls for an ‘ethic of care’, meaning that parents should continuously re-establish the commitment to be a carer, putting themselves at risk instead of staying in the comfort zone of technical reason. She notes that “I may come to rely almost completely on external rules and, if I do, I become detached from the very heart of morality” (Noddings, 2003, p. 47). What is appropriate, i.e. what is moral, is not to accede to enframing but to continuously explore its borders.

6.5 Implications for Those Who Want to Help Parents The trouble is that although as adults we instinctively know how to protect our children offline, we often assume that their greater technological expertise will ensure they can look after themselves online. But knowledge is not the same as wisdom. (Byron, 2008, Foreword)

Tanya Byron makes a well-known, though important, point here. Knowledge is not the same as wisdom or acknowledgement. Although children might teach parents some practicalities about the web and educational experts might teach parents how to deal with the web, wisdom cannot be taught. It comes over the years as one realizes one is to do something oneself with the knowledge at hand instead of merely adopting it. Wisdom is a matter of ‘adapting’ rather than ‘adopting’ knowledge by taking into account previous experiences and future contexts. In Cavell’s words “Acknowledgement goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge)” (in Mulhall, 1996, p. 63). Although educational experts and practitioners can provide knowledge, they cannot provide wisdom or acknowledgement. It is the parent alone who can recognize relevance for her child in her situation, i.e. who does something on the basis of her knowledge. What experts do for parents is thus not trivial as it serves as a basis, but it does not have the ‘primordial’ quality of caring either. Similarly, books that are presented as fit-for-purpose instructional books for parents also serve as a basis, but they are not as fit-for-purpose as assumed. They can never tell parents precisely what to do. There is always a need for practical judgement in order to decide what is appropriate in one’s own situation. This is what Arcilla (2006) calls ‘liberal education’. The parent does not settle for technical reason, but the parent struggles with what her responsibility is about and questions the pronouncements of common sense. The parent, Arcilla (2006) continues, is to be a continually reflective perfectionist, dwelling not solely within Enframing but on the borders of Enframing especially. If being a parent is about being a perfectionist in Arcilla’s (or Cavell’s) sense, those who want to help parents need an attitude of

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openness instead of stipulating parenting knowledge and the meaning of being a parent. In comparison to the parent-entrepreneur, the parent-perfectionist’s ability to educate develops “by a dialectic between the correct way to do something and the willingness to experiment through error. The two sides cannot be separated” (Sennett, 2008, p. 160). The appropriate or moral way to educate one’s children with the Internet is an achievement of the parent herself gained through a constant process. The process is to “dwell temporarily in mess-wrong moves, false starts, dead ends” (Sennett, 2008, p. 161). Paradoxically, then, tools may be ‘more efficient’ if incomplete than if perfectly adapted to ‘what works’. This point about incompleteness applies to educational advice in books, articles, newspapers and so on. Sennett (2008, p. 235) notes that In writing, the strategic economy of the ellipsis should be located precisely where the reader wants the release from tension that an explicit conclusion might provide but where the writer wants to hold the reader . . . to keep the reader going.

Educational advice that makes one ‘move forth’, that promotes imagination, that brings parents to engage is good advice though not ‘efficient’ advice in the usual sense of the term. Arcilla (2006, p. 8) argues in the same way: the educational experts’ and practitioners’ initiatives are to be written in order to “win the trust of lost readers and to spur them to trust as well that they still possess critical, constructive intuitions”. He continues: My criticism would start to turn me, convert me, urge me, to a better way, in my view, of making sense of life. Provoked by the text, I would have broached the start of an understanding for which I may take responsibility and hence claim, embarking on the project of working out its implications for how I should live, and how I should act on the demands immediately facing me. So awakens the perfectionist will. I may even find that this path intersects with opportunities to provoke others in turn to take the first steps of their own ways in their responses to mine. (Arcilla, 2006, p. 7)

Incomplete tools offer opportunities to find out what one’s responsibility consists of. These tools build guidelines, but not directives. Paradoxically again, it is the “very incompleteness of the tool [that] has taught us something” (Sennett, 2008, p. 195). Incomplete tools – or reading fit-for-purpose tools as incomplete ones – are what is needed in order to raise the moral question of what it means to be a parent. Thus “truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul” (Emerson in Arcilla, 2006, p. 7). What educational experts and practitioners can do for parents then is to offer incomplete tools so as to call on the perfectionist and carer the parent naturally is. Instead of being ‘relief’ or ‘support’ workers, who start from the idea that being a parent is a burden they should be relieved from or supported to bear, they should provoke parents to trust in their will and capacity to care.

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6.6 Conclusion: The Most Sufficient Tool an Expert Can Make Is an Incomplete One Technology, then, is not just a tool. It is an amalgam of conceptual, institutional and interactional issues that occupy the space of technical reason. Being a parent too has become technologized: parents are required to act as parents and do so in order to feel relieved from their worries of what to do with their cyber-children. However, as a consequence, to care is expropriated from being a parent: depending on what is generally understood as ‘good parenting’, parents act on principles of care instead of drawing on their natural caring inclination and practical judgement. They adopt knowledge instead of adapting it, i.e. instead of acknowledging it through practical judgement. In this article, I have tried to raise the moral question of what it means to be a parent. I have tried to provoke the reader to undo parenting from its technological straitjacket with the aid of inspiration found in perhaps surprising authors such as Pirsig (1974), Sennett (2008) and Lingis (1994). In line with what I have called their ‘humble’ positions, I have argued that parents’ identity ought to be about a deliberate – and thus not arbitrary – identification with or recognition of the knowledge at hand, i.e. acknowledgement, rather than a matter of predetermined existence as dictated by technologization. For educational experts and practitioners that means not so much doing less as doing more but in a humbler and more modest way. Besides formulating specific directions about how to deal with the Internet (in the mode of technical reason or along the lines of ‘what works’), they should create space for the ethicalities within relationships, i.e. for ethical questions on how the ICT we once managed has come to manage us conceptually, institutionally and in our relationships.

Notes 1. These are families that I interviewed as part of my PhD research. 2. The name of a UK television programme: see http://www.supernanny.co.uk

References Abbs, P., et al. (2006). Modern life leads to more depression among children. The Daily Telegraph — 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528639/Modern-life-leads-to-more-depressionamong-children.html (accessed December 23, 2006). Arcilla, R. (2006). Perfectionism’s educational address. Paper presented at conference on Cavell, Cambridge, MA. Byron, T. (2008). Safer children in a digital world. The report of the Byron review. Nottingham: DCSF Publications. Cavell, S. (1999). The claim of reason. Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. Oxford: University Press. Conrad, P. (1992). Medicalization and social control. Annual Review of Sociology, 18, 209–232.

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Couchman, G. W. (1983, Autumn). Miscellany. An informal survey. Parenting – American Speech, 58, 285–288. Depaepe, M. (1998). De pedagogisering achterna. Aanzet tot een genealogie van de pedagogische mentaliteit in de voorbije 250 jaar. Leuven: Acco. Dreyfus, H. L. (1998). Why we do not have to worry about speaking the language of the computer. Information Technology and People, 11, 281–289. Dreyfus, H. L. (2001). On the internet. London: Routledge. Feenberg, A., Higgs, E., Strong, D., & Light, A. (Eds.). (2000). From essentialism to constructivism: Philosophy of technology at the crossroads. Technology and the good life (pp. 294–315). Chicago: University Press. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/talk4.html (accessed November 20, 2006) Fenton, B. (2006). Junk culture ‘is poisoning our children’. The Daily Telegraph – 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk (accessed December 23, 2006) Heidegger, M. (1993). The question concerning technology. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Martin Heidegger. Basic writings (D. F. Krell, Trans., pp. 311–341). London: Routledge. (original work published 1954) Introna, L., & Zalta, E. N. (Eds.). (2005) Phenomenological approaches to ethics and information technology. The stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2005/entries/ethics-it-phenomenology/(accessed November 22, 2005) Lambeir, B. (2004). The educational cyberspace affaire. A philosophical reading of the relevance of information and communications technology for educational theory. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, KU Leuven, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Department of Pedagogical Sciences, Centre for Philosophy of Education, Leuven Lambeir, B., & Ramaekers, S. (2007). The terror of explicitness. Philosophical remarks on the idea of a parenting contract. Ethics and Education, 2, 95–108. Lingis, A. (1994). The community of those who have nothing in common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulhall, S. (1996). Knowing and acknowledging. In S. Mulhall (Ed.), The Cavell reader (pp. 47–71). Cambridge: Blackwell. Noddings, N. (2003). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pardoen, J., & Pijpers, R. (2005). Mijn kind online: hoe begeleid je je kind op Internet? Amsterdam: SWP. Pardoen, J., & Pijpers, R. (2006). Mijn kind online. Hoe begeleid je je kind op Internet? Amsterdam: SWP. Parenting, http://www.allwords.com (accessed November 26, 2007) Petrina, S. (2006). The medicalization of education: A historiographic synthesis. History of Education Quarterly, 46, 503–531. Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into Values New York: William Morrow. Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. London: Allen Lane. Smith, R., (2006). Technical difficulties: The workings of practical judgement. In P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Why ‘what works’ doesn’t work (pp. 159–170). Dordrecht: Springer. Suissa, J. (2006). Untangling the mother knot: Some thoughts on parents, children and philosophers of education. Ethics and Education, 1, 65–77. Van den Boomen, M. (2000). Leven op het net. De sociale betekenis van virtuele gemeenschappen. Amsterdam: Instituut voor publiek en politiek. Wintour, P. (2008, March 27). Parents to be shown how to protect children online. New codes of practice for social network sites and video games. The Guardian, pp. 1–2. Wubs, J. (2004). Luisteren naar deskundigen. Opvoedingsadvies aan Nederlandse ouders 1945– 1999. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Chapter 7

Capability and the Language of Educational Research Michael Watts

7.1 Introduction It has been suggested that there is “a perplexing absence of an appropriate language within which to speak of the university” (Barnett & Standish, 2003, p. 216), and this chapter offers if not a language then a dialect that may add to the discussion of higher education. In the UK, policies seeking to widen participation in higher education try to reconcile the two concerns of economic growth and social justice. However, even though widening participation students may obtain some benefits from their higher education, they are likely to remain relatively disadvantaged when compared with their more middle-class peers. Nonetheless, the government persists with its arguments that hold out the potential benefits of widening participation to all. The economic and social justice arguments for widening participation can be sustained if they are juxtaposed within the hyperreality of higher education in which the rhetoric of widening participation has replaced its original and authentic reality. Yet, peering through the hyperreal, it becomes clear that these policies are utilitarian in nature and cannot serve both good and Mammon. My concern here is to suggest that the language of utilitarianism sustains the hyperreality and that a different language, the language of capability, is required if the economic and social justice aspects of widening participation are to be reconciled. This is not intended to overstate the negative aspects of utilitarianism which, as suggested here, can lead individuals to raise their aspirations. However, if widening participation policies are to consider the individual’s opportunities to benefit from higher education – particularly those individuals furthest removed from the social median running through utilitarian arguments – it needs a language to articulate those benefits more fully. The argument here is that the language of the capability approach can articulate those benefits and therefore inform educational policies more fully than the language of utilitarianism currently deployed by the government.

M. Watts (B) Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, England e-mail: [email protected]

P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_7,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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7.2 Higher Education Policy and the Hyperreal Higher education policies in the UK, as elsewhere, are focused on stimulating economic growth and tackling social inequalities; and the widening participation agenda is promulgated as a means of tackling both of these concerns. However, the economic returns on a publicly subsidised mass higher education system are uncertain at best (Wolf, 2002; Keep & Mayhew, 2004), and with educational systems being deeply complicit in the reproduction of social inequalities (Bourdieu, 1996), it is unclear how that system can redress problems that are, at least in part, of its own making. I have suggested elsewhere (Watts, 2008) that government claims to be successfully tackling both the economic and social justice aspects of higher education policies can be usefully interrogated through Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1993, 1998) which addresses a neo-reality that assumes the force of reality and generates simulacra – historical, mythological and powerful models that replace non-existent originals. The desire to promote social justice through widening participation in higher education, particularly when this is coupled with increased national and personal wealth, can be so powerful that its authenticity is not always questioned. Economic growth is the main driver of widening participation policies: the Robbins Report (1963) recommended the immediate expansion of higher education to produce more graduates who would go on to enhance the national economy; and a central assertion of the Dearing Report (1997) was that the primary purpose of higher education is to prepare students for the world of work. However, behind the simple calculation that economic growth requires more graduates and therefore greater participation in higher education, there is also the desire to ensure “that the opportunities that higher education brings are available to all those who have the potential to benefit from them, regardless of their background” (DfES, 2003, p. 67). These benefits extend beyond greater employability and earnings potential (op. cit.) to a wide range of non-economic benefits such as better health and greater civic participation (HEFCE, 2001). The economic and social justice arguments meet in the government target of a 50% participation rate for the country’s 18–30 age cohort by the year 2010 and the stated intent of enhancing opportunities for older cohorts to engage in higher education. However, participation rates of those from the lower socio-economic groups remain stubbornly low across the higher education sector as a whole and widening participation students continue to be underrepresented in the older universities and overrepresented in the newer universities. Bourdieu’s sociology of education (1996) shows how students with lower reserves of cultural capital – which he argues is the main currency in educational fields – progress to and through universities that typically provide them with less capital than the more prestigious institutions so that, as Dearing observed, they will more often than not progress from privileged pasts to privileged futures or from less privileged pasts to less secure and lower status futures (1997). In other words, whilst students from widening participation backgrounds may benefit from higher education, they are likely to remain relatively disadvantaged in comparison with their more middle-class peers. None of this is to suggest

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that such students cannot benefit from higher education but as these benefits cannot be always be realised, it seems that there is something unethical about promulgating them (Watts, 2006a, 2006b) if the prospective student is coerced into believing that higher education is not only desirable in general but desirable for her even though she may not have the necessary resources to properly capitalise upon it. Yet the government, neatly sidestepping these potentially deleterious aspects of participation, continues to carefully argue that higher education can benefit such students. Moreover, these arguments are all too often accepted by educational researchers who, asking how widening participation should be addressed rather than why it should be, acquiesce in the government’s assertion that it is a means of achieving social justice. This is not to argue against widening participation policies but to question why they so often escape scrutiny and to suggest complicity in diverting attention away from the real scandal – that widening participation is failing the weakest members of the higher education community. The concept of hyperreality can help account for this. Called into existence through deceit and erasure in a media-generated world of spin, it not only obscures but erases the need to ask whether higher education really does take place for those widening participation students targeted by government policy. The government’s 50% participation rate has been built upon the understandable desire to enhance the economy and redress social inequalities. However, whilst there is little evidence to suggest that either can be reached through widening the social bases of higher education (or, at least, through that alone) the 50% target nevertheless remains a monolithic feature of higher education policies. The rhetoric of widening participation, it would seem, has replaced the reason for it and taken on a life of its own. Within this hyperreality, and because its imitation of the authentic is so convincing, as long as it seems that something is being done it does not matter what is actually done. This is not to suggest that much of what is done is meaningless: widening participation will enable some students, pace Dearing, to progress from less privileged pasts to more secure and higher status futures and thereby prevail over at least some social inequalities. Others, though, will fail. Here I want to consider the part that language and argumentation have played in enabling this convincing imitation of the real. My particular focus is the utilitarian nature of government policy that allows the needs of the weakest to be overlooked in the rush to satisfy the greatest need of the greatest number.

7.3 Utilitarianism and Higher Education The utilitarian nature of the government’s widening participation agenda was given clear expression by Sir Howard Newby, former Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England when he stated: “Whilst I would not wish to underestimate the political commitment to widening participation in higher education, the main driver is much more rational and utilitarian” (2004). This would seem to be fairly unambiguous but utilitarianism, alongside its philosophical construction, has a demotic sense (for example, as Secretary of State for Education, Charles

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Clarke sought to promote vocational training over such non-utilitarian subjects as Classics) and so Newby’s statement demands some examination. Utilitarianism holds that an action is morally right if and only if it generates at least as much good – or utility – for all those affected by that action as any other action they could otherwise take. A critique addressing the utilitarian nature of current widening participation policies should, therefore, consider the extent to which those policies seek to secure the greatest good for the greatest number of those to whom the policy is relevant. The corollary to this, though, is that such a critique should also consider the pertinence of the long-standing argument that utilitarianism fails to address the distribution of utility and the redistribution of the resources which are necessary to secure it. There has been considerable debate over what constitutes the utilitarian notion of ‘good’: whilst more modern interpretations (Griffin, 1986) are concerned with desire fulfilment, classical utilitarianism (Bentham, 1789/1996; Mill, 1861/2001) typically considers it in terms of happiness, pleasure or satisfaction. In the context of education, whether classical or more contemporary interpretations are employed, utilitarian approaches lead to a concern with “outcomes deemed the best result for the largest number, for example, the numbers of people who will benefit nationally and internationally from growth in an economy” (Walker & Unterhalter, 2007, p. 2). The maximisation of utility pays less heed to those who are furthest from the relevant social median and a constant criticism of utilitarianism has been the implications for distributive justice: the principle of utility demands sacrifices from the few in order to secure the greatest advantage of the greatest number (Ricoeur, 1996). However, this rests – or seems to rest – uneasily alongside the contemporary widening participation agenda. Although the chief beneficiaries of earlier policies were the middle classes (that is, those who are closest to the social median), the current government has provided significant amounts of money to enable the participation of those from the working classes (that is, those who are further away from the social median). This is redistribution on a massive scale, especially as it is being partly funded by the imposition of tuition fees that shift the burden of payment onto the middle classes. This could, of course, be seen as a response to the inherently utilitarian nature of widening participation: because earlier policies favoured the middle classes, further investment has been required to encourage the participation of the working classes who may not otherwise progress to higher education. Yet the massification of higher education has tended to reify class-based inequalities rather than remove them (Bourdieu, 1996; Brennan & Shah, 2003; Reay, David, & Ball, 2005). Moreover, such investment, along with the rhetoric used to justify it, tends to privilege higher education over other forms of post compulsory education (Archer, Hutchings, & Ross, 2003; Watts & Bridges, 2006; Watts, 2008). Thus, in pursuit of the randomly chosen 50% participation rate selected to legitimise a social justice agenda that is subsumed by the economic driver anyway, financial resources are being ineffectively diverted to a form of education that reinforces inequalities. Furthermore, by focusing on the reproduction of relative advantages and disadvantages, particularly when employing the Bourdieusian notion of capital, educational researchers tend to reify the

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sacrifices of the few – that is, the working class students who typically progress to less prestigious institutions if they progress to higher education at all – who are unable to secure the greater advantages available to the greater numbers of middle-class students in higher education. For all this, it could be argued that the current policies at least enable greater numbers of students to develop the higher human capacities of progressive beings that are central to Mill’s concept of happiness (1859/1987). Although this does not counter the argument that these policies are utilitarian, it does mitigate criticism of them. However, the wider contexts of contemporary higher education tend to reduce the opportunities for the reflective learning that Mill argued for: declining per capita financial support means that more and more students need to juggle their studies with paid employment; and, as I have suggested elsewhere, the hyperreality of higher education is generating a culture of expectation in which the commodified degree is becoming a simulacrum of the learning it is supposed to represent (Watts, 2008). Taken together, these contexts have the potential to squeeze out reflective learning with rote learning rushing in to take its place; and those who are most vulnerable to the pressures of these contexts, those of whom disproportionate sacrifices are asked, are those from the working classes who are being targeted by widening participation policies (Watts, 2006a). None of this is to suggest that the working classes cannot benefit from, or should not be encouraged to participate in, higher education. It is, however, to suggest that the government’s significant investment in widening participation is failing to address the distributive problem of utilitarianism and to further suggest that utility can be more evenly distributed by questioning the bases of the contemporary policies. In the increasing hyperreality of higher education, though, participation tends to be posited as an unquestioned good (something that educational researchers all too often readily acquiesce in). Happiness, it is implied, can be achieved directly in the Millsian sense or indirectly through the proxy of increased income, and preferences can be satisfied through participation alone rather than for what that participation may enable. The hyperreal obscures the failure of current widening participation policies to meet their economic and social justice ends at the risk of generating an unfounded sense of desire fulfilment instead. I have addressed the economic shortcomings of contemporary higher education policies elsewhere in this series (Watts, 2008), and I do not intend revisiting them in any great detail here. My concern here is to consider the problems arising from this summary. If, whatever Newby might have to say, widening participation policies seek to enhance social justice by enabling more people from more diverse backgrounds to enjoy the benefits of higher education, the additional support invested in these policies does not fully articulate with utilitarianism’s imperative to secure “the maximisation of the average advantage of the greatest number at the price of the sacrifice of a small number” (Ricoeur, 1996, p. 36). However, the hyperreality of higher education conceals the scandal that whilst “policy makes use of the social justice discourse, the economic agenda has primacy and social justice is subsumed to the economic need” (Watts, 2006a, p. 306). The scandal

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is enabled by a slight but significant linguistic twist signalled by the government’s stated intent to “make certain that the opportunities that higher education brings are available to all those who have the potential to benefit from them” (DfES, 2003, p. 67): the benefits of higher education are held out to all but not all will benefit from them. Before looking to the injustices of utilitarianism, though, two caveats are required. The first is that it is not unreasonable for a government spending significant amounts of public money on higher education to seek a return on this investment through increased economic growth. The second is that many of those graduating from higher education because of widening participation polices will benefit, both economically and non-economically, from their higher education. Yet this second caveat points to the injustices of utilitarianism and its concern for the maximisation of utility without regard to its redistribution or the demands made of each individual in order to maximise the good of the greatest number. The utilitarian principle inevitably leads to the social median, and those individuals who will benefit most in utilitarian terms are those closest to it. Conversely, those of whom most is demanded are those furthest from the median (Ricoeur, 1996). Thus, utilitarianism can be seen to endorse inequality providing the principle of utility is met (for example, from the Millsian perspective, providing the greatest happiness is achieved by the greatest number). In this context of higher education, an individual may be far from the social median because she has a proportionally greater volume of cultural capital and she can, therefore, afford the sacrifices (echoed, for example, through parental complaints about paying taxes that provide for a state education whilst also paying for a private education) demanded of the utilitarian drive to maximise the greatest good. However, she may also be far from the median because she has a proportionally smaller volume of cultural capital and can ill afford such sacrifices. Utilitarianism, then, involves a disproportionate sacrifice by the more vulnerable members of society who are positioned on its edge (Watts, 2006a), and this can be perceived in the context of higher education as students from less privileged pasts typically continue to progress to less secure and lower status futures (Dearing, 1997). The economic argument for widening participation is guided by an overly simplistic syllogistic argument: graduate employment boosts the national economy and there is a limited number of graduates entering the labour market; therefore more graduates need to enter the labour market to enhance the national economy. The economic need, reiterated through so many government documents, is to increase national productivity and growth; and, with increased earnings potential (at both the national and individual levels) acting as proxy for satisfaction, happiness and so on, national economic growth should finance national well-being. That is, allowing for the vagaries of government spending priorities, the greatest good of the greatest number can be achieved through the vibrant economy the widening participation agenda is supposed to promote. Although this argument does not always stand up to close economic scrutiny, my concern here is simply to show that it is

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utilitarian in that, in aiming to increase the national economy, it seeks the greatest good of the greatest number – whether that greatest number is drawn from the national population as a whole or from those members of the population entering higher education. Moreover, in seeking the maximisation of the good, utilitarianism makes the sinister demand of “disproportionate sacrifices” from those positioned on the edge of society (Ricoeur, 1996); and this necessary corollary of utilitarianism is recognised by the government’s attempts to provide additional support to widening participation students. The social justice argument for widening participation, tagging along behind the economic argument, is an acknowledgement of the injustices inherent in the utilitarian policy. In the hyperreality of higher education, though, this stubborn resistance to a social justice measured by individual earnings is subsumed by the determination to increase participation for economic ends rather than the happiness those earnings represent; and the hyperreal detachment from the original desire to enhance social justice is facilitated by the very nature of the utilitarian arguments deployed in widening participation policies. Increasing the graduate workforce can lead to relative increases in both national and individual wealth up to a point, but that argument cannot be endlessly extrapolated. This necessarily points to the problem of utilitarian metrics and their proxies. With the economic imperative of widening participation, the government’s argument deploys economic growth as a proxy for other utilities such as happiness, preference satisfaction and so on. However, those on the edges of the higher education society may not obtain as much satisfaction (as measured by the economic proxy) through higher education than through any other means – particularly when the direct and indirect costs of participation are taken into account (Watts & Bridges, 2006). That this articulates with the imperative of maximising the good of the majority at the expense of the minority adds to the argument that widening participation is primarily utilitarian. However, it simultaneously points to the problems of seeking to assess the concept of the good through the proxy of economic growth. Utilitarian metrics are important but, critics argue, they cannot be the only important aspect of an individual’s life. It is, as Sen observes, “sensible enough to take note of happiness, but we do not necessarily want to be happy slaves or delirious vassals” (1999, p. 62). His concern is that the utilitarian focus on the achievement of such metrics disregards the “creation of conditions in which people have real opportunities for judging the kinds of lives they would like to lead” (1999, p. 63) and that such “potentially momentous matters” as individual freedoms (1999, pp. 56–57) can therefore be “valued only indirectly and only to the extent that they contribute to pleasure or happiness” (1992, p. 54). Moreover, it remains open to question how much pleasure or happiness may be experienced by the widening participation student who has progressed through higher education in the hyperreal expectation of enhancing her income only to find that she remains relatively disadvantaged. There are, of course, other non-economic benefits to participating in higher education, but this points to a more fundamental problem associated with utilitarian assessments of well-being – that of adaptive preferences.

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7.4 Utilitarianism and Adaptive Preferences Utilitarianism fails to take adaptive preferences into account. Adaptive preferences are concerned with what people are made to prefer rather than what they really prefer (Teschl & Comin, 2005) and they can be manifest as the “sour grapes” phenomenon proposed by Jon Elster (1983) or the self-abnegation that concerns Sen (1992, 1999) and Nussbaum (2000) in their articulations of the capability approach. There are significant differences between these conceptions of adaptive preferences, but there is agreement that, because mental metrics of happiness and so on cannot truly reflect the well-being of those who are ground down by their circumstances, self-assessments of well-being are liable to be distorted by deprivation. Elster uses Aesop’s fable of The Fox and the Grapes to illustrate the selfdeception and irrationality of adaptive preference formation. Aesop’s fox is unable to reach a bunch of grapes it desires and reduces the “state of tension between what [it] can do and what [it] might like to do” (1983, p. 117) by concluding that they must be sour and not worth having. For Aesop, then, it is easy to despise what you cannot have. For Elster, this non-conscious psychological process of adaptive preference formation causes the individual to change her preferences without her knowledge and thereby generate non-intentional actions as she downgrades an inaccessible option. Putting this into the context of widening participation seems fairly straightforward: because it is out of reach, the atypical but prospective student concludes that a higher education is not worth the having and, in not participating in higher education, she satisfies her preferences. Unlike Elster, Sen and Nussbaum are concerned with adaptive preferences as self-abnegation. Within their interpretations, the notion of utility as happiness or desire fulfilment can be “deeply unfair to those who are permanently deprived” (Sen, 1999, p. 62) but who make “great efforts to take pleasure in small mercies and to cut down personal desires to modest – ‘realistic’ – proportions” (Sen, 1992, p. 55) as they become “implicit accomplices to injustices that are reified through traditions, norms and social rules” (Watts, 2007, p. 25). For Sen, adaptive preferences are uniformly negative products of adversity because they curtail individual freedom, whereas Nussbaum suggests that taking a realistic view of and adapting to one’s circumstances may be beneficial if this dissuades people from unrealistic aspirations. However, whilst Nussbaum’s discouragement of unrealistic aspirations has a certain appeal in the examples she gives (inter alia, flying like a bird), there is a difficulty in that what may seem impossible may merely be improbable – and the socially constructed ‘impossibility’ of accessing higher education is as good an example of this as any. Thus, the adaptive preferences criticism of utilitarianism seems to sit uneasily with widening participation policies intended to raise aspirations, expand opportunities and, by addressing the socially constructed impossibilities of accessing higher education, enhance the individual’s freedom to make informed educational choices. Such policies are concerned to put higher education within reach. However, I want to consider a different manifestation of adaptation as it inhibits autonomy within the utilitarian contexts of higher education and widening participation policies, and this requires a return to Elster’s fox.

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Elster distinguishes adaptive preferences from other forms of preference change including character planning (1983, pp. 111–124). This is not learning to live with adversity but the upgrading of accessible options. If adaptive preference formation locks the individual into her resignation, the intentional transformation generated by deliberate character planning can liberate her from oppressive aspects of her own identity and give her greater freedom to navigate her circumstances. The central concern here, though, is that these options should be accessible (that is, they are not unrealistic aspirations such as Nussbaum’s occasional desire to fly like a bird). This can, in the context of widening participation, lead the foxy student to raise her aspirations: character planning here frees her from the oppressive resignation that had led her to misperceive higher education as too difficult and so the change of preferences takes place because it has been upgraded as accessible. There is, however, the problem of constrained character planning or resignation to severely reduced circumstances which can also, paradoxically, be manifest in habituation to higher aspirations. Aesop and Elster are both concerned with foxes that misperceive sweet grapes as sour. But what if the grapes really are sour and their foxes misperceive them as sweet? Bringing this concern back to higher education, what if it cannot deliver the economic outcomes it holds out? What if, seduced by the utilitarian arguments framing the normative drive to widen participation, the aspiring student is not possessed of the innate abilities to achieve her higher educational goals? She may then fall into the gap that distinguishes “formal freedom and real ability, the latter but not the former implying that a desire to perform the action in question will in fact be realized” (op. cit., p. 126). The prospective student may be coerced into believing that higher education is not only desirable in general but desirable for her even though she may not have the necessary resources to properly capitalise upon it. Under such circumstances, she may adapt her preferences so that, for example, she comes to prefer participating in higher education (falsely believing it to be a better means of satisfying her preferences) to other options that may well serve her better. Within Elster’s typology, her preference change is significantly different from the others crying “sour grapes!” because she had an intentional role in her character transformation which indicates character planning (upgrading her accessible options) rather than adaptive preference formation (downgrading the inaccessible options). Yet her character planning is constrained. Like those crying “sour grapes!” her change of preferences is predicated on self-deceit – here, that she can succeed in higher education when it is clear that she cannot in any meaningful way. That is, pace Nussbaum, what had seemed merely improbable because of its social construction is, for such a student, impossible. Such circumstances predicate three closely related problems when considering the utilitarian arguments of widening participation. The first is that, whilst she may obtain other benefits from her determination to participate in higher education, she fails to satisfy the utilitarian criteria of achieving good via its economic proxy. The second is that other indices of the good she has obtained may not be recognised. The third is that she may nonetheless believe she has achieved this good even though she may have obtained greater economic benefit from non-participation

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(Watts & Bridges, 2006). The first of these issues adumbrates the sacrifice demanded by utilitarianism. The second illustrates the shortcomings of utilitarian metrics. The third highlights the problem of adaptive preferences (albeit adaptive preferences masquerading as character planning) deformed by the normative argumentation of widening participation policies located within the hyperreality of higher education.

7.5 The Language of Capability Widening participation policies framed by utilitarian arguments are intended to maximise the greatest good of the greatest number as measured by economic metrics serving as proxies for preference satisfaction. The additional support offered to those on the margins of higher education’s society is an acknowledgement of the more sinister (Ricoeur, 1996) aspects of utilitarianism. However, the attempt to superimpose the social justice dimensions of government policy upon the economic imperative generates a hyperreality which conceals the scandal that widening participation policies do not necessarily serve the interests of those they target. Whilst the government, pressing its economic agenda, seeks more and more participation, widening participation students are more and more unlikely to see the benefits held out to them. The utilitarian basis of these policies can therefore not only lead to the injustice of causing prospective students to reach beyond their grasp, but it can also obscure the complex benefits higher education has to offer. The social justice argument does not, within the government’s utilitarian framework, fully articulate with the economic imperative of widening participation policies. The problem is that utilitarianism, sustained here by the government’s economic arguments, cannot properly serve both good and Mammon. On the one hand, it highlights the capricious nature of a state seeking to maximise the greatest good of the greatest number at the expense of those on the margins of society. On the other, it suggests that the government’s chosen metric is not able to account for the complexities of individual well-being. A different language is, therefore, needed to strike a better balance between the two policy concerns. Whether informed by the ‘crude’ commodities approach which uses measures such as income as a proxy for development or the “more sophisticated version” found in Rawls’ theory of justice (Crocker, 1992, pp. 590, 592), the current widening participation agenda remains limited by a narrow set of metrics that overlook the “fundamental diversity of human beings” (Sen, 1992, p. 8). In moving away from these other approaches to human development, the capability approach obliges us to address “the extent to which people have the opportunity to achieve outcomes that they value and have reason to value” (Sen, 1999, p. 291) and therefore offers a language that can comprehend both the economic and social justice drivers behind this agenda. Government policies conceptualise higher education as a commodity or resource for enhancing national and individual income and, therefore, of promoting social justice through the redistribution of higher education’s benefits. However, whilst

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commodities and resources are important because people “cannot be at all, let alone have well-being or a good life, without having certain goods” (Crocker, 1992, p. 590, original emphasis), Sen argues that a person’s standard of living “must be directly a matter of the life one leads rather than of the resources and means one has to lead a life” (1987, p. 16) because commodities are not good in themselves but for what they can do for people. That people are not possessed of equal abilities to make equal use of the same commodities can be illustrated here by the continuing failure of widening participation policies to successfully redistribute the benefits of higher education: individuals from widening participation backgrounds may benefit from their higher education, but they are likely to remain relatively disadvantaged when compared with their more middle-class peers who retain greater cultural capital (Watts, 2007). As the superficial equality of commodities, such as the possession of higher education qualifications, “can still leave much inequality in our ability to do what we would value doing” (Sen, 1992, p. 20) command over commodities can only be a means to the end of well-being. Sen argues that the focus has to be “on the freedoms generated by commodities, rather than on the commodities seen on their own” (1999, p. 74), and this requires a language that articulates with this argument. Sen began developing the capability approach as a critique of mainstream welfare economics and utilitarianism, arguing that evaluations of equality should not be based only on information about people’s sense of happiness, their desire fulfilment or their command of primary goods (which can include commodities and other goods, particularly in the Rawlsian sense, such as self-respect and liberty) because these do not necessarily lead to increased well-being. Well-being can include being well off (that is, possessing income, commodities, command over primary goods and so on) but it is more than this. For Sen, the notion of well-being is located in the freedom to choose from “the range of options a person has in deciding what kind of life to lead” (Drèze & Sen, 1995, p. 11). To enable this focus on freedom, Sen makes use of the concepts of “functionings” and “capabilities” where: a “functioning is an achievement” (1987, p. 36) that “reflects the various things a person may value doing or being” (1999, p. 75); and “a capability is the ability to achieve” (1987, p. 36) and “is thus a kind of freedom. . . the freedom to achieve various lifestyles” (1999, p. 75). A person’s functionings and capabilities are closely linked but significantly different: functionings are “in a sense, more directly related to living conditions, since they are different aspects of living conditions” whilst capabilities are “notions of freedom in the positive sense: what real opportunities you have regarding the life you may lead” (1987, p. 36, original emphasis). The difference between functionings and capabilities, then, is the difference between the realised and the potential, between outcome and opportunity, and between achievement and the freedom to achieve. To assess well-being we must consider the alternative combinations of functionings from which a person can choose and so we must examine “the extent to which people have the opportunity to achieve outcomes that they value and have reason to value” (1999, p. 291, emphasis added). These options form a person’s capability set. Capability – or the capability to function – represents the various combinations of functionings that a person can achieve and choose from. It reflects “a person’s

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freedom to lead one type of life or another [and her] freedom to choose from possible livings” (1992, p. 40). A person’s well-being, then, is to be found in her freedom to choose from different possible functionings, different beings and doings and different ways of living life. Thus, whilst it can address both the economic and social justice concerns of governments, it is not constrained by them. This focus on freedom rather than achievement may seem perverse (Walker, 2006; Watts, 2006b) because it necessarily entails the possibility that people may choose apparently disadvantageous ways of living such as opting out of higher education when they could obtain qualifications and skills that (according to the government) articulate with better employment prospects. However, it is this freedom to choose a seemingly disadvantageous way of life that is at the heart of the capability approach’s concern with justice. The utilitarian framework of current widening participation policies, enmeshed in a hyperreality of their own making, may well propel students towards a higher education they cannot – at least within the government’s metrics of economic advantage – benefit from. That is, it may well cause prospective students to adapt their preferences and aspire to that which is beyond them. The capability approach addresses the adaptation of preferences by taking into account what the individual would do under different circumstances – or, in Sen’s words, what she would do if she controlled the levers of power (1992, pp. 64–69). The premise of this counterfactuality – what would the case have been if the facts were different? – demands “different ways of imagining the world [that] are contrary to what we know the facts actually to be” (Everitt & Fisher, 1995, p. 35). Would the working class student choose not to go to university if she were middle class? Whereas Elster’s historical analyses take into account what individuals did prefer but therefore overlook other forms of adaptation, the counterfactual analyses of the capability approach address what they would prefer and can therefore account for them. Counterfactuals, though, are “philosophically puzzling” and if, in general, “we are trying to elucidate a concept. . . it is not a good idea to invoke counterfactual assumptions. This would be seeking to elucidate the less obscure by the more obscure” (ibid.). However, capability analyses sidestep this epistemological puzzle by making interpersonal comparisons. Thus, within this context of higher education preferences, rather than just asking whether the individual would have more freedom to make valued choices if she were middle class, the analyses would seek to address the question by comparing her freedoms with those of another individual from the middle class. There is, though, the risk here of excluding information pertinent to the individual’s well-being by closing down the evaluative spaces the capability approach seeks to open up. Even though education has a special place in it, the capability approach is no more concerned with the acquisition of academic commodities than it is any other commodity (Watts, 2006b): its concern is with the substantive freedoms individuals have to choose and lead lives they value and have reason to value. Whilst not going to higher education may close down some opportunities, it does not close down all opportunities and may open others up. Therefore, unless the well-being assessment specifically focuses on accessing higher education (e.g. Walker, 2006; Watts, 2007) to ask whether an individual would have more freedoms if she were middle class

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is to ask the wrong counterfactual question. There is certainly plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that she would have more freedom to enter higher education if she were middle class; but the capability focus of the assessment demands an answer to the question: Why higher education? Comin – as well as the policy makers – addresses this when suggesting that higher education should be considered a basic capability (2007): it has potential economic and social justice benefits. However, these instrumental benefits can be obtained without a higher education (Wolf, 2002; Watts & Bridges, 2006), so the assessment would need to ask whether the individual would have more or less freedom to achieve these and other functionings through higher education than through other means. This demands a more subtle framework than that needed to address the simple question of whether individuals from the middle classes are more advantaged when accessing higher education (the answer to which is a resounding “Yes, of course they are!”). The current language of education policy, enmeshed in a hyperreality of its own making, does not enable that subtlety. The language of the capability approach, though, does and it therefore offers a means for educational researchers to address the shortcomings of government policies.

7.6 Conclusion As I have argued elsewhere (Watts, 2006b; Watts & Bridges, 2006) the capability approach provides a framework for arguing against the individual’s participation in higher education, and it can therefore be seen as a challenge to the government’s widening participation agenda. However, that agenda is restricted by the language and arguments of utilitarianism. Trying to serve both good and Mammon within these restrictions, the agenda has been lost in a hyperreality that obscures and seeks to erase the sinister implications of utilitarianism (Ricoeur, 1996). None of this is to argue against widening participation in higher education per se: my argument is with the binds that still tie it to utilitarianism because the more that agenda tries to struggle within those restrictions, the tighter those binds become. If the social justice aspects of widening participation policies are to have something approaching parity with the economic aspects – which, given the ongoing failure of those economic arguments to achieve their stated outcomes, may go further towards the achievement of the greater economic good – there is a need for a different language that can comprehend the complexities utilitarianism overlooks. Whilst the capability approach cannot comprehensively address those complexities, it can, nonetheless, usefully add to the languages of educational policies and research.

References Archer, A., Hutchings, M., & Ross, A. (2003). Higher education and social class: Issues of exclusion and inclusion. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Barnett, R., & Standish, P. (2003). Higher education and the university. In N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith, & P. Standish (Eds.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of education (pp. 215–233). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

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Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death. London: Sage. Baudrillard, J. (1998). The consumer society. London: Sage. Bentham, J. (1789/1996). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation (J. Burns & H. Hart, Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brennan, J., & Shah, T. (2003). Access to what? Converting educational opportunity into employment opportunity. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Comin, F. (2007). Concepts of development: The role of education. In D. Bridges, P. Juceviˇcien˙e, R. Juceviˇcius, T. McLaughlin, & J. Stankeviˇci¯ut˙e (Eds.), Higher education and national development (pp. 87–102). London: Routledge. Crocker, D. (1992). Functioning and capability: The foundations of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s development ethic. Political Theory, 20(4), 584–612. Dearing, R. (1997). Higher education in the learning society: Report of the national committee of inquiry into higher education. London: HMSO. DfES, Department of Education and Skills. (2003). The future of higher education, cm 5735. Norwich: HMSO. Drèze, J., & Sen, A. (1995). India: Economic development and social opportunity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elster, J. (1983). Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Everitt, N., & Fisher, A. (1995). Modern epistemology: A new introduction. New York: McGrawHill. HEFCE, Higher Education Funding Council for England. (2001). The wider benefits of higher education, report 01/46. Bristol: HEFCE. Griffin, J. (1986). Well-being: Its meaning, measurement and moral importance. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Keep, E., & Mayhew, K. (2004). The economic and distributional implications of current policies on higher education. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 20(2), 298–314. Mill, J. S. (1859/1987). On Liberty. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mill, J. S. (1861/2001). Utilitarianism. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Newby, H. (2004). Doing widening participation: Social inequality and access to higher education. The Colin Ball Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Bradford. Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reay, D., David, M., & Ball, S. (2005). Degrees of choice: Social class, race and gender in higher education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Ricoeur, P. (1996). Love and justice (D. Pellauer, Trans.). In R. Kearney (Ed.), Paul Ricoeur: The hermeneutics of action. London: Sage. Robbins, L. (1963). Higher education. Report of the committee appointed by the Prime Minister under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins, 1961–1963, Cmd 2154. London: HMSO. Sen, A. (1987). The standard of living. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. (1992). Inequality reexamined. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Teschl, M., & Comin, F. (2005). Adaptive preferences and capabilities: Some preliminary conceptual explorations. Review of Social Economy, 63(2), 229–247. Walker, M. (2006). Higher education pedagogies. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Walker, M., & Unterhalter, E. (Eds.). (2007). Amartya Sen’s capability approach and social justice in education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Watts, M. (2006a). Disproportionate sacrifices: Ricoeur’s theories of justice and the widening participation agenda for higher education in the UK. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 40(3), 301–312. Watts, M. (2006b). What is wrong with widening participation in higher education. In J. Satterthwaite, W. Martin, & L. Roberts (Eds.), Discourse, resistance and identity formation (pp. 169–184). Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Watts, M. (2007). Capability, identity and access to elite universities. Prospero, 13(3), 22–33.

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Watts, M. (2008). Higher education and hyperreality. In P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: The educationalization of social problems (pp. 141–155). Dordrecht: Springer. Watts, M., & Bridges, D. (2006). The value of non-participation in higher education. Journal of Education Policy, 21(3), 267–290. Wolf, A. (2002). Does education matter? Myths and education and economic growth. London: Penguin.

Chapter 8

A Rhetoric for Educational Research Lynda Stone

[Rhetoric] has no single discipline: it covers every bit of human communication, good and bad, every academic field, every corner of our lives. See Wayne C. Booth (2004a) Failure to examine the rhetorical practices of education limits the understanding of processes in play and the possibilities for education. See Richard Edwards, Katherine Nicoll, Nicky Solomon and Robin Usher (2004, p. 11)

8.1 Introduction In the spirit of rhetoric, this chapter offers a rhetoric for educational research. One direction within which to explore the thematic of this volume on language in education is into the realm of rhetoric. Its tradition within western thought is as old as history; its standard story is not new, although from near-ignominy there is a relatively recent resurgence of interest and scholarship. Also potentially significant is a rhetorical orientation toward contemporary educational theory, specifically applicable to educational research explored herein. The chapter is organized into two parts. The first part, background, provides framing for the second, more developed part, exemplar. Following introduction, sections of part one overview two conceptions of rhetoric, the first named “extension” as a general orientation toward inquiry and the second named “tradition” as a brief history of the classical formulation. A brief section makes connection to philosophy of education. Sections of part two begin with consideration of educational research and to rhetoric of science. Then the concept of ethos is overviewed as a lead into a special contribution from the late American

L. Stone (B) School of Education, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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literary theorist, Wayne Booth (whose work is referenced throughout). The last substantive section applies Booth’s concept of the implied author – and its ethos – to an exemplary document from educational research. As just indicated, the chapter entails special use of Booth. Before turning to the background, an introduction is appropriate. The late Wayne C. Booth (1921–2005) spent the majority of his academic career at the University of Chicago where he had earned his doctorate. There he was not only an active scholar but also a popular teacher and administrator. Among his many accomplishments were his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his becoming President of the Modern Language Association. Notably influenced by his teachers of the Chicago School and by the New Critics,1 significantly in his writing he moved beyond these origins (see Antczak, 1995a, pp. 3–4). His own influence is typically compared to that of Kenneth Burke and Hayden White for attention to rhetoric across disciplines. For the present purposes and an education audience, Booth’s writings are useful precisely because he was, in his own admission, a “generalist” (Booth, 2004a, p. 494). As such he was concerned with communication, especially with regard to the rhetorical structure and role of narrative. His obituary in the New York Times says thus: “[Booth] knew that human conversation mainly consists of telling stories and passing judgments on them. . . . [Overall he] saw that his ideas had practical applications, and could lead towards a greater ethical understanding of life itself.”2 He published nearly a dozen major books, several anthologies, and numerous articles. Two examples of his obvious stature are a festschrift from 1995 and a dedication to him of a Blackwell ‘companion’ collection from 2004 (Antczak, 1995b; Jost & Olmsted, 2004). The Rhetoric of Fiction (Fiction) (1961/1983, 1983) and other pertinent texts from and about him are used in what follows.3

8.2 Part I: Background 8.2.1 Rhetoric of Inquiry As Booth writes in the final entry of the Blackwell companion, there has been an “amazing explosion” of books about and utilizing rhetoric in the last 50 years (Booth, 2004a, p. 494). From the introduction, these concern specifics within the tradition as well as its extension, related and in turn as part of a broad intellectual change – a historical-philosophical recontextualization of the ‘twin pillars’ of rationality, philosophy, and science in western thought. Written in nearly novelistic style, philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s wonderful Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Cosmopolis) (1990) posits this: [Since the mid-twentieth century, the] ‘changes of mind’ that were characteristic of the 17th century’s turn from humanism to rationalism are. . . being reversed. The ‘modern’ focus on the written, the universal, the general, and the timeless. . . is being broadened to include once again. . . [from roots in earlier centuries] the oral, the particular, the local, and the timely. (Toulmin, 1990, p. 186)

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This broadening has two possible futures for Toulmin, one of acceptance, novelty, and hope and another of denial, nostalgia, and trepidation. Twenty years later, these choices still remain. Within his reconsideration, Toulmin does mention the rise of the contemporary interest in rhetoric in which his own work on argument from mid-century decades plays an important role.4 An illustration of the larger extension is an edited collection, The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language, Argument and Scholarship in Public Affairs, edited by John Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald McCloskey, published in 1987.5 Employing their own rhetoric of persuasion, the editors offer a description of what is being intellectually unsettled. [The] scientismic way makes the reader subject to hierarchies of proof or method that intimidate and exclude most people—even if we grant, in principle, the subject may aspire to personal expertise. Those who really know benefit from privileged and usually undiscussable observations, compelling because scientific techniques certify that findings must mirror nature. Capable of opinion only, the humble subject must submit to the rigors of Method in order to ascend the heights of Truth. (Nelson, Megill, & McCloskey, 1987a, p. 6, emphasis in original)

The editors submit a set of propositions that they believe comprises a movement. First, all inquiries incorporate a relationship of what is said to how it is; language and text matter in specific interaction. Second all employ rhetorical devices, “metaphors, invocations of authority, appeals to audience” (p. 4). Third, while rhetoric in general is common to all, every intellectual field has its own specific formulations. This means, fourth, that all inquiries are selective, and engaged within historical and other contextual specifics. Fifth, the movement claims that these commonalities are indicative of an intellectual, theoretical conversation in which all can participate: gone are necessary hierarchies. Sixth, there is very significant result for an emerging conceptual relationship of epistemology, ethics and politics in which the latter may indeed come to dominate inquiry. Seventh, authority for this more general stance includes a list of philosophical ‘members’. Among them, beginning in the nineteenth century and each in his own way, are Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Rorty, Cavell, Foucault, Derrida, and Habermas.6 Finally, one must note that both commonalities and differences exist over what constitutes rhetoric between the broad movement and the contemporary tradition of rhetoric. As the next section documents, the more technical ‘tradition’ also thrives even if specific definition is elusive. Given the path of this chapter, two larger connections of rhetoric are in order, to literary interpretation and to science studies, the latter taken up in the second part. The first provides useful comparison to what a rhetorical ‘foundation’ looks like. Critic Paul Hernadi.7 asserts commonality of poetry, drama, and fiction with all other forms of discourse “[as] semantically overdetermined, historically situated. . .[projects] of. . . . figurative storytelling. . . and imaginative worldmaking” (Hernadi, 1987, pp. 270, 264). For him, interpretation then becomes complementary processes of communication constituted of rhetoric and hermeneutics. He writes of their bases,

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One is that no product of spoken or written expression can function as a means of communication unless it is comprehended as such. The other is that. . . comprehension becomes available for public inspection. . . [as it must] only when it has been transformed into. . . [an audible or visible] product of expression” (pp. 264–265). All products, further, have three elements, authorial message, historically conditions seepage, and mimetic image, in other words, symbolic, indexical, and iconic signification. In Harnadi’s schema, three theoretical approaches result. One is understanding, re-construction of the author’s communicative intent; two is over-standing, de-construction of the text’s symptomatic façade; and three is standing-in-for, construction of personally or socially relevant appropriation of the text (closely paraphrased, p. 269). Hernadi’s contribution connects to key features of Booth’s work on fiction to follow. In sum, while interpretation is not considered again, its home in text, its venue of discourse, and its character as openness align it with the comprehensive conception of rhetoric of the chapter.

8.2.2 Tradition Intellectual histories of rhetoric reveal that a definition of the field, at the least, is confusing and complex, and at the most, nonconsensual. Early definitions include this from Aristotle: “[Rhetoric] is the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle cited in Booth, 2004b, p. 4).8 A useful, modern definition is found in James Herrick’s introductory text, A History and Theory of Rhetoric: “The art of rhetoric. . .[is] the systemic study and intentional practice of effective symbolic expression” (Herrick, 1997/2005, p. 7). This is closer to, but still distinct from, the broadest conception in Booth’s epigraph above, of rhetoric as integral to all communication – and what operates for him, its effects and effectiveness. In rhetoric’s evolving meaning, between persuasion and communication, one often finds references to deliberation and argumentation. Importantly, a common epistemological orientation is shared across the tradition: This is a focus on the practical, the political, the concrete, and the situational, and increasingly across time rhetoric as inventive, flexible, and suggestive (think Toulmin here). Across time too, rhetoric has had sibling relationships to law, politics, religion, literature, and other arts. Most notably the history of rhetoric relates it to philosophy. The dominant story of the development of western thought begins with the Greeks and Plato and tells of winners and losers in a battle for political, intellectual, and educational power. Given Plato’s ‘victory,’ philosophy, and with it mathematics and logic took command, and rhetoric and all manner of the arts did not. The story means that for the latter, secondclass citizenship if not outright dismissal has continued nearly to this day. Actually, two aspects are more complicated: first, a tradition of rhetoric and rhetorically based inquiry has always existed, and second, there are historic moments in which the countertradition itself assumed dominance.

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As brief elaboration, now imagine the story of rhetoric in specific chronologically identified chapters in which there is central plot, and various settings, characters, and themes. Most significantly the story is ‘alternative’ – one with villains that for many by today are heroes. Further, most must admit that focus on the negative connotations, themselves especially strong since the centuries of Bacon and Locke, are gone. Rhetoric is no longer only conceived as irresponsible use of language, ‘mere rhetoric,’ ‘winning at all costs,’ ‘politics for its own sake.’ No longer is it deception, emotional manipulation, flattery, or demagoguery. The tradition has emerged as a positive tale in its own right. In the story, a first hero is Aristotle, who, in Rhetoric, was critical of both the Sophist views of Isocrates and others, and of his teacher. Herrick emphasizes that he “avoided the moralizing tone of. . . [Plato in an approach that] was both pragmatic and scientific” (Herrick, 1997/2005, p. 74).9 During the Roman heyday, heroes included Cicero, Quintilian, and Longinus, whose writings appear generally more influenced by the Sophists than the Platonists. A subsequent significant period is that of medieval Christendom; although not in his own day, best known are St. Augustine’s writings about rhetoric. Herein classical rhetoric was appropriated for different theological (philosophical) needs. One significant change is that rhetoric as broad, classical public oratory is largely transformed into writing for more narrow-focused educational use. One interesting hero is Martianus Capella whose ‘best-selling’ text, Book of Rhetoric, broke from the connection to Christianity: In it appears an etching of a new heroine, Rhetorica, waving her sword over sciences and arts (Booth, 2004b, p. 5).10 She is returned to below. One last premodern era must be noted; this is the Renaissance. Described in Cosmopolis, western humanism of that time was fundamentally literary, artistic, and rhetorical. In the period of “greatest influence,” Herrick summarizes thus: Rhetoric flourished “as a method of instruction,. . . an avenue to personal refinement, a means of managing the intricacies of civic and commercial interests, and a critical tool for. . . [scholarly] study” (Herrick, 1997/2005, pp. 147, 148). Looking backward, what is particularly important is the work of Italian Humanists within the tradition of rhetoric – but also the influence of other national contributors such as English playwrights and poets. Three particular heroes were Lorenzo Villa, Francesco Petrarca – Petrarch – and Pico della Mirandola – Pico. One other, later Italian thinker deserves mention, Giambattista Vico. In opposing Descartes, Herrick explains, Vico argued that rhetoric, not reason, was the basis of social life, and that the growing hegemony of scientific thinking threatened to undermine the common beliefs and values. . . that provide the basis for society. Speech, especially poetic speech, provides the foundation of civilized society. (p. 176)

As intellectual history shows, following the Renaissance there was no stopping the tide of philosophy, reason, and science from the 17th century. Indeed, rhetoric has had its lowest status through most of modernity. It is only in the past few decades that a reversal is underway. One aspect, already mentioned, is that specific heroes have been resurrected such as Vico; even more important is Nietzsche from the late

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19th century. Another aspect of changed status is to suggest that across time many rhetoricians ‘masked themselves’ by not employing technical language but by writing about and using ideas from the tradition. Today many are revealing themselves. A last aspect is a return to recognition that rhetoric was central to the education of gentlemen even into the early 20th century.11 Thus, contemporary flourishing of rhetoric has occurred in the two strands of this chapter, tradition and extension. The conventional story of the resurrection of the tradition locates origin in a text from Chaim Perelman and Lucy OlbrechsTyteca entitled The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, published in French in 1958 and translated into English in 1969.12 Taking up the matter of everyday argumentation, these authors focus on ‘audience’ in a treatment that, in a different language, presages Booth on the ‘author’. Their three audiences are universal, all normal adult persons, the addressee in a dialogue, and “the subject. . . [who must] give himself reasons for. . . actions” (Herrick, citing Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 200). All three test reasonableness of arguments. As indicated above, Booth offers his own elaboration of the second strand, first by “unconscious worshippers” (Booth, 2004b, p. 34) and second by numerous publishings of “the rhetoric of x”. His claim is that there have been literally thousands in the past half century or so (ibid.). Significantly for this chapter, in his list there is no title referring specifically to professional education although two concern education, one about democratic education and the other to composition classroom pedagogy (see Antczak, 1979; Donahue & Quandahl, 1989). Moreover, he notes only one title ‘of’ philosophy, the classic text, Rhetoric of Philosophy from critic I. A. Richards, published in 1936 (Booth, 2004b, p. 37). A second volume with the same title now is available from Shai Frogel (2005).13

8.2.3 Rhetoric and Philosophy of Education Although not widely recognized in modernity, it is clear that across time rhetoric has been central to the practice of education and thus to philosophy of education. Out of classical Greece, rhetoric was one of three equal ‘paths’ of the foundation of liberal education, the trivium. The other two were grammar and logic. Roots of the trivium and of the standard categories of rhetoric are traceable to but not identical with Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion, of logos, ethos, and pathos.14 Taken up recently, rhetoric’s use for educational reform makes for strange bedfellows; the first returns to tradition and the second turns to extension. Strangeness perhaps comes from their contradictory views of education itself. In a 2007 article, “Rhetoric, Paideia and the Old Idea of a Liberal Education,” Alistair Miller calls for this: a renaissance of “the lost classical ideal of a liberal education founded on rhetoric, the very embodiment of an educational philosophy that seeks to develop practical reason or judgement together with self-knowledge” (Miller, 2007, pp. 183–184). Following careful consideration to the Aristotelian roots and evolution of rhetoric, the author poses the garnering of humane knowledge, that “become

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part of one’s self and inform daily living. . . . [as] it is the autonomous citizen able to think for him or her self that is wanted in today’s society” (pp. 196, 203).15 In contrast to a return to the classical conception, an earlier piece from Lynda Stone takes up, from above, the broad contemporary view of inquiry for philosophy of education. Given a general preoccupation with the linguistic turn, she begins with acknowledgment of an emerging influence of literary modes of inquiry for philosophy of education. Then, in turning to the possibility of rhetoric as itself a mode, the philosophical basis is writings by Paul De Man and Hans Blumenberg on the relationship of culture to text. She writes, for the first, “culture is encompassed in text. . . in contrast [for the second] culture encompasses text” (Stone, 1996, p. 413). What emerges is a ‘postmodern’ rhetorical characterization of philosophy and philosophy of education that incorporates contemporary formulations of text through adaptability, figurativity, positionality, and ethics.

8.3 Part II: Exemplar 8.3.1 Educational Research The title of this chapter incorporates educational research that is missing from the first part. Much has been written about its state in recent years especially in response to international education policy and funding through narrow notions of standardization and accountability. Taken up as the exemplar in this part is a significant ‘policy’ text from the context of the USA; its stance toward research, and its discourse, is emblematic of similar viewpoints across the west. In a recent article, worth quoting at length from the US context, D. C. Phillips summarizes what he names as the contemporary position: [The] focus of educational research ought to be the rigorous establishing of the causal efficacy of educational programmes or treatments (and, along with this, the accurate measurement of effect sizes), and there is renewed determination (supported by government funding) to weed out sloppy research. If things come to pass, the expectation is that educational policy making could be based on what has been shown to work—as (supposedly) happens in public health and medical spheres. (Phillips, 2005, pp. 583–584, citing Mosteller and Boruch)16

As is now well-known, this focus has resulted in a near-hegemony of the use of experimental and quasi-experimental research designs, known as the ‘gold standard.’ What the position itself misses, dismisses, and indeed denies are both a complex history and condition of contemporary educational research and, as well, decades of broader intellectual change. Current educational research consists of a strong qualitative tradition as well as one quantitative. Use of mixed methods appears also on the rise, primarily, however, of a less-important addition of a qualitative component to the ‘standard.’ What are also present are alternative models from the social sciences, and even the humanities, that have emerged from theory – and previous ‘research

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results’ – that extend beyond US traditions. In effect, in the standard position, so much philosophical and other attention across relatively recent years to the ‘posts’ seems never to have occurred at all: no feminism, no voices from the margins, and virtually no attention to any nonempirical work. This limiting of ‘what works’ and what counts as research has received significant attention by educational philosophers and historians (see, e.g., Smeyers & Depaepe, 2003, 2006; Bridges & Smith, 2007). One statement of the result is this: [Clearly] we should accept that science. . . is a cultural practice. . . . Maybe the time has gone to have general discussions about paradigms, about method,. . . about understanding and explanation, about why we are right and they are wrong, or to celebrate the eternal truths. . . . [about education science]. . . . [Instead to be concerned] with specific problems in particular areas seems extremely fruitful. (Smeyers & Depaepe, 2006, p. 4, some paraphrasing added)

This attention points at least to the recontextualization posited by Toulimin. It also entails its own rhetoric, connected to rhetoric of science. 8.3.1.1 Rhetoric of Science Across international borders, education has typically desired to be a science. Its standard orientation is embedded in a traditional view of scientific research that has itself denied two theoretical developments. One is the emergence of the field of ‘science studies’ and the other is writings on rhetoric of science. Science studies took root in the latter decades of the past century, in part due to a history of the west. Science was to ‘solve all social problems’, but this was not to be as the continued presence of war, environmental deterioration, poverty, and the like demonstrates. Response came to be known as the ‘science wars’ along with the emergence of ‘science studies’. Inception that incorporates a contemporary rhetoric is often identified with the appearance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 (Kuhn, 1970; see Fish, 1990/1995, pp. 210–212). Ironically Kuhn became a ‘hero’ even as his argument largely denies scientific discovery and revolution by single individuals. What is also ironic is that he never intended a sociologically influenced strong program that questioned the basic materiality and empirical nature of science. In the introduction to The Science Studies Reader, Mario Biagioli writes, “Science studies does not define its subject matter because, in some significant way, its subject matter comes prepackaged is. . . . [As] the set of scientists’ practices, institutions, and so on. . . . [the question is not] what science is but rather how science works” (Biagioli, 1999, p. xii). Across a very wide range of interests and critiques, Richard Rorty may want to see science as merely another conversation but, even with her fictional cyborgs, Donna Haraway wants more (see Rorty, 1987; Haraway, 1991). The movement of science studies links to that of rhetoric of inquiry, to rhetoric as extension, from part one of the chapter. Moreover, just as with the tradition above, so is there a literature of ‘rhetoric of science’ (one of Booth’s x categories). Before turning to this sub-tradition, it is important to acknowledge that theorists of science have themselves made use of rhetorical devices. These writings might be termed

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use of ‘weak rhetoric’ as contrasted with ‘strong’; this distinction is returned to in the exemplar below. As an example, Lawrence Prelli reports that Robert Merton wrote about a set of norms in modern science in the 1930s and 1940s that decades later resulted in counterresponse (Prelli, 1989b). In the initial set (read theory) are universalism, communality, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, originality, and humility; in the response set (read rhetoric) are particularism, solitariness, interestedness, and organized dogmatism. (Prelli, 1989b, pp. 48–49; also see Merton, 1973; Mitroff & Mason, 1981). Foreshadowing discussion to come, rhetorical themes in this weak use function in the service of scientific knowledge, not of ethos itself but of logos. At the same time that scientists like Merton are using rhetorical concepts, ‘rhetoric of science’ emerges (e.g., Simons, 1989; Prelli, 1989a; Gaonkar, 1997). Among the chief contributors is Alan Gross, who is recommended by Booth in an essay on rhetoric, science, and religion (Booth, 2004/2006). Two versions of his position are found in The Rhetoric of Science (Gross, 1990) and in its updated version, Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies. Assuming the stance from above, Gross prefaces, “[rhetorically there is] the world as meant by science” (Gross, 1990, p. 4). His own task is to use “the categories of classical rhetoric. . . [to] explain the observable features of scientific texts” (p. 6). A first step for Gross concerns scientific discovery; importantly he replaces discovery with ‘invention.’ This is because the former is an honorific carrying certainty, privilege, and authority, while the latter “captures the historically contingent and radically uncertain character of all scientific claims, even the most successful” (p. 7). A second step embeds science in a set of traditional concepts of rhetoric: First, these are statis, defining of situations for rhetorical persuasion; and second, ‘common and special topics,’ the former that include the genres of speech, for fact, policy, and persons and the latter that include observation, prediction, and mathematization. In his schema, the three interrelated modes of argument from above, logos, ethos, and pathos, as well as arrangement and style are also integral. Foreshadowing Booth, Gross writes of ethos as “the persuasive effect of authority and embodied values” (Gross, 2006, p. 26). For him a dialectic functions, on the one hand the training of scientists and its social sanctions and, on the other hand, innovation. Authority is incorporated in such components as apprenticeship arrangements and publication relationships; values arise internally but also in larger contexts of science and society. 8.3.1.2 Ethos In this essay thus far, Wayne Booth has been mentioned occasionally and his influence represented throughout. Before consideration of his significant contribution, attention to a central concept of ethos is useful. In this chapter, the term has appeared with the other two classic modes of persuasion, logos and pathos to which it is often interrelated. It has also been defined in a preliminary way from its Greek root as ‘character’; a second definition is ‘custom.’ What is apparent are basic dimensions as either or both individual and collective: character that is individual but

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can contribute to collectives and custom that is collective but applied to, adopted by individuals. In commonsense terms today, ethos refers typically to basic, shared features, better ‘spirit’, of groups, organizations, institutions, and cultures reflecting and representing shared values. This contemporary sense has clear connection to classical meaning. ‘Character’ comes from Aristotle who posited that it might be “‘the most effective means of persuasion’. . . . particularly important. . . ‘where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided’” (Jasinski, 2001, p. 229). Ethos is a means, attributed to a speaker who traditionally possesses good sense, good moral sense, and goodwill (ibid.). What is particularly important is that this characterization is not just manifest in the speaker but must be manifest in the speech – in the text. The two cannot be divorced. Another way to conceive of ethos relates to integrity, of the person and of the person and the text. One result is that integrity also concerns the effect of the text, since the aim of ethos is understanding over misunderstanding, ethical activity over unethical. Ethos also refers to authority and to identification. In the tradition of rhetoric, certain truth may not be the aim but rather is persuasion for good aims. In working toward good aims, one cannot claim end, and neither perfectability nor certainty. In his account, James Jasinski cited above, identifies central theoretical debates over ethos in recent times. They include, matter of ‘the self’ in various formulations of ethos; question of whether there can be ethos without identity; value of relating ethos specifically to modern notions of discourse and ethics; possibility of whether ethos can be ‘measured’ (Jasinski, 2001, p. 230); and, finally, general contemporary re-thinking that updates its ‘nature.’ One interesting development in the late 20th century has been to posit “source credibility” as a synonym for ethos, this perceived by audience as attributes of advocate intention, expertness, and trustworthiness (ibid.). Finally, recall the description of rhetoric as relating what is said to how it is said. The point is that another dimension is present in all communication that is not included but surely implied in specific language use. Rhetoric entails form, formal, and artistic qualities, an aesthetic dimension. One might posit that given the emphasis on text in modern theory, all representations are inherently rhetorical and aesthetic. From this discussion, the specific transition to Booth is that for him ‘ethos’ is applications of rhetoric to literature, especially fiction, even as he does not always name the concept.

8.3.1.3 Booth As indicated in the brief biography above, Booth’s entry to rhetoric is through literary criticism, and specifically, in his attention to fiction. In his own field, rhetoric was so little valued that there was strong objection to the term in the title of his now classic book Fiction. Over years, he studied and extended his own notion of rhetoric and arrived at the very broad conception in the chapter’s epigraph. Employing Booth’s own idiom, Walter Jost posits a general stance developed across over five decades

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of inquiry: Booth’s purpose is always to search for common intellectual ground, aiming for what he names as “warrantable assent” utilizing ‘listening-rhetoric’ to arrive at agreement (Jost, 2006, p. 5). His own ‘logos,’ Jost adds, is best named “character-as-textual-activities” that surely includes in technical and more broad senses ‘character-as-active’ writer and reader (see p. 3). Booth arrived also at a set of more technical distinctions. First, a rhetor is anyone saying or writing something to produce an audience effect (Booth, 2004b, p. 9), as distinct from a rhetorician who studies effective communication. Second, rhetoric is not rhetrickery, the potentially harmful and indeed unethical processes of miscommunication and misunderstanding (p. 11). Third, rhetoric relates to different kinds of reality, across three from one permanent and unchanging to one created and changing. The point concerns effects that are ‘real.’ Fourth, these are related to sub-kinds, attempts to alter the future, the past, and the present and the “personae of those of us who accept the new realities” (p. 17). What specifically results is ethos or character of “those who engage with it” (pp. 17–18). Further, fifth, this ethos is itself embedded in distinct domains, communities with practices and standards of rhetoric that are identifiably distinct from one another. Domains range from those huge to miniscule, culture to ‘language’ of a particular journal. In her very recent history of rhetoric, Wendy Olmsted devotes half a chapter (of ten) to Booth and his text Fiction. She writes that the book “redefined literary studies for decades by using distinctions. . . [from rhetoric] to explore heretofore unknown facts and arguments about how novels can be read more inventively and with more fidelity to their communicative possibilities” (Olmsted, 2006, p. 113). The book was his first and most famous, taking nearly a decade to write. In a late autobiographical essay, Booth describes his route to writing the work, especially how he came to rhetoric after training in ‘English’.17 He summarizes its specific purpose thus: “[It is] a celebration of how all writers of fiction and all readers seek to achieve a rhetorical bonding. The authors do not just ‘make their readers,’ they create a communion between an implied author and an implied reader” (Booth, 2004a, p. 500). It is significant, to repeat, that Booth sees rhetorical effects as fundamentally ethical and bonding as “trustful understanding about inquiry” (pp. 496, 502) Olmsted offers a summary judgment of Booth’s specific contribution. By describing and refuting “traditional universal rules” of the relationship of author and reader of novels, he overturns “critical commonplaces” (Olmsted, 2006, p. 117). Three of these are author detachment, novelistic realism, and audience objectivity. She concludes, “more adequate guides to interpretation. . . [that mark] his work as rhetorically inventive” (ibid.) result from his conceptualizing and analyses. Employing the traditional rhetorical category from above, Booth’s ‘invention’ is constituted of adaptability, openendedness, and sensitivity to differences found in particular novels. This, in effect, undermines fictional universality, central to modern literature. As Jost adds, overall Booth’s universality instead resides in the potentials of communication, in knowing and understanding from “a nondogmatic, nonreductive variety of perspectives on the world. . . [that defer] closure on truth” (Jost, 2006, p. 7). Booth’s project is applied next in an exemplar of educational research.

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8.3.1.4 Exemplar in Educational Research Above, rhetoric has been connected to education practice, to the philosophy of education, and educational research. A 2004 text from Richard Edwards, Katherine Nicholl, Nicky Solomon, and Richard Usher offers a comprehensive connection out of the tradition with influences from various poststructuralists. Their position is that education is thoroughly persuasive, thoroughly rhetorical and thus better understood through recognition and reflection on its rhetoric. They begin: The discourse of science. . . [has] played a powerful rhetorical role in positioning education as a science, distinct from rhetoric. . . . [For] much of its history and even today, scientific discourse has itself been circumscribed by strict rules of what can be written and how it can be written. (Edwards et al., 2004, p. 5)

Based in reference to ethos, logos, and pathos, the particular focus of their study is figurative language in education usages with an emphasis on metaphors (see the latter on p. 23). Educational research, these authors assert, exhibits a ‘traditional’ rhetoric of research, of “transparent carriers of meaning reflecting the truth of the world” (p. 169). Analyses of this tradition and indeed critiques of it have focused on research as a technology comprising methods, designs, and procedures. Even conceiving of research as a social practice based in cultural contexts has often emphasized technical elements. Utilizing the metaphor of narrative, the authors report the ubiquity of “the algorithmic tale”. They cite from Donald Polkinghorne,18 the research process. . . [is] a logical and sequential series of moves where the generation of research questions leads to methodological design and implementation. Here research is represented as systematic, planned, cumulative, and progressive. . . . [Further, a certain. . . determinacy] is fabricated through the structuring of these research texts rather than found in nature. (p. 171)

Key to this story and central to the exemplar to follow is the ‘place of the author.’ Edwards, Nicholl, Solomon, and Usher offer that an absence/presence operates in which the author is ‘ostensibly absent but strangely present’. Embedded in ‘depersonification,’ references to the article, the chapter, and the paper stand in for ‘the researcher.’ This rhetoric, they conclude, “is a vital factor building and projecting the authority of the text” – and in effect claims of the research itself” (ibid.). Booth’s work extends a connection to education in his multidimensional exploration of the relationships of author and reader.19 His concept of the ‘implied author’ has special importance. In this brief consideration, the exemplar is Standards for reporting on empirical social science research in AERA publications (Standards), developed, adopted, and published by the American Educational Research Association in 2007/2008.20 The document is the result of deliberations of a task force of 10 members augmented by a review process of anonymous and public comment and AERA Council member suggestion.21 In turning to Booth, the central role of rhetoric is acknowledged as is the inherent invention of ethos. Of course, Booth’s use is especially challenging to educational research as his venue is fiction.

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Bringing forth the metaphor of story from above, now imagine a researcher and ‘author’, Dr. Rhetor (without gender specificity) – a contemporary manifestation of the medieval Rhetorica. The premise is of ‘strong’ application, out of the tradition of rhetoric; it is beyond weak themes and metaphors and is one in which ethos and ethics is inherent in text. In what follows, Booth’s ‘construct’ is set out, followed by a gloss on the AERA document. Booth’s concept of the ‘implied author’ arises from an origin that texts have authors, in spite of relatively recent theorizing announcing their death.22 Indeed the character of the author has received attention since Aristotle and no more so than with the advent of the modern novel. Various subject positions or identity formations, to employ a current idiom, with varying authority and responsibility have been described (see Reynolds, 1993). Classical embodiment has been made complex and Booth’s construction is one expression of this. For Booth, the implied author is this: distinct from the actual author (perhaps ‘writer’ to avoid confusion), the ‘scribe for the narrative,’ a ‘second-self’ that has effect on the audience. In other words it is the “air depending on the needs of particular works. . . [that] the author sets out” (Booth, 1961/1983, p. 71). It is the ‘core of choices and norms,’ the “various commitments, secret or overt. . . [that] help determine. . . [reader response]” (ibid.). Booth adds, “A great work establishes the ‘sincerity’ of its implied author, regardless of how grossly the man who created the author may belie in his other forms of conduct the values embodied in his work” (p. 75). In this conception, it is important not to confuse the implied author with the ‘flesh and blood author,’ the author as commentator who inserts ‘himself’ into the text, or any form of narrator. Not done in Fiction, in a later text, Booth does equate the implied author with ethos (Booth, 1988, pp. 128, 221), and names it “a disinterested friend” who offers a reader benefit (p. 174). Booth’s implied author becomes an implied researcher-writer in Standards. Here is his typical ethos: Dr. Rhetor is a strong ‘member’ of a tradition and seeks, in a best sense of conservation, to maintain its norms: its ethos is his ethos. He appreciates ‘standards’ “[as providing] guidance about the kinds of information essential to understanding both the nature of the research and the importance of the results.”23 He prides himself that his standards are connected to ‘social science’ and that those of his ‘association’ are potentially useful for other fields. He recognizes and undoubtedly will use his current standards for the “training and preparation of. . . [future] researchers.” He values “sufficiency” of evidence in research and “transparency” of reporting results. He accepts that “the researcher’s responsibility. . . [is] to show the reader that the report can be trusted.” To do this, he applauds the use of a standard logic that organizes problem formulation, design, evidence, measurement and classification, analysis and interpretation, and generalization. While acknowledging that other forms of research are available for educational inquiry, his are fundamentally ‘empirical,’ quantitative and qualitative. Perhaps the most illuminative statement of Dr. Rhetor’s ethos concerns the aim of research as a “contribution to knowledge”; notably in the document the meaning of knowledge is itself assumed. In detailing sub-points this contribution can be to an “established line of theory,” new theory, practical concerns or providing

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missing information. Finally a set of terms used throughout the document is indication of ethos. In addition to the key concepts of sufficiency and transparency, these include ‘clear,’ ‘comprehensive’, ‘well-specified’, ‘unambiguous’, ‘adequate’, ‘precise’, ‘appropriate’, ‘trusted’, and ‘explicit’. Along with content terminology, Dr. Rhetor reveals his ethos though form. While “not intended to define or determine the format for writing empirical work,” nonetheless the literal and analytic form of the Standards might well be assumed for research itself. Indeed quantitative studies are often formulated in the exact order of the substantive categories of the document and qualitative studies are assumed to incorporate these elements. Following introduction and preamble, the seven sections of the document begin with a general statement often based in a definition. Each is then elaborated with numbered sub-points, and some of these are broken down further. The idea moreover is that ‘standards’ are always amenable to analytic breakdown – and arguably to reduction. Given the terms above, finally, the general impression of the Standards is that they are clearly and comprehensively (and so forth) set out – to repeat, just as proper, empirical educational research should be. In a radical move, when Dr. Rhetor is envisioned as an author of fiction and research as a story, a more nuanced ethos appears. First, each study is particular, each story its own even as standardization and generalization are sought. Second, within any particular study there is no great degree of control, no matter the tradition. Third, there is no neutrality when choice concerns problem, method, and the like; partisanship, even intimacy, is typical of research rather than disinterest. Fourth, meaning of research is inherently social as it occurs within a larger historical context. Fifth, ethics extends in research beyond the relationship of researcher to the researched subjects or phenomena: it is embedded not only in the process but also in the report content and form. This implied author, this ethos, brings to the fore a story that is submerged yet present in all research. It thus calls into question a dominant desire for certainty. Since all research is rhetorical, humility in persuasion, tentativeness in results, and ethically based understanding become paramount.

8.4 Conclusion This chapter has posed a rhetoric for educational research out of a basic claim that all communication entails a persuasive dimension typically through language use and effect. It has been organized as a series of moves that explicate and combine two basic understandings of rhetoric. One is as general extension into and across all human sense-making and the other is as tradition through technical application. These have appeared in two basic parts of the chapter, background and exemplar. The rhetorical focus has in one sense been ironic as the tradition posits persuasion through specific situations and cases; this text, with a historicist presence, is itself a case of philosophical rhetoric.

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While attention to irony is beyond this paper and its conclusion, two other rhetorical aspects endemic to all inquiry are its purview. One is ethos and the other in conclusion is ethics. Across this paper, debt is owed primarily to American literary critic Wayne Booth. As the ‘generalist’ he names himself, his unique contribution is to combine the two understandings or strands of rhetoric. His notion of an applied author, an ethos, accomplishes three purposes: It underscores ‘authorial presence’ in all text. It affirms that text, and inquiry, is always selective, composed of choices and commitments. It points to the ethical dimension of all communication in and through its very language content and form. The introduction of the implied researcher, Dr. Rhetor, thus has something important to say for educational research. In sum, there is no research that does not carry the interests and values of an ethos. Further, it is inherently and intrinsically ethical in all of its dimensions; ethics becomes thus the aim of education, an aim that perhaps replaces epistemology in educational research.

Notes 1. The Chicago School of criticism had its heyday in the mid-decades of the last century. Members were neo-Aristotelian, emphasizing the structures of literature, for instance plot and character of the novel. Related in time and by some interests, New Critics ‘read closely’ other elements such as figurative language. Both emphasized the intrinsic unity and value of works. Both are often incorporated into the movement of New Criticism. 2. Professor Wayne Booth, TimesOnLine, October 14, 2005, retrieved from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article578209.ece, May, 2008. 3. In addition to other sources, a very useful essay on Booth is from Walter Jost (2006), cited in what follows. 4. See Toulmin (1958). 5. Not utilized in this chapter, a very pertinent piece on rhetoric in educational research is from Charles Brazerman on the behaviorist basis of the nearly universally used Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association; see Brazerman (1987). See in general Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey (1987b). 6. One commentator writes that “rhetoric returns as philosophy” (Crosswhite, 2004, p. 379). 7. See also Hernadi (1989). 8. If the history of rhetoric is ‘a footnote to Aristotle’, it is important to remember that when even critical he was a student of Plato. 9. Herrick utilizes contemporary interpretation from George Kennedy; see (1963, 1998). 10. See images of Rhetorica at http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=rhetori ca+pictures&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1 &ct=title 11. One wonders if the content of the American college ‘capstone course’ in moral philosophy was more rhetoric than philosophy, especially given its minister-teachers. 12. See text, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958/1969). 13. An earlier text was from Scottish philosopher George Campbell in 1776. 14. Ethos is described below. Most simply logos comes from the verb to speak and refers to rationality, to reason and logic. Pathos refers to experience arousing emotion, often sympathy or pity. 15. This is a comprehensive and useful article set primarily within the context of British education.

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16. They are editors of a text of ‘evidence’ published by the Brookings Institution. Acknowledging rhetoric, and in support of his view of research influenced by post-positivist philosophy of science, Phillips also cites the Nelson, Megill and McCloskey volume. His view is a weak statement. 17. English departments in the USA have programs or courses in ‘Rhetoric and Composition’ that remains a step child to ‘literature’ and ‘theory.’ 18. See Polkinghorne (1997). 19. See Booth’s delineations, 1983, pp. 428-431. A useful source overall is Booth, The Essential Wayne Booth (2006), published posthumously. 20. Standards for reporting on empirical social science research on AERA publications, retrieved from http://www.aera.net/uploadedFiles/Opportunities/ StandardsforReportingEmpiricalSocialScience_PDF.pdf, April 2008. 21. I am assuming a process similar to one by a later task force in 2008–2009 on ‘humanitiesbased’ research of which I am a member. 22. The origin of continental discussion is from Roland Barthes (1967/1977, 1978). Author function in this tradition has theoretical overlap with Booth’s view. 23. Quoted words and phrases are from the Standards document online. Acknowledgments This chapter is a revision of a paper delivered at the meeting of the Research Community, Fund of Scientific Research-Vlaanderen. Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education, Evaluation and Evolution of the Criteria for Educational Research, Leuven, Belgium, May, 2008. Thanks to participants for stimulating questions especially to David Bridges who rightly asked for clarification.

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Nelson, J., Megill, A., & McCloskey, D. (1987a). Rhetoric of inquiry. In J. Nelson, A. Megill, D. McCloskey (Eds.), The rhetoric of the human sciences: Language, argument and scholarship in public affairs (pp. 3–18). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nelson, J., Megill, A., & McCloskey, D. (Eds.). (1987b). The rhetoric of the human sciences: Language, argument and scholarship in public affairs (pp. 3–18). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Olmsted, W. (2006). Rhetoric: An historical introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1958/1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise in argumentation (J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver, Trans.). Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Phillips, D. (2005). The contested nature of empirical educational research (and why philosophy of education offers little help). Journal of Philosophy of Education, 39(4), 577–597. Polkinghorne, D. (1997). Reporting qualitative research as practice. In W. Tierney & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: Re-framing the narrative voice (pp. 3–21). New York: State University of New York Press. Prelli, L. (1989a). A rhetoric of science: Inventing scientific discourse. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Prelli, L. (1989b). The rhetorical construction of scientific discourse. In H. Simons (Ed.), Rhetoric in the human sciences (pp. 48–68). London: Sage. Professor Wayne Booth. (2005, October 14). TimesOnLine. Retrieved May, 2008, from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article578209.ece Reynolds, N. (1993). Ethos as location: New sites for understanding discursive authority. Rhetoric Review, 11(2), 325–338. Richards, J. (2008). Rhetoric. London: Routledge. Rorty, R. (1987). Science as solidarity. In J. Nelson, A. Megill, & D. McCloskey (Eds.), The rhetoric of the human sciences: Language, argument and scholarship in public affairs (pp. 38–52). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Simons, H. (Ed.). (1989). Rhetoric in the human sciences. London: Sage. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2003). Beyond empiricism: On criteria for educational research. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Smeyers, P.„ & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2006). Educational research: Why ‘what works’ doesn’t work. Dordrecht: Springer. Stone, L. (1996). A rhetorical revolution for philosophy of education. In F. Margonis (Ed.), Philosophy of education: 1996 (pp. 412–420). Urbana: University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and Philosophy of Education Society. Toulmin, S. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity. New York: The Free Press.

Chapter 9

Arguments and Proofs About Arguments and Proofs Jean Paul Van Bendegem and Kathleen Coessens

9.1 Introduction: Rhetoric, Old and New, and Mathematics: Never the Twain Shall Meet? Both rhetoric and mathematics are ancient, elaborate and still active fields of study that cover a time span of more than two millennia. That much, they undisputedly have in common. However, in the domain of mathematics one will search in vain for traces, positive or negative, of rhetoric, and in the domain of rhetoric, although the relation between mathematics and rhetoric is often discussed, the standard claim is to deny that they are intimately related or intertwined. Moreover, things have hardly changed over two millennia. Let us present two examples, which I freely admit, present a slight bias. The first example is taken from what is commonly referred to as ‘old rhetoric’ and the second, from ‘new rhetoric’. Our first example is Institutes of Oratory the famous book by Quintilian, the Roman orator.1 (Of course, we could have picked numerous other works, but it is generally accepted that Quintilian’s book should be included in any overview of rhetoric). First it is worth noting that mathematics does not feature prominently in this book. And, second, what is said about mathematics is quite limited. The most interesting passage in regard to mathematics can be found in Chapter 10 of the first book, where two statements are put forward: (a) Mathematics, in this case basically arithmetic and geometry, is important in the court room to avoid making silly mistakes. Making a calculating error creates a very bad impression and insufficient geometrical knowledge can lead to painful and costly mistakes.2 Here mathematics is reduced to required background knowledge and, in that sense, there is surely no rhetoric of mathematics, save perhaps the rather modest rule: “Keep the number of errors as small as possible.” J.P. Van Bendegem (B) Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]

P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_9,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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(b) Occasionally mathematics does occur within an oration itself. What happens then? The following quote is quite clear on the matter: “Besides, of all proofs, the strongest are what are called geometrical demonstrations, and what does oratory make its object more indisputably than proof?” (Book 1, Chapter 10, paragraph 38, second sentence). In other words, mathematical proof is the highest standard to aim for. Both (a) and (b) show the special status of mathematics. If it intervenes, it does so with certainty and conviction – it should not be questioned. Quintillian makes it clear that there is no room for rhetorical considerations within the mathematical realm. Quite the contrary: whenever some mathematical argument enters into the discourse, for a brief moment all rhetoric can be suspended and, for a short time, clarity and transparency reign. Our second example comes from the work of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, who are credited with developing the ‘new rhetoric’. It is true that in their work ‘new’ approaches and conceptions of rhetoric are explored. However, in their account, mathematics (and this includes logic) keeps its special status. Let us consider the following excerpt: Le langage artificiel des mathématiciens fournit, depuis des siècles, à beaucoup de bons esprits, un idéal de clarté et d’univocité que les langues naturelles, moins élaborées, devraient s’efforcer d’imiter. Toute ambiguïté, toute obscurité, toute confusion sont, dans cette perspective, considérées comme des imperfections, éliminables non seulement en principe, mais encore en fait. L’univocité et la précision de ses termes feraient du langage scientifique l’instrument le meilleur pour les fonctions de démonstration et de vérification, et ce sont ces caractères que l’on voudrait imposer à tout langage.3 (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1970, pp. 174–175)

It is quite remarkable that these authors, when discussing mathematics, seem very close to Quintilian. On first inspection, the label ‘new’ does not seem to encompass the role mathematics plays in a rhetorical setting. However, it is perhaps necessary to explain why Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca remain so close to Quintilian. As it happens, one ingredient of their strategy is to establish rhetoric and argumentation theory as independent fields of research. Or, in other words, by breaking the ties between everyday reasoning/arguing and mathematical reasoning (which becomes an ideal to strive for), it follows that argumentation and rhetoric have to be studied on their own without reference to mathematics. Ironically, this view of things implies that mathematics be treated as something altogether different, as an extremely particular language game, practised by a happy few in specialised environments.

9.2 A Proof Is Always Better than an Argument, Is It Not? There is an additional phenomenon that must be mentioned. The clear-cut division between argumentation/rhetoric on the one hand and (mathematical) proof means that they are not considered equal partners. Roughly speaking, if one is given the

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choice between an argument and a (solid) proof, the latter should be preferred to the former. After all, the former can still give rise to discussion, whilst the latter, in principle, cannot. A perfect historical example of this mode of thought can be found in the development of logicism in the late 19th century, but mainly early 20th century, within the foundations of a mathematics research program. The principal contributors to this area were Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Let us set out the logicist enterprise schematically: (1) No reasonable person can doubt the basic principles of logic. Statements such as “If it rains, then it rains,” “If it is not the case that it doesn’t rain, then it rains,” and “Either it rains or it doesn’t,” cannot be doubted. After all, suppose someone were to say that she is not sure about “If it rains, then it rains,” then the only counter-question would be: what could prove the statement wrong? If a statement of the form “If A, then B” is rejected, that implies that one believes it is possible for A to occur together with not-B. But in this case, that would mean one believes that “It rains” (A) can occur together with “It does not rain” (not-B) and that is clearly absurd. (2) No reasonable person can doubt logical rules such as modus ponens – given A and “If A, then B”, B follows – as they are self-evident.4 Another way of formulating this idea is to say that the logical rules transfer the certainty of basic principles to derived statements. (3) Putting (1) and (2) together, this simply means that all of logic is as certain as it can be. (4) So far nothing specific has been said about logicism as such. The additional and bold claim is this: mathematics can be derived from logic, using the very same logical rules. If it is possible to show that all basic mathematical concepts can be derived from logic, then mathematics will thereby acquire certainty. It will become immune from doubt and mathematical principles will be irrefutable. This claim sounds so unbelievable that a short example is called for to demonstrate what is at stake. Consider natural numbers. One might think that numbers cannot be expressed in purely logical terms, but this is not correct. Take the sentence “Here are two apples.” Logically one could write down (∃x)(∃y)(A(x) & A(y) & x = y), i.e., there is an x and there is a y such that x is an apple and y is an apple, and they are not the same. However, something is missing here, as this formalization only says that there are at least two apples. This is not a problem, for it is easy to express that if a third thing here were to be an apple, then it is either x or y. Let us put this in formal terms: (∃x)(∃y)(A(x) & A(y) & x = y & (∀z)(A(z) ⊃ ((z = x) v (z = y)))). This last statement, which makes no explicit reference to numbers and merely uses logical symbols, succeeds in expressing the number two. (5) If this program proves to be successful, its implications for the sciences are enormous. Take any scientific theory T. Formalize and axiomatize T. Either the axioms are logico-mathematical statements or they are empirical statements. The rules are the rules of logic. So everything comes down to the degree

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of certainty as regards the empirical basis. A ‘classic’ example is Newtonian mechanics. As soon as one accepts statements such as “Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration” (F = m.a) then, having applied the mathematics (and having applied the underlying logic), what follows is as certain as Newton’s law itself. Formulated in negative terms, as long as a scientific theory has not reached a formal-logical status its certainty is not established at all. Many examples can be produced that support this view. However, one specific case stands out (and, if a play of words is allowed for, it should be considered an ‘exemplar’), namely the writings of Thomas Kuhn himself. It is usually claimed that Kuhn demonstrated the relativistic aspects of science and scientific practice, but the opposite is the case.5 In the second chapter of his well-known book The structure of scientific revolutions, he stresses that many social sciences should (perhaps) be thought of as being in the proto-paradigmatic phase: Excluding those fields, like mathematics and astronomy, in which the first firm paradigms date from prehistory and also those, like biochemistry, that arose by division and recombination of specialties already matured, the situations outlined above are historically typical. Though it involves my continuing to employ the unfortunate simplification that tags an extended historical episode with a single and somewhat arbitrarily chosen name (e.g., Newton or Franklin), I suggest that similar fundamental disagreements characterized, for example, the study of motion before Aristotle and of stasis before Archimedes, the study of heat before Black, of chemistry before Boyle and Boerhaave, and of historical geology before Hutton. In parts of biology—the study of heredity, for example—the first universally received paradigms are still more recent; and it remains an open question what parts of social science have yet acquired such paradigms at all. History suggests that the road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous. (Kuhn, 1962, p. 15)

To make the point using rather theatrical examples, sociology and (parts of) psychology are in a comparable situation to alchemy prior to the rise of chemistry or astrology before the rise of astronomy. In short, we note that even one of the founding fathers of the sociology of science still maintained that being mathematized is better than not being mathematized, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. Note the special status that is being attributed to mathematics.

9.3 Education and Educational Research So far, we can see that a hierarchy has been constructed that favours mathematical proof over argument/rhetoric. This hierarchy has clear implications for education. The obvious example is a mathematics curriculum that tends to focus on mathematics and nothing but mathematics (though this is not always the case6 ). Occasionally some space is reserved for historical considerations, but these too concern mainly, if not exclusively, the internal history of mathematics. Therefore, all too often, this curriculum is presented in a closed format. This means that the mathematical realm is posited as something distinct from daily life or other scientific realms. Of course, mathematics can be ‘applied’, but such a move is seen as being distinct from mathematics itself. This understanding of mathematics leaves no room for argument

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within the mathematics classroom. And, conversely, where arguments are allowed, there seems to be little room for mathematical proofs. Actually, it is important to make an additional distinction between the teacher’s and the pupil’s perspective and perception of this situation. A teacher will have undergone some form of training in mathematics and that, normally speaking, implies an adherence in some way to (something like) the logicist’s dream. He/she will believe that mathematics has eliminated discussion and inconclusive arguments from practice. The pupil does not share this background but is confronted for the first time with this particularly ‘strange’ world.7 The fact that we are able to make these claims derives from the fact that there is a scientific enterprise that takes situations of this type as its topic, namely educational research. Of course, as a scientific discipline, it will not escape the hierarchy observed earlier. So, one might expect that mathematical or mathematized treatments of problems within education are preferred to non-mathematical or non-mathematized treatments. More concretely, a statistical analysis that produces a clear set of correlations is surely far more interesting than a series of reasoned arguments. A prime example of this mode of thought can be found in the work of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). PISA uses questionnaires that allow for graded responses. Such responses can then be submitted to statistical treatment. In effect, this allows them to rank schools, countries and cultures. It is interesting that they examine literacy in more or less the same way as numeracy.8 The rough picture presented above allows us to approach the core question that interests us in this paper: does the distinction between mathematics and rhetoric as it appears within the mathematics classroom relate to the distinction as manifested in the scientific field of educational research? At first it may seem possible to map the distinction on to educational research, but this claim cannot be substantiated in a straightforward fashion. Are there any good arguments for the claim that mathematics-in-the-classroom should be best studied from the quantitative perspective and that language-in-the-classroom should be studied from the qualitative perspective? We think not, but how can we justify such a claim? Quite simply, we argue that all combinations can and do occur and, in a second move, that no claim for superiority can be upheld. A first-order classification might help here (we use the following notation9 : “C” stands for classroom, “EC” for educational research, “QN” for quantitative, “QL” for qualitative and the expression “(C: QN)” means that in the classroom a course is given, the nature of which is quantitative, thus, for example, mathematics or physics): • (C:QN) and (EC:QN): The PISA corresponds perfectly to this case. A statistical

analysis is performed to judge capacities such as mathematical reasoning. • (C:QL) and (EC:QN): Here too PISA is a fine example, as literacy is studied in

exactly the same way, namely, using statistical techniques. • (C:QL) and (EC:QL): What we have in mind here, are, for example, studies of

the societal and cultural impact of particular choices in regard to the presentation of literature to pupils, where the focus can be on the implicit cultural values that are transmitted along the way.10

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• (C:QN) and (EC:QL): This case might sound rather surprising (at least, we hope

it does to a certain extent). Is there a way that a course such as mathematics can be studied qualitatively? We believe the answer to be yes, as we will demonstrate in the next section.

9.4 The Dream That Was Never Realized Let us briefly return to the logicist’s dream and announce the bad news: the dream turned into a nightmare. Neither Frege’s arguments in Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik nor Russell’s and Whitehead’s work in The Principia Mathematica achieved their intended goals. Inconsistencies and paradoxes ruined the projects.11 Of course, one can argue that what failed was the attempt to derive mathematics from logic. But could one not have a more modest dream: to model mathematics on logic? In other words, is it possible to formalize and axiomatize the whole of mathematics, so that the only important matter is the truth or plausibility of axioms? As the rules of logic also structure mathematical theory, certainty will spread throughout the system. For that matter, why not adopt an even more modest position and leave the axioms to be freely chosen. The only problem with the more modest position is that it will be necessary to introduce non-mathematical considerations concerning the chosen axioms. This will involve moving beyond what was previously taken to be an internal mathematical matter, so as to introduce a degree of uncertainty originating from the ‘outside’ world. It must be reported that all previous attempts to make such a move met with philosophical criticism. But, perhaps more importantly, it became increasingly clear that these formal-axiomatic attempts have a difficult relation with actual mathematics. We realize that this last sentence must sound strange: surely mathematics is all about axiomatic thinking? So where could we find a difference or differences? Two possibilities must be mentioned: (1) the axiomatic approach misses out large parts of actual mathematical practice and (2) in particular it does not capture all relevant features of the practice of handling proofs themselves. We will illustrate (2) first, and then say a few things about (1).

9.4.1 How Does a Proof Work? Consider this example. You are presented with the following problem. Today is day 1 and you receive 1 euro. Tomorrow, day 2, you receive 1/2 euro. Day 3, you get 1/3 euro (we make a slight abstraction here, assuming that the sum of 0.33333. . . euro actually exists.12 ) Generally speaking, on the n-th day, 1/n euro is given to you. Assume finally that this process continues until the end of time, which, in this case, is infinitely far away.13 How rich will you be? I guess that most, if not all, nonmathematicians will wonder if the term rich should not be put between quotation marks, as this is not a successful road towards wealth. And yet, as mathematicians

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know, at the end of time, one will be filthy rich, since one will have an infinite amount of money. If the mathematician is allowed to step forward and explain what is going on, then this is the most likely story she will present to a non-mathematical audience. The question that is being asked here is: what is the sum of S = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + ... + 1/n + ..., because that is the total amount you will receive in the end. Now look at the following curious phenomenon: ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

1 + 1/2 > 1/2 1/3 + 1/4 > 1/4 + 1/4 = 1/2 1/5 + 1/6 + 1/7 + 1/8 > 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 = 1/2. 1/9 + 1/10 + 1/11 + 1/12 + 1/13 + 1/14 + 1/15 + 1/16 > 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 = 1/2,

and so on. In other words, by correctly grouping the terms in S, one sees that S > 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 + ..., is counted an infinite number of times, hence S = infinite. No doubt all mathematicians will end the proof with QED. But has the statement actually been proved? Let me rephrase that question in a more precise manner: is this proof convincing to everyone who goes through the process, if ‘everyone’ includes mathematicians and non-mathematicians14 alike? The answer seems to be “no”. Without a flicker of doubt, the mathematician will remark that roughly speaking the proof looks OK, but that it needs cleaning-up a bit here and there. To name but one sloppy element in the proof: there are conditions to be satisfied when grouping terms in a series (which happen to be satisfied in this particular case) that should be mentioned in a decent version of the proof. It is clear, however, that the mathematician will be convinced by this proof. The mere fact that he or she requires a ‘clean-up’ indicates that there is something to be cleaned-up in the first place and what else can that be but a proof? How about the non-mathematician? There are several straightforward reasons why this proof may not convince non-mathematicians. Such reasons do not relate to a simple lack of elementary mathematical competencies involving numbers, addition, fractions, comparing numbers and so forth: (a) There is an obvious contradiction or, at least, conflict between what the theorem says and our relevant intuitions: how is it possible to become infinitely rich by getting less every day. It simply does not make any sense.15 (b) Reasoning involving infinities connects very badly, if at all, with everyday reasoning. This is reflected in the fact, sustained by personal teaching experience spanning 25 years (in which I taught, on average, about 800 students per year)

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that, if one is clever enough, one can prove almost anything one likes.16 Given this bad connection, it follows that one does not have straightforward standards to judge and evaluate such forms of reasoning. Hence they appear to a large extent to be arbitrary. This is what produces distrust. (c) Related to the previous point is the observation that the proof does not explain why the terms of the series S are grouped in this particular way. Note that the mathematician will reply that a proof is not supposed to do any such thing, which is correct, but is perceived differently by the non-mathematician. The non-mathematician may suspect a form of ‘backwards reasoning’: start from what you want to obtain and construct the proof so that this result is obtained. Put differently, one may not be convinced that there could not be a different grouping that shows S to be convergent.17 In a curious way, the mathematician now seems to occupy a position that resembles a heavily biased form of sophistry, in which he/she will be prepared to defend any position whatsoever. These three reasons give a first insight into why this beautiful mathematical proof ceases to be convincing in particular settings. It seems obvious that right from the start, a certain (set of) practice(s) has been deemed acceptable. Such practices introduce a particular set of assumptions. Unless one shares these assumptions (that accompany such practices), a proof such as the one recorded above carries little or no persuasive power. Let us try to make a few elements more explicit: (a) A symbol introduced in the course of a proof maintains its meaning throughout the proof. At the same time, it is perfectly acceptable, if within a proof a subproof starts up, which uses the same symbol but with a different meaning. We therefore witness a subtle play of signs, symbols and meanings. (b) Steps in a proof that are considered evident are contracted into a single step. Let us illustrate this point straightaway: have another look at the proof and notice that we used the obviously non-mathematical expression “and so on”. To replace this expression by a (more) correct proof would make the proof quite elaborate and complex, thereby less transparent and, in fact, quite paradoxical! Therefore it is accepted as part and parcel of mathematical practice. The extreme variations on this theme are ‘trivial’ and “proof left to the reader”. (c) Related to (b) is the fact that for every mathematical domain there exists a set of statements, not axioms, that can be used without proof, because this set of statements represents a shared background knowledge. Also related to (b) are situations in which one is challenged to produce a proof but sees immediately how this should be done. If, for example, one is working in number theory, then there is no need to separately prove that the sum of two odd numbers is even (although a full proof is not trivial at all18 ). On the basis of these few characteristics, it seems quite acceptable to conclude that mathematical texts, proofs in particular, are very specific texts, aimed at a very specific public, namely mathematicians (and often a subset of this set). Such proofs

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have specific properties that are not reducible to purely formal aspects. This last statement is rather easy to check. Take any mathematical manual or textbook. The first chapter comes very close to the formal(ist)/logicist ideal: all steps in proofs are explicitly mentioned and everything is presented as transparently as possible. Here, only formal characteristics seem to be at work. But, as we move through the chapters the distance between real mathematical text and formal ideal increases. The reason why this happens is straightforward. As mentioned earlier: if all steps are written out in full, then the proof length increases exponentially.19 Consequently, one is simply forced to ‘summarize’ proofs. Note that there is not a singular way of achieving this, and therefore choices have to be made. In addition, these summaries need to be ‘glued’ together and the binding of texts becomes crucially important. A useful analogy can be drawn with a cookery book. Imagine a book that might be written for absolute beginners. Such a book describes all the stages of cooking in full and explicit detail. For example, the writer even attempts to provide different cooking instructions for different ovens. Well, such books do not exist. Instead real cookery books provide summaries (“Light a fire” applies to all ovens). What determines the quality of the book is precisely the balance between what is left out and what remains. Otherwise a single instruction should do the trick: “Prepare dish” or “Recipe left to the cook”. This comparison is useful as mathematical proofs are often seen as recipes. So what goes for recipes holds for proofs.

9.4.2 How Concepts Are Created Let us persist for a brief moment, with the cooking analogy. Even if you happen to be very proficient at using cookery books and are capable of producing dishes that perfectly match the photographs to perfection, this does not mean that you are able to create new dishes. Of course, this requires separate training, but that just goes to prove that the cookery book on its own does not suffice if one is to become a good cook. In other words, cookery books do not tell the whole story about cookery. The same thing can be said for mathematics. Of course, the analogy only takes us so far. Obviously, the search for mathematical proofs is rather a matter involving different elements, many of which are of a non-mathematical nature. Let us briefly discuss one example. It is not a deep mathematical problem, rather a puzzle, but it will serve our purpose very nicely. Suppose that on a table there are five coins in the following order: H T H T H, where H is heads and T is tails. You are allowed to perform one operation only: take two adjacent coins and flip them over. Challenge: is it possible to reach the situation: T T T T T? The answer is no, but Why is this the case? Of course, you could try all possible moves and see that the desired result never occurs. But, instead, you might introduce the following concept: given a particular arrangement X of the coins, define P(X) as the product resulting from replacing H with +1 and T with –1. So P(H T H T H) = (+1).(–1).(+1).(–1).(+1) = +1. Convince yourself that flipping over two coins does not change the value of the product. Hence if an end situation is to be reachable, it must have the same value as the original situation. However, P(T T T T T) = –1. Therefore, it is not reachable.

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In this simple example, a concept was introduced (the product of an arrangement) that solves the problem almost immediately. But why should one choose this concept and not another? Are there any other concepts that could do the job equally well? Can there be such a thing as ‘concept generation’? In this particular case, the answer might be a shy “yes”. What we did with this example was to make use of a basic principle: given a situation S and an operation P applied to S, P(S), look for properties that remain invariant or unchanged.20 Let us summarize by returning to the point made at the end of Section 9.3. Not only is it possible to study mathematics from a non-mathematical perspective, it is actually necessary to do so. We must take this on board if we want to have a more or less complete picture of what it is mathematicians do when they are doing mathematics. This still leaves us with one important problem to deal with, announced almost en passant at the end of Section 9.3: what about the superiority claim? After all, it is not because we claim that mathematics can be studied from a non-mathematical perspective that mathematics thereby loses its special status as a source of reliable, certain knowledge. If we are not careful, we might even risk getting trapped in a paradox: if mathematics cannot deliver the required certainty, why do so many mathematicians and some non-mathematicians alike continue to believe it nevertheless does so. Are they all mistaken? Are they afraid to accept the bad news? Surely, those answers are too easy. Something else must be at stake.

9.5 The Importance of Being Stylish In an attempt to answer the above conundrum, we take a step back in time to the philosophy of the Signific Movement, a group that was at its peak in the first quarter of the 20th century. There are a number of parallels to be drawn between the work of this movement and the logical empiricism of the Wiener Kreis. However, there are just as many differences as shown by Gerrit Mannoury, who argues that ordinary language functions in a way that is analogous to mathematical language. This creates a continuum with ordinary, everyday language on one side and mathematical and logical languages on the other. The movement from one side to the other requires ‘language-steps’21 : All language means used by members of a society can be divided up into language steps that differ gradually from one another. This occurs on the basis of regularities related to the use and, above all, to the interconnections and resulting stability of the meaning of signs and speech acts. With every step these regularities become more important; in parallel run a stepwise social differentiation and stability of meaning. The resulting language steps serve specific communicative aims and the formulation of specific contents; furthermore they shape the social relations between individuals, who, while communicating, use a particular language step. (Schmitz, 1990, p. 352, our translation)

At first sight what is put forward here seems relatively trivial – the argument presented in the above quotation is generally accepted in socio-linguistics today. After all, Schmitz simply seems to be saying that everyone speaks ordinary language, whereas mathematical language is only used by a very select subgroup in society

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(and simultaneously serves as a means of identification). This would be true, if it were the only claim being made in the above quotation. However, something else is going on that relates to the stability of meaning. If meaning is stable, then this allows for greater clarity and less ambiguity. In its turn this implies that full mutual understanding would involve the elimination of all ambiguities. This would result in resting on a higher language step, an idea that implies social differentiation. In conclusion, perfect mutual understanding can only occur in very select, very small groups, which are preferably isolated from the rest of society. It is obvious that such a view goes in the opposite direction to any attempts to globally spread a language freed from ambiguities. No attempt is being made to promote a new ‘universal’ language. For the Significs, any such project is doomed from the outset.22 So what guarantees this stability of meaning? We argue that this guarantee takes the form of an intricate network of mainly implicit, occasionally explicit practices that ensure that a particular text is recognized, read and interpreted as a mathematical proof. It is crucial to repeat the point that these practices often have little to do with formal correctness. In most cases, there is little or no doubt about the proof’s status as a proof (the proof will show that the mathematical statement is indeed the case). Moving away from concerns regarding formal correctness, we want to consider the importance of the power of persuasion (how ‘well’ something is done) to the issue at hand. We feel that the word ‘style’ captures what is at stake here. Note that the concept of style reduces the distance between ‘ordinary’ non-mathematical arguments (debates and discussions) and mathematical proofs.23 We think that it is therefore clear that mathematicians are not wrong in thinking that their activities have a special status. Of course they create certainty (at least as far as other mathematicians are concerned). However, if an explanation is to be produced as to why mathematics is so special, then this must relate to shared practices rather than any intrinsic property of mathematical knowledge itself. This goes to show that, although the status of mathematics might be special, it does not warrant the belief that it is superior to other forms of reasoning and arguing.24

9.6 Avoiding the Slippery Slope This final section briefly examines the other end of the spectrum. There is a certain danger of becoming too enthusiastic and thus ceasing to find any distinction anymore between what mathematical proofs are all about and what arguing, reasoning, discussing and debating involve. In fact, the thought experiment that follows merely serves the purpose of indicating the difficulty not so much of making distinctions but of keeping them separate. The experiment aims to show that the distinction quantitative-qualitative is a complex matter. Here is the thought experiment. Suppose you are told that a mathematician is studying a particular phenomenon and trying to construct a model for it. Her efforts have resulted in the following model:

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• Given is a set M and a relation R defined over M, i.e., R is a subset of the cartesian

product M × M,

• The relation R satisfies the following properties:

◦ (totality) For two members m and m , m different from m , either Rmm or Rm m holds, ◦ (irreflexivity) For all members m of M, Rmm is not the case (the relation does not hold between an element and itself), ◦ (transitivity) For any three members m, m , m of M, if Rmm’ and Rm m hold, then Rmm holds In addition, the mathematician notes that, given this model, it is possible to define a function f from the set M to the real interval [0, 1], such that f(m) > f(m ) if Rmm . In that sense the elements of m can be linearly ordered by the function f. It is obvious that all kinds of interesting theorems can be proved about this structure (M, R). For example, it is obvious that R is not symmetrical, for suppose that there are m and m in M, such that Rmm and Rm m hold, then by transitivity, we would have Rmm and that contradicts the irreflexivity. To show that the function classifies the elements of M on a linear scale is a direct consequence of the totality property. Since we know that either Rmm or Rm m holds, this means that either f(m) > f(m ) or f(m ) > f(m), since f(m ) = f(m) cannot occur. Consequently, we have a linear order. Hence it is possible to speak of the smallest, min, and the largest element, max, of M under the function f. Suppose now that you are asked the question – and this is the thought experiment – what phenomenon is being modelled here? We assume that all kinds of answers will be produced – a set of items on a table that are ordered according to size, a set of measurements of some process or other, an economic situation where f is to be seen as a utility function, etc. However, we assume that the following answer is not likely to be supplied: M is the set of persons present at this conference and R is the relation “is far better equipped to produce strange counterexamples to plausible statements than”, then it is obvious that the model is applicable and therefore, yes, there is a function f that orders us linearly in terms of the specified relation R. And so the theorem shows that there is someone among us who is optimally equipped and someone who . . . Why use this thought experiment? On the one hand, it illustrates that the distinction between what can be mathematized and what cannot is a delicate matter. The message of the experiment is that, as soon as you can speak of a set of items M, be they what they may, and a set of relations R1 , R2 , . . ., Rn over elements of M, then you have the basic material to construct mathematical models M = (M, R1 , R2 , . . ., Rn ). It therefore becomes difficult to think something up that utterly ‘resists’ mathematization (we admit that there is a provocative aspect to the boldness with which we put forward this claim). On the other hand, argumentations and proofs serve different purposes. It is not because an argument can be transformed into a proof and a proof into an argument that one can replace the other in all circumstances. Rather the problem will be deciding whether or not (within a particular context) an ‘option’

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should be taken for arguments or for proofs. The above model is particularly well suited to determining who is the smartest. However, it brings nothing to the question of why we are interested in measuring this phenomenon in the first place.

9.7 Looking Ahead If the above arguments (admittedly not much proof has been delivered) have any force, the next problem concerns how arguments and proofs interact in a given context. Our view is that in some situations arguments will have a greater impact than proofs and vice versa. So, how can we decide what to do in a particular setting? We must recognise that occasions might arise where mathematical proof is rejected in favour of argumentation, something that must sound pretty strange to many a philosopher and mathematician. In short, we only tried to show that “you can count on that” is what it is, an argument and not a proof.

Notes 1. I have used an on-line edition, to be found at: http://honeyl.public.iastate.edu/ quintilian/index.html 2. Here is Quintilian (paragraphs 39–41): “39. Geometry often, moreover, by demonstration, proves what is apparently true to be false. This is also done with respect to numbers, by means of certain figures that they call pseudographs, which we were accustomed to play with when we were boys. But there are other questions of a higher nature. For who would not believe the one who asserts the following proposition: ‘Of whatever places the boundary lines measure the same length, of those places the areas also, which are contained by those lines, must necessarily be equal?’ 40. But this proposition is fallacious, for it makes a vast difference what figure the boundary lines may form, and historians, who have thought that the dimensions of islands are sufficiently indicated by the space traversed in sailing round them, have been justly censured by geometricians. 41. ‘ For the nearer to perfection any figure is, the greater is its capacity, and if the boundary line, accordingly, shall form a circle, which of all plane figures is the most perfect, it will embrace a larger area than if it shall form a square of equal circumference. Squares, again, contain more than triangles of equal circuit, and triangles themselves contain more when their sides are equal than when they are unequal.’ ” 3. “The artificial language of mathematics has, for centuries, presented to many fine minds, an ideal of clarity and univocity that less developed natural languages should do their best to imitate. All ambiguity, all opacity, all confusion are, from this perspective, seen as imperfections, to be eliminated not merely in principle, but also in fact. The univocity and precision of its terms turn the scientific language into the best instrument for demonstrations and verifications, and these are the characteristics one would like to see imposed on any language.” (our translation) 4. We are familiar with the beautiful and amusing critique by Lewis Carroll of the lack of justification for such rules. See Carroll (1895). Achilles claims that MP can be justified by the rule “If you have A and you have ‘If A, then B’, and you accept that if you have A and you have ‘If A, then B’, then B follows, then obviously B follows”. Call this rule MP∗ . What could justify this rule? Yes, a rule MP∗∗ and a regressus looms in the background. 5. Which, by the way, explains, we think, why the first edition of the Structure was published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science series, the logical empiricist project par excellence. See Van Bendegem (2003) for some background.

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6. Some of the claims made in this section refer, in the first instance, to the Belgian-Flemish context, and we rely here on the excellent work done by Karen François. See her contributions in François and Van Bendegem (2007). 7. Surely one of the most famous papers on this topic is a paper by Karl Menger, “Why Johnny hates math”, published in 1956. We will not summarize the paper here, but restrict ourselves to one small example. How is a pupil to master the idea that in the equation “ax2 + bx + c = 0”, a, b, c and x are all unknowns, but in a sense ‘different’ unknowns. A, b and c are supposed to be given, so they are specific numbers and x is the quantity to be found. Confusion only becomes greater when one is asked to consider, for example, that all equations of that take a form whereby a is not equal to zero. In short, and we will return to this in this paper, handling symbols presupposes a set of implicit practices without which no sense can be made of the symbols. Otherwise it is impossible to explain why the following is both right and wrong: 16/64 can be simplified by eliminating the 6, leaving 1/4 and indeed 16/64 = 1/4. Simply ask yourself for what numbers the following equation holds: (10.x + y)/ (10.y + z) = x/z. 8. Browse through the technical report of PISA 2003, http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/49/ 60/35188570.pdf to have an excellent idea of what we mean. Texts that have to be studied by the pupils are split into continuous texts and non-continuous texts. The former are evaluated according to five cognitive dimensions: (1) retrieving information, (2) forming a broad general understanding, (3) developing an interpretation, (4) reflecting on and evaluating the content of a text and (5) reflecting on and evaluating the form of a text. In addition, it is worth noting that one type of continuous text is labelled “Argumentation”, meaning: “The type of text that presents propositions as to the relationship between concepts, or other propositions. Argumentative texts often answer ‘why’ questions. Another important sub-classification of argumentative texts is persuasive texts” (from http://www.pisa.oecd.org/ dataoecd/46/14/33694881.pdf page 104). 9. We assume that the reader is wondering what the additional value can be of this semiformalized presentation. We will briefly return to this problem at the end of this paper, but here we wish to remark that the problem is an old one. It was previously noted by, amongst others, Carl Gustav Hempel. 10. We do not include specific examples at this point as we assume that participants at the conference will provide countless examples. 11. Russell’s paradox is one of the most famous examples of this. Consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, so R = {A: A ∈ / A}. Question: what about R itself? If R ∈ R, then it satisfies the defining property, so R ∈ / R. But if R ∈ / R, then it clearly satisfies the defining property and so R ∈ R. 12. This seemingly innocent phrase merits a paper of its own. 13. See footnote 12. 14. The negative description ‘non-mathematician’ is meant to be as neutral as possible. We object to the use of the expression ‘layperson’, as it carries too many religious connotations, including a hierarchical relation between layperson and expert. That being said, ‘non-mathematician’ is not a success either. 15. This observation is supported by the fact that in mathematics courses the harmonic series is often presented as a fine case to show that a series S = a1 + a2 + . . . + an + . . ., S need not be convergent if the condition an → 0, for n going to infinity, is satisfied. So, it is assumed that students might think otherwise. 16. A typical reaction is that the student spontaneously presents a clearly invalid argument that is believed to correspond to a correct form of reasoning, such as: “I fit in my pyjamas, my pyjamas fit in my suitcase, hence I fit in my suitcase”, hence demonstrating that everything can be proven correct (being of a friendly disposition, one does not point out immediately the self-refuting nature of this line of reasoning). As it happens, it does take time to convince a student that formal logic is the tool par excellence to show why the argument is indeed invalid. One has to suppose that the relation ‘fits in’ is transitive which, as the example makes clear, is obviously not the case.

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17. In a way this is of course correct: for all we know, the theory of convergence and divergence of series may well turn out to be inconsistent and then obviously anything is provable. That, however, is not what the non-mathematician has in mind. 18. Suppose you are challenged to produce a proof. What would it look like? Something like this, I imagine: an odd number can be written as 2n+1. So, given 2n+1 and 2m+1, their sum = (2n+1) + (2m+1) = 2(n+m) + 2 = 2(n+m+1), which is an even number. However a critical spirit will not be satisfied because she is left with the following questions: (a) why does an odd number always have the form 2n+1?, (b) why is it alright to move from (2n+1) + (2m+1) to 2(n+m+1)? There is a very subtle play going on with brackets, associativity and commutativity: (2n+1) + (2m+1) = 2n+ (1+(2m+1)) = 2n+ (1+(1+2m)) = 2n+((1+1)+2m) = 2n+(2+2m) = 2n+(2m+2) = (2n+2m)+2 = 2(n+m) + 2 = 2(n+m+1). Note that in the summary proof above only the underlined statement has been mentioned, (c) why, if an even number is represented as 2k, is it correct to conclude that 2(n+m+1) is also an even number? After all, I have to be certain that, for every term n+m+1, there is a k, such that k = n+m+1. This is not trivial at all, because the question is related to the closure of addition. Perhaps one is inclined to think that this is “much ado about nothing”, but there are plenty of alternative arithmetical structures where one of these properties does not hold and the proof does not carry through. Consequently, it is a good thing that the critical spirit is at work here. 19. Let us consider a rather amusing but at the same time entirely convincing example. The Bourbaki attempted to rewrite mathematics in a clear and explicit formal manner. Nevertheless, they had to use summarized proofs when things became sufficiently complex. At one particular moment in the treatises, the number 1 is defined, and the authors mention the fact that its definition could be written out in full, but that this would consist of more than twenty thousand symbols. In a curious paper Mathias (2002) the author performs the actual calculation for the number of symbols needed and the answer is (exactly!): 4.523.659.424.929, a number rather bigger than twenty thousand. 20. One particular form of invariance is symmetry, hence its importance in mathematics and, by extension, in mathematized sciences such as physics. 21. I quote from the excellent historical survey, Schmitz (1990), as it still stands on its own as a presentation of Signific thinking. Apart from Mannoury, the most prominent members were the author and philosopher Frederik van Eeden and the mathematician-mystic L. E. J. Brouwer (at least for some time). Mannoury corresponded with Otto Neurath, one of the core members of the Wiener Kreis. This also establishes an immediate connection with the work of Shahid Rahman. See, for example, the introduction to the first volume in the LEUS series, Rahman, Gabbay, Symons, and Van Bendegem (2004). 22. Cf. Van Bendegem (2004) for more details on the failed attempts to find such a universal language. 23. Another strong argument in this respect is the importance given by mathematicians to the concept of mathematical beauty. Some writers try to express this beauty using mathematics, the most notorious example being Birkhoff (1961). This is not merely ‘silly’. After all, mathematicians operate within their own private world. Instead, mathematical beauty is a concept that guides mathematical activities. To explain what this means, most proofs that mathematicians judge beautiful are proofs that can be generalized. Such proofs do not merely prove the statement under consideration, but make it clear that a host of other statements can now be proved as well. 24. For a recent analysis along somewhat similar lines, see Heinz (2000) and, for a historical treatment, Netz (1999).

References Birkhoff, G. D. (1961). Mathematics of aesthetics. In J. R. Newman (Ed.), The world of mathematics (Vol. IV, pp. 2185–2195). London: George Allen and Unwin. Carroll, L. (1895). What the tortoise said to Achilles. Mind, 4, 278–280.

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François, K., & Van Bendegem, J. P. (Eds.). (2007). Philosophical dimensions in mathematics education. New York: Springer. (Mathematics Education Library 42) Grattan-Guinness, I. (2000). The search for mathematical roots, 1870–1940. Logics, set theories and the foundations of mathematics from Cantor through Russell to Gödel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heinz, B. (2000). Die Innenwelt der Mathematik. Zur Kultur und Praxis einer beweisenden Disziplin. New York: Springer. Kuhn, T. (1962, postscript 1969). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mathias, A. R. D. (2002). A term of length 4.523.659.424.929. Synthese, 133(1–2), 75–86. Menger, K. (1956). Why Johnny hates math. The Mathematics Teacher, 49, 578–584. Netz, R. (1999). The shaping of deduction in Greek mathematics. A study in cognitive history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1970). Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhétorique. Brussels: Éditions de l’ULB. Rahman, S., Gabbay, D., Symons J., & Van Bendegem, J. P. (Eds.). (2004). Logic, epistemology and the unity of science (LEUS) (Vol. 1). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Schmitz, W. H. (1990). De Hollandse Significa. Een reconstructie van de geschiedenis van 1892 tot 1926 [The Dutch Significs. A reconstruction of its history from 1892 to 1926]. Assen: Van Gorcum. Van Bendegem, J. P. (2003). Draaien in cirkels of de relativiteit van funderingen (Turning round in circles or the relativity of foundations). In J. Stuy, J. Van Bellingen, & M. Vandenbossche (Eds.), De precisie van het lezen. Liber Amicorum Maurice Weyembergh (pp. 137–148). Brussels: VUBPRESS. Van Bendegem, J. P.(2004). Why do so many search so desperately for a universal language (and fortunately fail to find it)? In F. Brisard, S. D’Hondt, & T. Mortelmans (Eds.), Language and revolution/Language and time. Antwerp Papers in Linguistics, 106 (pp. 93–113). Antwerp: University of Antwerp, Department of Linguistics.

Chapter 10

Evidence and Argumentation in Educational Research Nicholas C. Burbules

10.1 I Researchers have generally stood in a ‘trust me’ relation, in between their readers and the information they analyze. (‘Information’ here can mean quantitative or qualitative data, textual information, multimedia resources, and so on – the bases of analysis or interpretation that underlie the knowledge claims made by the research itself.) While researchers might be quite explicit about their methods of data collection and analysis, the typical situation is that the only ‘raw’ data the reader sees are those samples or summaries the author chooses to use to illustrate particular claims – and this process is by definition selective. This selectivity even pertains to results or quotations cited from other research; we assume that they represent the other work accurately, but unless we are familiar with it ourselves we can never be sure. Such selectivity is not the only area in which the reader must implicitly trust the honesty and integrity of the researcher, but it is one of the most important because we must assume that the samples are representative and not simply chosen tendentiously to buttress specific conclusions. Now, sometimes it is possible for the reader to check some of the researcher’s arguments and evidence: Sometimes enough statistical data are provided to allow for reanalyses using other tools; readers can interpret quotations or interview transcripts in divergent ways; where an article or book is cited, readers can check the original source and so on. Even within the confines of the publication itself, readers can question the logic of arguments, or raise doubts about the rhetorical moves of persuasion that carry the audience toward certain conclusions. Thus it is not necessary for the reader to have all the original data in order to critically assess research reasoning or results. A number of years ago I wrote an essay analyzing the text of a children’s story book called ‘Tootle’ (Burbules, 1986). When it was published, I insisted that the journal, at some considerable inconvenience, include the full text of the story. (It

N.C. Burbules (B) Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_10,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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would have been even better if they could have included the illustrations too.) It was a point of principle for me that the reader should be able to see the passages I quoted from, in context; that they should be able to see the passages I did not quote; that they should be able to read the story for themselves and decide whether my interpretation was worthy or not. The choice to republish the full text raised a number of problems: copyright approval, for one, but also the question of whether the original author and publisher would provide permission to republish their text for the purposes of an essay that was highly critical of the ideological subtexts of the story (Burbules, 2002). In most other research contexts, the ‘raw data’ comprise much more than just a few hundred words copied from a children’s book: hundreds of surveys; hours and hours of audio or video recordings; boxes full of raw data that preceded statistical summary and analysis. The data disclosed in any study can only be the tip of the iceberg of all the evidence the author drew upon in making his or her conclusions, and so it is understandable to wonder about what is not being shown or discussed – not necessarily as an accusation of fraud or deception, but precisely because no study ever makes all of its evidence known. Until recently it was impossible to imagine that every journal article, every book, could be published along with the data that support it. Today, the virtually unlimited capacity of digital publishing makes this feasible. Unlike print publishing, electronic publishing is not governed by an economics of scarcity. Since much data today is collected (or transcribed) in digital forms, it would be relatively straightforward to upload it as an appendix or addendum to a work published online (or on a publisher’s web site conjoined with a text published in print). This could include a variety of multimedia resources for research that uses them. Now that we can publish this information, the question before us is, Should we? That is the question I explore in this essay.

10.2 II The ‘open source’, ‘open access’ ethos in today’s technology culture promotes the general idea that ‘knowledge wants to be free.’ In the place of a proprietary, often commercialized economy, more and more participants see new technologies as a medium for a more commons-based mode of interaction. Free access replaces fee-based access. Collaborative involvement replaces individual credit. Openness and transparency replace control. Much of the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ revolution is about public access to data bases that allow novel recombinations of data across different integrative purposes (‘mash-ups’). New data-mining techniques allow for reinterpretations of massive data bases. This open-access ethos is not just a freefloating normative article of faith. Yochai Benkler (2002) argues empirically that such commons-based peer production is often more productive than systems based more on individual ownership, motivation, and credit. Researchers have traditionally spoken of ‘their’ data, the gathering of which often does entail hours upon hours of painstaking planning and collection. Think

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of the historian, filling hundreds of note-cards with information culled from dusty archives; or the interviewer, carefully building relations of trust and creatively formulating questions to get informants to share their stories. The collection of data is never mindless and routine – it is itself an exercise of talent, energy, and insight, and as such is a manifestation of this researcher with all of his or her strengths and shortcomings. Moreover, even at this level an element of selectivity enters in: No one collects ‘all’ the data (whatever that would mean). Theoretically guided judgments about what is important and relevant enter in at even the earliest stage of research (What questions to ask; what indices to measure; why pick this topic of inquiry in the first place?). And so it must be said at the outset that a researcher’s data are in one sense distinctively ‘theirs’, every bit as much as anything else they produce. But there is a separate, more troublesome sense of this phrase, ‘their’ data: the researcher who happens upon the collected letters of a major literary figure and hoards them so that others cannot review them, or the head of a research team composed of research aides or laboratory assistants whose collective efforts (often funded by public moneys) produced the data under consideration, but who expects to be listed as a coauthor on all studies coming out of that data. In such cases the personally proprietary attitude toward data seems less justified. Researchers want to protect ‘their’ data, understandably, because they hope to get a number of publications out of it, or because they are jealous of preserving their unique access to it. They fear that if the information were made publicly available someone else might beat them to further publications, or steal some insight or discovery they want for themselves. But here one needs to weigh the understandable self-interest of the researcher with the public interest in open access to information. When one is publishing their research, are they publishing only the results, or the entire process of data collection, analysis, and interpretation? Who deserves credit for sharing a body of data, which others may use for their own purposes? Might scholars become as famous and widely credited for producing a rich and fertile set of data, as they might become for their own specific analyses of it? What new forms of attribution, acknowledgment, and coauthorship might be appropriate for this more distributed model of inquiry? These are new questions we need to be asking.

10.3 III Making the data available along with the research analyses of it manifests a different relation between the researcher and the audience, and a different conception of public knowledge. In place of a ‘trust me’ relation, the researcher invites the readers to check the analysis against the data that support it. They may discover errors or omissions that critique the original study or extend its analyses further. This provides an independent check on credibility and validity. Such access also allows that other analyses and other uses of the data are possible. The wider community of inquiry can benefit by collaborating, in a sense, with the original author through these other

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projects. It is a relation based more on transparency – and, one might even add, generosity – than the more typical possessive, proprietary mode. Readers are invited into examining the evidence for argumentation, the rhetorics of persuasion, and the choices of selective disclosure and nondisclosure that underlie any research study. Indeed, contrasting the original data with the published uses made of them invites questions about the inevitability of selectivity and judgment in making these determinations. There is not a single, direct line of inference from any set of data to particular conclusions, and readers should be made aware of this. Many years ago, I was part of a research project in which one of the research assistants committed an innocent but devastating error in judgment that invalidated nearly all of the data he collected. None of those data made it into the final analysis, of course – but the fact that it happened, and the choice the authors made in not mentioning that it happened, could not have been known to anyone but those directly involved in the project. Should the error have been disclosed, even though it did not affect anything that was used for the analysis in the published article? This was a judgment made conscientiously, but others might have made that judgment differently. My own sense, over the intervening years, is that many – perhaps most – empirical studies experience similar difficulties along the way, which are very rarely discussed in the final report. Research is an imperfect human practice, like any other, conducted by serious but fallible human beings. The kind of transparency argued for here would allow readers to make independent judgments about the importance of such research errors or snafus and their relevance to assessing the research results. In such a new relation the authority and credibility of research knowledge comes to be based in a wider and more distributed set of relations. The author’s individual voice, style, or point of view should be respected in relation to their own inquiries, but they need not bound or limit the possibilities of other independent inquiries. Such a system might make us more aware of the rhetorics and standards of evidence that make us find research arguments compelling, while illuminating the possibility of alternative treatments of the same material. Just as different biographies might make us think about the diverse characterizations that can be made of a ‘single’ lifetime, we might become better attuned to the different ways in which the ‘same’ classroom, or the ‘same’ teacher at work, can be viewed and assessed. Such a diversity of analyses and interpretations need not yield relativistic conclusions, but it should make us question the simpleminded assumption that all studies necessarily converge on a single ‘truth.’ On the other hand, it may also turn out that multiple analyses of the same data establish stronger intersubjective agreement on at least some aspects of a study, yielding greater confidence in them. There are wider benefits as well. No data set is ever exhausted by a single analysis, or set of analyses; there are always other theoretical frames, other questions, that might be brought to bear. Multiple data sets, developed by different researchers in different contexts for different purposes, may yield broader conclusions when compiled together or studied in a comparative way. The open data approach proposed here illuminates the importance of these theoretical frameworks and assumptions. Some of the researchers who access these data and use them in new ways may be talented ‘amateurs’ who do not have the institutional funding or support to allow

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them to carry out large data collection themselves. As in many other cases of the new digital knowledge network, a plurality of perspectives can give voice to scholars who have been closed out of traditional publication avenues; as with ‘blogs’ and other new media, it is sometimes the ‘amateurs’ and ‘outsiders’ who contribute fresh and original insights to a knowledge enterprise. Publishing open data in the way described here can be vastly empowering to these new voices and perspectives: It becomes an occasion to create an eclectic community of inquiry around a body of shared information and a related set of questions growing out of it. Obviously, some very large data sets, generated through public funding, are already made widely accessible in this way, across a range of different disciplines. But data in educational research may have a special status in this regard, since education is a public concern and since so much of this research is funded through public moneys. It is an area in which research carried out in another context – a different school, city, or country – might yield important insights into one’s own. And so some wider public good is also served by making such data freely and widely available.

10.4 IV There are certainly serious issues in making data freely and widely available: protections of legitimate intellectual property claims; issues about the confidentiality of research subjects or informants who have developed a relation of trust with the researcher but who have not agreed to make their personal disclosures widely available; the special vulnerability of children and other research subjects who need the protection of anonymity; the threatened status of ‘whistleblowers’ who cannot afford to be identified and who would not participate if they knew their comments would be publicized in a manner that might allow them to be identified. The reward systems developed for academic researchers also work generally against this open-source ethos: when one is rewarded for numbers of publications, for ‘original’ or ‘unique’ discoveries, for single-authored or first-authored articles, and so on, where is the incentive for releasing data that others might use for their own publication and professional benefit? In my college, some of the hallways are lined with boxes with faculty names scrawled on the side, containing primary data materials, some covered with the dust of many years, just waiting for the day when the original author might decide they can be reused again. Imagine an alternative scholarly economy in which the original researcher may get fewer studies out of the data, while the research community as a whole might get more. This is probably a beneficial trade-off from the larger perspective of the public good but not necessarily from the standpoint of the individual self-interest of the researcher. In whose favour do we adjudicate this trade-off of benefits? As noted, such a revised relation between the researcher and audience also might yield a different set of attitudes about the finality of research results; about the bases

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of research authority and credibility; about the necessity of selectivity in representing the data; about the possibilities and benefits of multiple, sometimes conflicting, analyses of the same data; about changing rules for intellectual property and plagiarism; and about a wider shift of emphasis from the individual researcher to the research community as the locus of epistemological control and accountability. This shift also reflects a different sense of research ethics and responsibilities: If I know that I will be expected to share the underlying data on which I draw my conclusions, I might be especially scrupulous in staying within the bounds of what I can confidently assert. I might be more open to acknowledging the selectivity – and the criteria for selectivity – in what I choose to disclose, or not to disclose, in the published form of my study. I might be more generous in acknowledging the possibility, and the value, of alternative interpretations of my data. And I might be more attuned to my own situatedness within broader communities of inquiry to which I have obligations going beyond the protection of my own individual research interests and autonomy. In all of these respects, the possibility of publishing – that is, making public – the data that accompany published research opens up new ways of thinking about the point and purpose of doing research at all. Some important issues, along the lines of problems described here, will have to be worked out. In various academic fields professional societies may have a key role to play in setting such rules and standards. But overall it seems a policy that journal editors and publishers should seriously consider. Agencies that fund research with public money may mandate the release of data for the public good (and some are beginning to do that). There are reasons why many individual researchers will be reluctant to do so unless they are required to; but I expect that more and more people will choose to do this, as the avenues for making data public become safe and convenient, because they recognize the wider good served when knowledge is made free. Researchers may find that the benefit of having their data used (with attribution or acknowledgement) in other researchers’ studies constitutes a new kind of role and service to the research community – one, presumably, with reciprocal benefits. In research as in other contexts, a rising tide lifts all boats.

References Benkler, Y. (2002). Coase’s penguin, or, linux and the nature of the firm. The Yale Law Journal, 112(3), 369–446. Burbules, N. (1986). Tootle: A parable of schooling and destiny. Harvard Educational Review, 56(3), 239–256. Burbules, N. (2002). Tootle revisited: Fifteen years down the track. In S. Merriam & D. Vreeland (Eds.), Types of qualitative inquiry: Exemplars for study and discussion (pp. 348–351). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Chapter 11

Half a Language: Listening in the City of Words Richard Smith

I do not find that listening to reason is exhaustively expressed by the ability to produce and to be moved by argument. Sometimes it requires refusing to listen to arguments. Sometimes it requires demanding that one’s own voice be listened to, taken into account. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 329

In his Preface to Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s The Other Side of Language (1990, p. i) Manfred Riedel writes, “Our philosophy is grounded in only half a language, in which the power of discourse is deployed while the strength of listening is ignored. We inhabit a culture that knows how to speak but not how to listen”. This is of course not simply a matter of not being able to identify appropriate ‘listening skills’. It is worse than that: it is not clear that we have anything but a thin and debased notion of listening in our contemporary (western) world, in which it is seen principally as the poor relation of speaking, mute and passive by contrast to the active, dynamic creativity of speech. In this chapter, I shall first suggest that unsatisfactory accounts of the concept of truth are partly responsible for why we have forgotten to think about listening and argue briefly for a largely dialogic notion of truth and truthfulness in which, bearing in mind the theme of this book, on ‘Proofs, Arguments and other Reasonings’, the distinction between proving and persuading is less than firm. From this perspective, it will be easier to see how and why listening, of the two partners in the dialogue, has been neglected. The poor relation of the proceedings needs to be redeemed from the obscure and marginal status it currently occupies, and the remainder of the paper consists of moves in this direction. It has been put to me that what I have written here is part of a wider project to rehabilitate some of the quieter virtues, such as humility and diffidence (cf. Smith, 2006). While this was never an idea, I had explicitly formulated that there are certainly similarities of approach here. There are broader connections too with what R. Smith (B) University of Durham, Durham, England e-mail: [email protected]

P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_11,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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might be called a ‘postmodern’ turn: if it has been characteristic of modernity to foreground the values of efficiency and effectiveness and generally getting things done, a critique of modernity might certainly want to ask whether a quieter and more reflective element of life was not being given its due. However I do not develop these connections to any extent in what follows.

11.1 I In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Richard Rorty argues that we should think of science as making truth, rather than discovering something ‘out there’. The success of science is in prediction and control, rather than in reflecting ‘the world how it is’. Truth is a property of sentences, and these depend on our languages and vocabularies. There is no final vocabulary in which sentences can be uttered (the language of God, the language that reflects the world). There is no way in which ‘the world of facts’ determines whether the language of Freudian psychology or the language of neurophysiology (or sociobiology or sociology) has got it right. “That Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle’s does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian” (ibid., p. 6), nor the language of any other particular version of science, mathematics or logic. There is no vocabulary that ‘best fits the world’ or ‘best expresses human nature’. Logic itself is simply a human convention (though we need to be wary of the implications of adding ‘simply’ to that sentence). We might be reminded here of Peter Winch’s Wittgensteinian argument to the effect that “criteria of logic are not a direct gift of God but arise out of, and are only intelligible in the context of, ways of living or modes of social life” (Winch, 1958, p. 94) and his ingenious account (ibid., chap. 2) of the conversation between Achilles and the tortoise which is meant to show that if the tortoise just doesn’t share the convention of implication, doesn’t ‘get it’, then no amount of argument, no piling up of premises (as if this would somehow cause the tortoise to see through to the Truth) will be any use. Rorty thinks that we need to drop the idea of truth as some ‘deep matter’, rather than as what is instrumentally helpful. Progress occurs not by discovering something deep and indubitable: rather what happens is that we lose the habit of using one set of words and get the habit of using another. We change languages and social practices and produce different human beings (e.g. ‘adolescents’, who do not seem to have existed before the end of the 19th century, or ‘schizophrenics’, or ‘dyslexics’: none of these categories was always there, only waiting to be discovered). Rorty himself, we might say, is in the business of creating ‘people who can live with contingency’. Sometimes we want to say: “a better vocabulary is available”, not in the sense that it brings us nearer the truth but in the sense that it offers new and more interesting possibilities. We keep redescribing the world until people begin to take up the vocabulary we are using and adopt with it new ways and institutions. Once, for instance, we talked of the nuclear family and the need for two parents of different sexes. Now that language seems to be changing, and practices (e.g. of

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offering IVF treatment) are changing with it. Once we talked about literature as if we were trying to reconstruct the author’s intentions. Then we found it more interesting to talk about the relationship between the formal elements of the text. Now we increasingly focus on what happens in the engagement between the reader and the text. Intellectual and moral progress then becomes ‘a history of increasingly useful metaphors’ rather than a matter of approaching ever closer to truth. Progress occurs where language x gets in the way of language y and we develop a third language, z. To change the way we talk is to change the way that we are rather than to say we have found a different reality. To say “God is dead” is to say something about us rather than to report an event. Nor are we clear what we want to do before we find the language to do it. Our “new vocabulary makes possible, for the first time, a formulation of its own purpose” (Rorty, 1989, p. 13). This is to see (with Davidson) language as not a medium, either of representation or of expression. It is to see language in Wittgensteinian vein as a matter of using different tools. It is also to see intellectual progress as a long and interesting conversation – a matter of talking and listening – rather than as a matter of ending debate by making discoveries. If progress was a series of conversation-stoppers, a record of success in ending debates, then arriving at the truth would of course mean not needing to listen further. The Rortyan account is not uncontested. Bernard Williams (2002) offers a nuanced critique. Although Williams wants to move the discussion away from truth to qualities such as truthfulness, sincerity and accuracy, he wants to retain a notion of truth as more than the pragmatist’s conception of it as a business of offering the best possible justification for a belief. Against what he calls the ‘deniers’, those who think that analytic philosophy’s search for an account of truth is chimaerical, Williams insists that ‘to the extent that we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something, and may well lose everything.’ This, he thinks, will have especially damaging consequences for the humanities which, losing their function of doing justice to ‘everyday truths’, and fragmenting into competing and squabbling theoretical schools, offer no reason why they should any longer be taken seriously. There is no space here to adjudicate properly between Rorty’s position and Williams’s (and in any case those positions often seem more close to each other than Williams thinks). I confine myself to two points that appear to me to weight the balance on Rorty’s side of the argument. First, there is much force, at first sight, in two questions Williams asks in his first chapter (p. 2): “If you do not really believe in the existence of truth, what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for? Or – as we might also put it – in pursuing truthfulness, what are you supposedly being true to?” Williams himself offers (p. 15) an answer formulated as follows: “The ‘unconditional will to truth’ does not mean that we want to believe any and every truth. It does mean that we want to understand who we are, to correct error, to avoid deceiving ourselves, to get beyond comfortable falsehood”. Quite so: but it is difficult to see why anything helpful is added to this by talking of ‘the existence of truth’, which brings the faint but persistent implication of capitalised Truth, located in a realm of Platonic essences.

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Second, against Rorty’s sort of account it is sometimes urged that things happen in the external world – events such as earthquakes and cyclones – to which we are required to do justice, about which the truth needs to be told. Granted that it is often difficult to move beyond interpretations, it is sometimes said, some events are beyond interpretation and even make interpretation seem crass and redundant. Grassie (1997) is often quoted in this context: ‘regardless of your belief system, a single nuclear explosion can ruin your day’. Against this uncompromising view it is important to assemble reminders of how the world is still shot through with interpretation even when it most seems to come at us with the force of unmediated reality. For example, something cataclysmic happened around the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004: to call it a ‘tsunami’ is immediately to invoke an interpretation in terms of geological faults and plate tectonics. A tsunami is not “how the world is ‘in itself’” but an expression of our human understanding of how the world is. The strength of Rorty’s position, in my view, is to move us on from the idea that there has to be a single, unified theory of truth and help us to see that are several notions of truth and not just one. Sometimes it makes sense to say that to call a sentence ‘true’ is to claim that it does indeed mirror the world. Sometimes however the ‘everyday truths’ for which we admire the novelist or playwright are not quite like this: here it is more like saying that what is written ‘rings true’, which is to say that it does not strike a false note – and here there is no question of supposing that there is some external reality to mirror any more than in the case of a bell that rings true or a carpenter who planes a piece of wood true. Sometimes we want to reserve the accolade ‘true’ for a relationship between language and reality, while at others to say that a statement is true is more a matter of claiming that we can defend it against all comers – and, as Williams notes, of making the important further move of claiming that the procedures we use for defending it can themselves be justified or defended. At any rate, the helpful move that both Rorty and Williams make is to move us away from the old analytical debates about truth. We can continue, with Rorty, to be sceptical about these or, with Williams, remain attached to them. Both writers move us on to consideration of these ‘procedures for defending statements’. For Rorty these include the way we offer each other new descriptions and move into new vocabularies. For Williams the crucial thing is to consider how truthfulness, sincerity and so on play a part in human flourishing. For me the crucial question is how we are to think of the relationship between truth and dialogue and especially the place of listening in it, since defending statements or realising that they are indefensible does after all imply attending properly to them in the first place. It is this to which I now turn.

11.2 II This section may seem to make particular demands on the reader, whom I naturally ask to be an assiduous listener, even if he or she concludes in the end that I have been obscure or have struck the wrong notes. However since what I have to

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say concerns the Platonic dialogues, and the Republic in particular, some preliminary remarks are in order. Various answers have been canvassed to the question why Plato wrote dialogues, with their stage-settings, dramatis personae and frequent use of myth. The dialogue is a way of sugaring the austere pill of philosophy, perhaps, making it accessible to a wider readership. Or it faithfully depicts the practice of the historical Socrates, Plato’s teacher and mentor; or it illustrates the difficulties Plato faced in bringing systematic, analytical philosophy to birth from the primeval sludge of poetry, myth and rhetoric in which he found its embryonic form. It will quickly be clear that I reject these particular answers, but I do not intend to begin by setting out schematically an answer of my own. Some elements of that answer can be inferred throughout this section. To do more than that at this point would be to offer an alternative to attending fully to the dialogues themselves, a failure to listen which is what their fate has too often been at the hands of critics and commentators.1 What, then, can we learn about listening from Plato, the theorist of dialogue, or dialectic?2 The opening words of the Republic3 are well-known: Socrates tells us “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston. . .”; but this is too well-known, something which we know so well that we do not listen to it. How can we slow down, attend properly to the words? In Greek, κατ´εβην χθ `ες ε’ις ειραια˜ μετα` λα´νκωνoς τo˜ν ’Aρíστωνoς (katebên chthes eis Peiraia meta Glaukônos tou Aristônos4 ). I went down, κατ´εβην (katebên). This ‘going down’ will occur again in the dialogue, and we should mark it here. Socrates went down to the Piraeus to pray and view the celebration of the festival, after which he and Glaucon turned back towards the city, and at that moment ‘Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.’ At the moment Socrates was about to turn back to the city, the usual setting for his dialogues, he is stopped, as we should stop too and not rush on to what some would think of as the meat of the Republic, the Forms, perhaps, or Sun, Divided Line and Cave; or of course the Theory of Education. All of which deserve capitals because they are what the dialogue is about, aren’t they? Why stop now before the business has properly got going? Socrates stops because a slave tells him that his master, Polemarchus, says he is to wait. The Greek here is περιμε˜ινα´ι ε κελε˜νσαι (perimeinai he keleusai) – and the verb that Jowett decorously translates with ‘bid’ and ‘desires’ is repeated three times. It is the standard Greek word for telling someone to do something. (Lee’s translation has “sent his slave running on ahead to tell us to wait for him. . . ‘Polemarchus says you are to wait’”.) Its very everydayness, its neutral quality as it might seem, first causes us not to notice it; and then its capacity to recede into the background brings it to our attention. An underling, one of the boys (τòν πα˜ιδα – Polemarchus sent, literally, his boy, ton paida), tells Socrates that Don Corleone says he is to wait. There is no need for the Boss to put things in more forceful terms. The dialogue proceeds as follows. I [Socrates] turned round, and asked him where his master was. “There he is”, said the youth, “coming after you, if you will only wait”. “Certainly we will”, said Glaucon; and

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in a few minutes Polemarchus appeared, and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon’s brother, Niceratus the son of Nicias, and several others who had been at the procession. Polemarchus said to me: “I perceive, Socrates, that you and our companion are already on your way to the city”. “You are not far wrong”, I said. “But do you see”, he rejoined, “how many we are?” “Of course”. “And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are”. “May there not be the alternative”, I said, “that we may persuade you to let us go?” “But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you?” he said. “Certainly not”, replied Glaucon. “Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured”. Adeimantus added: “Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?” “With horses!” I replied: “That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them one to another during the race?” “Yes”, said Polemarchus, “and not only so, but a festival will be celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be perverse”. Glaucon said: “I suppose, since you insist, that we must”. “Very good”, I replied.

Cephalus, the father of Polemarchus, to whose house Socrates is taken, is a rich man from another part of Greece who has chosen to forsake citizen status (no small matter for a Greek, as many of the commentaries remind us) and residence in Athens, to live in the Piraeus, the port district (the docks; for a Londoner, the connotations of ‘the East End’ are to the point), and enjoy his riches. He is too old for the pleasures of the flesh (and it is clear from a passage a little later that sex is indicated specifically). You don’t come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were still able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me. But at my age I can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come oftener to the Piraeus. For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

Before moving on we might note that, in a dialogue whose philosophical arguments are, notoriously, full of holes, Cephalus’s address here stands out as one of the more carefully worked-through pieces of reasoning. It has, as we like to put it, logical force. But quite what is the force of this logic? Has Socrates not been taken to Cephalus’s house to gratify the old man’s desire for conversation? By force of numbers, by people who will not listen? He has been stopped, and his dialectic has been pressed into the service of making an elderly mafioso happy, like some philosophical Scheherazade (and then a disturbing note is struck: is the whole of the Republic just a kind of entertainment?5 ). The commentaries on the Republic do not always make much of this. Cross and Woozley (1964) do not mention the scene at all. Julia Annas (1981, p. 18) writes: “Socrates and Glaucon are visiting

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the Piraeus, the port of Athens, for a festival, and are jokingly forced to visit the house of Cephalus and his sons”. Lee (1968) comments tersely “The scene set and the characters introduced” (p. 51). Blackburn (2006) makes nothing of it, describing Polemarchus and Cephalus as “two rich, conservative, self-satisfied tradesmen” (p. 28). Jowett pictures Cephalus as a genial paterfamilias, “at peace with himself and with all mankind” (p. 5).6 Cavell (2004) offers a much more subtle and suggestive reading. In this “apparently benign public encounter of acquaintances” there is “unnoticed delusion and aggressiveness” (p. 325). When Socrates suggests that he might persuade Polemarchus and his boys to let him go Cavell finds preserved the question whether speech disperses violence or whether it is a form of violence. (Later Socrates will distinguish modes of speech, not merely at large between the poetry of tragedy and the prose of philosophy, but between discussion and dispute). (ibid.)

What I take Cavell here to mean is that at the beginning of the Republic something important is being said about dialectic and what we have later come to call philosophy. Can dialectic or philosophy convince and persuade, and if they can, then how are they different from rhetoric or even the sophistry that carries its case by doing violence to reason? Cavell expresses this (above) as a question about modes of speech, but thinking of it as a question of how we are to listen, and what we are to listen to, brings out better what is at stake. Do we nod along to the scene-setting of the Republic, anxious to get on to the philosophical meat? Or can we hear the quiet thought that this is to go too fast and miss an essential strand in the texture of the book – what Cavell describes as Plato taking trouble to “stage the onset of conversation, not as it were taking for granted his philosophical medium of dialogue but suggesting both a craving for it and a reluctance toward it” (p. 324)? Perhaps the very craving for philosophy may be its undoing: or to put it another way, perhaps philosophy may not be done under particular conditions, of which ‘craving’ is one. In a famous passage at Republic 475d Glaucon questions Socrates’ suggestion that “he who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and who is curious to learn and is never satisfied, may be justly termed a philosopher.” Glaucon responds: If curiosity makes a philosopher, you will find many a strange being claiming the name. For all the lovers of sights [‘theatre-fans’, Lee] have a delight in learning, and will therefore have to be included. Musical amateurs, too. . .

´ This last phrase, which is ιληκooι (philêkooi) in the Greek, Lee translates as ‘music-lovers’. The problem with them is that while they do the rounds of all the concerts and music-festivals “they are the last persons in the world who would come to anything like a philosophical discussion” (Jowett’s translation). Philêkooi are literally ‘lovers of hearing’: they are enthusiasts for listening, just as Cephalus is at the beginning of the dialogue and just as Phaedrus is at the beginning of the dialogue that bears his name. But listening – enjoying philosophy as if it were a show, perhaps (Ferrari, 1990, calls Phaedrus an ‘impresario’: with his mixture of enthusiasm and flattery he has a wonderful knack for getting philosophical discussion started) – is not enough. Real philosophers must be ‘lovers of the sight of truth’

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(475e4) and, we infer, of the sound of truth too. We now begin to understand what it is to be such a lover. It has little to do with aiming at some determinate state where language mirrors reality. It is rather to be someone who is alert to the dangers of craving and reluctance in the context of philosophy. There is the craving for the reassurance of solid doctrines, exemplified perhaps most spectacularly in the reception of the Republic itself as Plato’s authoritative theory of the state and of education. There is also the craving for skills and techniques, of philosophy as much as of rhetoric, a craving illustrated particularly well by attempts to find the one true ‘Socratic method’ behind the Platonic dialogues. We have seen this particular craving in modern times, in the philosophy of education in particular: ‘techniques’ derived from linguistic analysis and formal logic that lead to the identification of standard bugaboos such as relativism or the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ (and of course ‘anything-goes postmodernism’, generally by those who show no familiarity whatsoever with the writers they criticise, no capacity to listen to these unfamiliar voices); other ‘techniques’ consist in the deployment of well-trodden lines of argument such as transcendental proofs of the value of reason or the distinguishing of different kinds of knowledge. Such craving is itself the other side of reluctance – a reluctance towards the full philosophical engagement that consists in attunement to the richest resources of language, as found in myth and poetry. Yet this attunement in turn, as the philêkooi remind us, risks becoming a craving for mere words rather than, as Ferrari puts it (p. 212), a search for the kind of “life which gives those words importance”. These considerations help us to understand why, in a work of philosophy fit to generate philosophical footnotes until the end of time, Plato has included such flights of fancy as the allegory or simile, as it variously called, of the cave (the beginning of Book VII) and the myth of Er at the very end of the Republic (or, in the Phaedrus, the myth of the discovery of writing). How are we to hear these voices of the text? They are less surprising, less singular perhaps, if we come to them without the prejudice – that an attentive reading of the opening of the Republic should have dispelled – that philosophical dialogue is without qualification the only thing worth listening to. They are less surprising too if we attend again to the opening word of the dialogue: κατ´εβην (katebên). Cavell (who refers us here to Pappas’s Guidebook to Plato and the Republic) is not the only commentator to have noted that this “going down” prefigures other goings-down in the text, principally the going down into the “cave of the everyday” (Cavell, 2004, p. 325) which the philosopher undertakes (also under the force of persuasion or compulsion, if necessary) near the beginning of Book VII. But if the descent to the Piraeus – which produces the whole remarkable philosophical dialogue that is the Republic – prefigures the allegory or simile of the cave, and if the Socrates who goes down to the Piraeus is readily identifiable with the philosopher who goes down into the cave, then the story of the cave, one of the most poetic parts of the whole text (and which we are explicitly told at Republic 517 must be connected with those other diversions, the simile of the Sun and the analogy of the Line), begins to take on a new status and a new resonance. It is not a mere poetic flight of fancy, inferior to philosophical dialectic, but of central importance in the text.

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So it is that in the Republic Plato gives us a philosopher who is stopped – and so by implication stopped from doing his business, which is philosophical dialectic – and who nevertheless does thus philosophise, and in doing this shows that philosophical dialectic may be less powerful and less productive of understanding than a kind of poetry. The ironical multi-layeredness here (for once the modish term ‘imbrication’ is apt) is reminiscent of the Phaedrus, where Plato writes a dialogue – a narrative of what was said – in which Socrates, a philosopher who never wrote, tells the story of the invention of writing, in which this great invention is declared to be inferior to speech. The craving and reluctance towards philosophical dialogue that Cavell writes of (quoted above) is also strangely layered. The reluctance that seems to be implicit in the refusal to listen to reason on the part of Polemarchus and his mob turns out to be highly productive of philosophy – doesn’t it? – since it results in the dialogue that is the Republic. On the other hand, Cephalus’s craving, for conversation at least, leads to some fairly bad philosophy in the first Book of the Republic in particular. And our own craving – that of the modern reader anxious to get past the setting of the scene and onto the ‘real philosophy’ – becomes a way of not listening to what matters: matters philosophically, as we would of course say.

11.3 III In the 21st century naturally we can review the ideas of the ancient world in the light of new knowledge about listening. The Learning Through Listening website offers us an article titled ‘Plato revisited: learning through listening in the digital world’. Young people live in a world where the traditional literacies of reading and writing “are being blended, redefined and replaced by dynamically evolving media and communication technologies”, the kind of technologies that young learners have grown up with. This is the age of the listener. The proliferation of new technologies will not diminish literacy but rather expand it. In particular, we shall argue that new technologies—from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to iPods, sound blogs and textto-speech—have revived the importance of listening and “re-balanced” literacy such that printed text remains an important facet of literacy but is not itself synonymous with literacy. The new literacy, in which listening and oral literacy regain an important role, will be a literacy that even Plato would have admired.

New digital imaging techniques, it appears, allow neuroscientists to study the anatomy of the brain and the way it functions, including its operations during the activity of listening. When we “really listen”, the prefrontal cortex is engaged. This part of the brain “is specialised for organising and prioritising actions and movements into goal-directed activity” and is concerned with what we attend to and what we remember. “Planning and organisation are essential features of listening” – how marvellous and at the same time unsurprising to find it all comes down to management – or at any rate active listening, and “cognitive neuroscientists have shown

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that it engages a large portion of the prefrontal cortex (Osaka et al., 2004)”. Now we know all about listening. Learning through listening, it is concluded, is a powerful way into learning. Buy our audiobooks and digital texts for learning and enjoyment now. Here a fetish is being made of the new technology. Ferrari (1990) suggests that this is exactly the kind of thing that concerned Plato and helps us make sense of the criticism of the discovery of writing in the Phaedrus. That dialogue begins with Phaedrus recently come from listening to the sophist Lysias (another son of Cephalus). Phaedrus has been so impressed that he has first written Lysias’s words down verbatim and then learned them by heart: as if something here constituted the real thing, the presence, not to be lost by mere recollection of the general drift. Ferrari (p. 211) comments that “writing does indeed have that dangerous quality which Phaedrus found so seductive: the quality of making a fetish of the truth of events, of giving the heady feeling that the creative moment has been suspended and can perhaps be revived” – as if we could secure it from interpretation for all time. Similarly perhaps we fetishise listening and attempt to make a technology of it, because the element of interpretation involved in all listening alarms us. We are not comfortable with the idea of listening and are generally not very good at doing it. We appoint experts to do it for us; they in turn may be seduced by the idea of ‘listening skills’ that stipulate the appropriate angle and distance at which the counsellor’s and client’s chairs should be set, with a packet of tissues and a pot plant on the table between them.7 We value, intermittently, the ‘talking cures’, now back in fashion since a 6-week dose of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is relatively cheap, when the idea of ‘listening cures’ might be more helpful, not least by moving us on from the supposition that it is the ‘talking’ of the patient, as if letting off steam, that brings about improvement.8 In education in our own time the value of proper listening has been neglected partly out of the faith that children are naturally active makers of meaning and should not be vessels into which knowledge is poured. Simplistic notions of social constructivism have much to answer for. The good classroom is characterised by a purposeful buzz: beware the teacher who talks too much. This latter is didacticism. Yes, this can be a problem, but the result is that children do not learn to listen, to their teachers, to their books or to each other. Even at university it is common to hear someone (perhaps a postgraduate teaching part-time, or perhaps someone who should know better) say: “My seminar group were on form today – I could hardly get a word in edgewise!” Philosophy too, of the analytic kind especially, has not learned much from Plato’s strictures on eristic and his remarks on the dangers of teaching philosophy to the young, who, “after their first taste of argument, are always contradicting people just for the fun of it; they imitate those whom they hear cross-examining each other, and themselves cross-examine other people, like puppies who love to pull and tear at anyone within reach” (Republic 539b, Lee’s translation). I have on my shelves a book called Philosophy in the Open, edited by Godfrey Vesey (1974). The Foreword tells us (p. 5) that “What philosophers do is argue. They argue with anyone who is prepared to argue with them.” The front cover duly shows two men arguing, one

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apparently straddling a chair and leaning into his more conventionally seated interlocutor, hand held parallel to his face, with first finger raised. The challenge of the book, the back cover declares, is contained not in chapters, but in “dialogues, discussions, and talks”. All this is familiar from philosophy conferences, though this style of philosophy now seems to be in decline. Philosophers might be better listeners if they were more prepared to add one more footnote to Plato, in which they noted his repeated and subtle questioning of any easy distinction between philosophy and other kinds of discourse such as myth, poetry and even rhetoric. I have argued elsewhere (Smith 2008)9 that the language of philosophy, and a fortiori the language of philosophy of education, are irreducibly figurative. There is no privileged discourse in which clear, logical and rigorous argument can be conducted, uncontaminated by metaphor and other tropes that are often thought of as poetical or literary. This re-immerses us in the ancient difficulty of distinguishing philosophy from rhetoric but means that we shall have to listen more carefully both to what we read and what we write. If we worked like this we would be better readers, better listeners: less prone to grabbing, to snatching at text, to impatient skimming in order to extract what we can paraphrase, repeat, cast in bullet-points, to precipitancy and prejudice, interrupting, or just plain ignoring. We would be slow readers, rather than fast readers. Those who re-read rather than always moving on to the latest recommended book (the next website, urgently clicking the links: the truth must be out there, like the perfect Greek island, if we can only find it). Who can read between the lines, hear what is not said, be sensitive to the register, notice the echoes and relish the irony. More than this: how would things look different if we could replace the persistent, deep-rooted tendency to cast science as the paradigm of knowledge with something more like literary criticism – or, if that sounds too academic, with discussion of novels, films, poetry and plays? Where the exchange of interpretations, rooted in attention to the text, the slow building of understanding but never immune to challenge, replaces the idea of knowledge as erklärung, the shedding of light on the world to reveal what is, finally and indubitably, there? How would it be if we could listen to nature – cicadas especially – and escape from the dominant western paradigm of mastering it, or if we could recover the sense of craftsmanship as a matter of attunement to materials, to the wood we plane, the ingredients we cook with, the paper we hang, the seedlings we plant out? If physics envy could finally be replaced by the love of the world and the attention and attunement to it, and to each other, that cultivates listening as a high art?

Notes 1. Illustrations of this, together with more sensitive and astute readings of many of the dialogues, can be found in, e.g., Griswold (1988). 2. I shall use these words interchangeably, but a number of distinctions can be drawn between them. 3. All translations are from Jowett unless otherwise indicated.

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4. I have taken transliterated Greek text from the Perseus Digital Library website: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0167 (Retrieved 12 January 2009).  λóγoις κειμ´ 5. The Republic is described at the end of Book IX as a ‘city of words’, τ η˜ εν εν η (têi en logois keimenêi). Jowett translates as ‘exists in idea only’, Lee as ‘the society which we have been describing and which we have theoretically founded’. Neither of these catches the possibility that the dialogue may amount to mere words, verbal pyrotechnics, the entertaining conversation that Cephalus had required, and the equivalent of the horseback torch-race that was promised for later in the evening. 6. The second (revised) edition of Lee’s translation (Penguin, 1974) includes Appendix I, The Philosophical Passages in the Republic (pp. 456–459). By bringing together the philosophical ‘meat’ of the dialogue – the Theory of Forms, Sun and Divided Line and so on, Lee effectively advises the ‘philosophically’ interested reader to ignore the opening scene. 7. Thanks to Jenny Laws for this point. 8. Simone Weil (1977, p. 51) writes, ‘Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it’. 9. Originally a conference paper: To school with the poets: the Pädagogisierung of philosophy, Vlaanderen Fund for Scientific Research: Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education – Evaluation and Evolution of the Criteria for Educational Research, Leuven, Belgium, November 2007.

References Annas, J. (1981). An introduction to Plato’s republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blackburn, S. (2006). Plato’s republic: A biography. London: Atlantic Books. Cavell, S. (2004). Cities of words: Pedagogical letters on a register of the moral life. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cross R. C., & Woozley, A. D. (1964). Plato’s republic: A philosophical commentary. London: Macmillan. Ferrari, G. R. F. (1990). Listening to the cicadas: A study of Plato’s phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fiumara, G. C. (1990). The other side of language: A philosophy of listening. London: Routledge. Grassie, W. (1997). Postmodernism: What one needs to know. Zygon, 32(1), 83–94. Griswold, C. L. (1988). Platonic writings, platonic readings. London: Routledge. Jowett, B. (1871). The dialogues of Plato. London: Macmillan. Learning Through Listening. (2008). Retrieved 15 May, 2008, from http://www. learningthroughlistening.org/Listening-A-Powerful-Skill/The-Science-of-Listening/LearningThrough-Listening-in-the-Digital-World/Table-1/152 / Lee, H. D. P. (1968). Plato: The republic. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, R. (2006). On diffidence: The moral psychology of self-belief. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 40(1), 51–62. Smith, R. (2008). To school with the poets: Philosophy, method and clarity. Paedogogica Historica, 44(6), 635–645. Vesey, G. (Ed.). (1974). Philosophy in the open. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Weil, S. (1977). Reflections on the right use of school studies with a view to the love of God. In G. A. Panichas (Ed.), The Simone Weil reader (pp. 44–52). New York: David Mackay. Williams, B. (2002). Truth and truthfulness: An essay in genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Winch, P. (1958). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy. London: Routledge.

Chapter 12

Revisiting Achilles’ Sadness that No Method Can Be Found Educational Research: To Whom Should We Talk, for What Purpose and in What Way? Paul Smeyers

12.1 Introduction Though qualitative methods are now regarded with more respect than ever before, mainstream educational research is still dominated by the paradigm of ‘real research’. There is still the general suspicion that in one way or another, what is offered by social science research, including qualitative research, cannot adequately satisfy the need for proper knowledge. What looms behind this concern may be captured by the following false assumption: not understanding everything is equated with not understanding anything. What some writers long for is something similar to the law-like explanation and ‘prediction’ of the natural sciences.1 This desire parallels that of philosophers for whom philosophy has to amount to valid reasoning warranted by methods of conceptual analysis (necessary and sufficient conditions) and logical rules of induction and deduction. This desire is also captured in the quest for an overarching metaphysical system.2 The naive means-end schema that is implicit to these kinds of research has been criticized by philosophers of education. Thus one can even observe a renewed attention to the innovative role of educational research of introducing a ‘utopian’ perspective. It is also the case that a number of historians and sociologists of educational science have demonstrated that the preference within the social and behavioural sciences for what was seen as a superior quantitative approach did not simply rest on developments within these disciplines. It also derived from external changes associated with the social context in general and with the dominance, in particular, of meritocratic values accompanying the rise of neo-liberal society. So why is it that this preoccupation with method still characterizes so much of the educational debate? In other words, if the arguments of the philosophers and historians who have dealt with so many issues concerning educational research fail

P. Smeyers (B) Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]

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to settle the debate (assuming that their arguments are valid), why is it that it seems impossible to move on to a discussion of education itself? One answer to this is that we are unwilling to live with complexity. Because we are always looking for theories and hypotheses to be tested, we do away with particularity, and this presupposes more homogeneity than can in fact be found. Instead of looking for a mode of understanding based on the ‘practice’ of education steeped, as it is, in everyday language, a move is made in the other direction. And thus, as some methods are able to deliver up theories, the preference for such methods becomes clear. A second answer is that often what one really is interested in is ‘usefulness’ over and above other concerns regarding what is important for human life (what is relevant, what makes sense, without necessarily being useful for something else). Again it seems that similar methods are able to offer what one is interested in. Thus the so-called realistic turn tends to have led in the direction of empiricism and of ‘what works’. This particular agenda and method give the promise of progress to the study of education. One could also say that educational problems were rephrased in more positivist terms in order to produce ‘results’ – there is a presupposition that such results will enable one to deal better with (i.e., to predict or to anticipate, in other words to intervene in) the issues that education presents. Here ‘means’ (i.e., methods) are treated as value-neutral and a discussion of ‘ends’ is excluded from the debate, because the definition of the ‘good life’ has to be left open.3 As argued above, philosophers and historians of education have criticized the kinds of educational research that are based on the stances described above and have dealt with their implicit presuppositions. For instance, groups such as the Research Community ‘Philosophy and history of the discipline of education: Evaluation and evolution of the criteria for educational research’, established by the Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen) has focused on the study of the different modes and paradigms of educational research. Thus attention was given in its annual meetings to various topics, such as the following: the use of particular research methodologies, methods or techniques within the educational context (and their pros and cons); the implication of new forms of technology or new ways of communicating for educational research; the justification of particular positions within philosophy and history of education vis à vis other (for instance ‘empirical’) research in this field; the relation of philosophy and history of education to ‘pure’ philosophy, to ‘pure’ history, literature, aesthetics and other relevant areas such as economics, sociology and psychology; the justification of educational research within society at large; and finally, the curricular history of educational science as an academic discipline. The academics involved in this network share the belief that there is a place within the discipline of education for foundationalist approaches. This is not, however, to respond to a need for a (new) foundation, but to systematically study a particular area from a discipline-oriented stance. Yet it is sad to observe that in spite of the rigorous work carried out by the network, its output has had little effect on the overall climate of educational research. Such research continues to be conducted as if nothing had happened, nothing had been dealt with, and nothing was said.

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I want to draw attention to a point (in passing) that merits particular attention. The intricacies (pertaining to educational research) that need to be accounted for do not only rely on the nature of education itself and on what is to be understood by research ‘methods’; philosophical and historical approaches are not free from the contexts of the social discourses and practices in which they are embedded. Thus an even more complex picture emerges.

12.2 The Educational Realm and the Historical Embeddedness of Arguments Going back to our initial question it seems that we have to focus on two issues: – Why do the arguments developed by philosophers and historians of education remain to a large extent sterile vis-à-vis the educational realm? – How are the arguments themselves to be received (what is their nature), given that they too must necessarily be seen as historically embedded in both a particular academic tradition and a more general cultural climate, a spirit of the times. I would like to offer two clusters of answers that relate to areas discussed earlier, namely, unwillingness to live with complexity and the category of ‘usefulness’. The discussion of these clusters will not highlight quite the same points. First (cluster A), the proofs and arguments that feature in critiques of educational research often focus on what particular writers seem to be unaware of, namely, issues/areas that they have forgotten to address that still need accounting for. The critic will therefore draw attention to a particular point that a researcher overlooked or did not want to deal with. Consequently, the critic will introduce this point and thereby add another dimension to the discussion. This involves an attempt to illustrate how one’s own position is more true to the nature of what one is dealing with in accordance with the way in which one conceptualizes what is at stake. The differentiations one makes or the stance one foregrounds may be thought of in terms of a kind of wisdom that has been forgotten or ignored. Second (cluster B), one imposes a particular logic or set of rules that frame the debate. By implication this will exclude some colleagues or other educational researchers (including the empirical researchers one is criticizing) from the discussion. The following quotation from Lewis Carroll captures what I have in mind here: “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiles contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice know-down argument’ for you!” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice know-down argument’,” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

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“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things”. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master – that’s all.” (Carroll, L., 1977, p. 196)

I will return to this issue, but first, let us say a little more about the first cluster. The issues that emerge from the first cluster relate to Peter Winch’s discussion of Lewis Carroll’s What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. This discussion occupies a central place in Winch’s book The Idea of a Social Science. Winch introduces the problem (which I quote here at length) as follows: Achilles and the Tortoise are discussing three propositions, A, B, and Z, which are so related that Z follows logically from A and B. The Tortoise asks Achilles to treat him as if he accepted A and B as true but did not yet accept the truth of the hypothetical proposition (C) ‘If A and B be true, Z must be true’, and to force him, logically, to accept Z as true. Achilles begins by asking the Tortoise to accept C, which the Tortoise does; Achilles then writes in his notebook: ‘A B C (If A and B are true, Z must be true) Z.’ He now says to the Tortoise: ‘If you accept A and B and C, you must accept Z’, when the Tortoise asks why he must, Achilles replies: ‘Because it follows logically from them. If A and B and C are true, Z must be true (D). You don’t dispute that, I imagine?’ The Tortoise agrees to accept D if Achilles will write it down. The following dialogue then ensues. Achilles says: ‘Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z’. ‘Do I?’ said the Tortoise innocently. ‘Let’s make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refuse to accept Z?’ ‘Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it!’ Achilles triumphantly replied. ‘Logic would tell you “You can’t help yourself. Now that you’ve accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z”. So you’ve no choice, you see.’ ‘Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down,’ said the Tortoise. ‘So enter it in your book, please. We will call it (E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true. Until I’ve granted that, of course, I needn’t grant Z. So it’s quite a necessary step you see?’ ‘I see,’ said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone. The story ends some months later with the narrator returning to the spot and finding the pair still sitting there. The notebook is nearly full.

Winch comments on this as follows: The moral of this, if I may be boring enough to point it, is that the actual process of drawing an inference, which is after all at the heart of logic, is something which cannot be represented as a logical formula; that, moreover, a sufficient justification for inferring a conclusion from a set of premises is to see that the conclusion does in fact follow. To insist on any further justification is not to be extra cautious; it is to display a misunderstanding of what inference is. Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning to do something. Now the point, which Oakeshott is making, is really a generalization of this; where Carroll spoke only of logical inference, Oakeshott is making a similar point about human activities generally.4 (Winch, 1958, pp. 55–57)

Many philosophers of education have criticized the language of instrumentalism central to both quantitative and qualitative educational research. Often this critique

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articulates the argument that insufficient attention is given to ‘ends’ themselves. The discussion of ‘ends’ is therefore divorced from scientific and/or rational debate. Some philosophers argue that this language seems to leave out the ethical dimension altogether. In many cases Aristotle’s concept of a practice (and its recent reformulations by MacIntyre, Taylor and others) is invoked to argue for a different stance. By drawing attention to the regress Carroll’s example focuses on, we may take the critique in a different direction. The position ‘That all there is to practical rationality is instrumental rationality’ can be criticized in a more technical sense. Since instrumental rationality involves a higher-order commitment to combine willing an end with taking the necessary means, it therefore cannot, on pain of regress, be added to (or included in) one of the elements to be combined. Therefore instrumentalism cannot be supported. This entails a criticism of the traditional views of science as elaborated by Hempel and Popper, views that feed into the work of many educational researchers. From this, it does not follow that we must renounce (altogether) the normative force of principles of reasoning such as modus ponens or that there is something wrong with the idea that we learn to do science. Neither should the ‘sadness’ in the tone of Achilles be interpreted as a legitimate kind of scepticism or a justification of it. The point is, however, that ‘judging’ as a necessary characteristic of practice is highlighted by the ‘Achilles’ example, which implies that one has to have learnt (mastered) to judge in a particular way in order to take part in a practice (in the case of argumentation), to be able ‘to go on’. This too invokes a different concept of practice, i.e. an Aristotelian one, but it does this not because technical rationality leaves out the ends, but because even technical rationality would not make sense without a context in which one had learnt how to apply it. The point made in cluster A basically comes down to the rationale that in order for an argument to work, the participants have to see the point. In many cases the arguments of philosophers and/or historians of education may not be effective simply because educational researchers do not appreciate what is going on in that area. They are so preoccupied with other issues that they cannot see how such contributions, which are highly critical of means-end reasoning, are relevant at all. Though related, the point made in cluster B highlights another dimension to this issue. Here the willingness to interact, i.e., discuss and engage seems to be lacking on the part of philosophers and historians of education. Might we say that such figures withdraw from the general debate, relying on insights that only they are privy to, insights that are often backed up by methodological claims (such as the historical method, discourse analysis, concept clarification, etc.) used to arrive at the truth of what they profess?

12.3 Further Specifications Concerning Educational Research and a Preliminary Conclusion Concerning the debate about educational research some further specifications of these general points can be made. I submit that the discussion we find ourselves in concerning educational research confronts us with a number of ‘insurmountable’ problems because of the following:

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(1) it is easier to attack method than content (the way the discussion is driven provides an alibi for not putting one’s cards on the table); (2) the language of educational research is basically no different from the language of education in that it tries to convince the opponent; (3) the issue is to some extent a circular process; (4) what philosophers and historians of education argue for uses a concept of practice that has become silenced by the climate of performativity and has therefore lost is appeal; (5) finally, that in as far as philosophers/historians can be aware of the presuppositions behind their own work, they must either follow a route they do not want to take (a view from nowhere) or renounce full acceptance of the consequences following on from the fact that their interpretation is of an evocative nature, which according to many weakens their position. This is a route that many writers are reluctant to take. Let me therefore offer a preliminary conclusion. The overall consequence of this discussion seems to be that the reconstruction of the discipline offered by philosophers and historians of education will have to be seen in the same sense as any other contribution to an inquiry aimed at the formation of practical insights and judgements. Such offerings will thus have to be evaluated on their own merits.5 Because of this, the whole notion of ‘method’6 (in educational research including in philosophy and history of education) must be dispensed with. Moreover the sadness that may accompany this loss should be welcomed. We might also note that this reconstruction cannot come about unless there is some engagement with practical educational issues. Philofsophers/historians would have to take part in the discourse of parents, teachers and other researchers. This form of engagement would include looking for alternatives to the problems that make sense to everyone participating in such an inclusive discourse.7 To substantiate these claims use will be made of some of the results and ideas drawn from published collections by the Research Community (Cf. Smeyers & Depaepe, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008).8 I will also draw on the material these contributions are based upon. Though the various points presented in this chapter are relevant to other areas of educational research, I want to look at our own field9 and see whether the notions of ‘imposing a particular logic’ on education or being ‘more true its the nature’ apply there as well.10

12.4 Cluster A Answers: Seeing the Point of What is Argued for 12.4.1 Offering Differentiations and Indicating ‘What Has Been Forgotten’ Typically, when Depaepe and Van Gorp (2003) examine the research careers and influence of four leading educational scholars in Belgium during the first half of

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the 20th century, they argue that above all else, these figures shared an emancipatory view of the power of science. This is so despite the fact that the actual impact of their work tended to reinforce a well-ordered, rationally managed and scientifically supported society. Or, when Popkewitz (2003) examines the US educational sciences as an assemblage of cultural practices that order, differentiate and regulate the inner characteristics and capabilities (in other words, the soul) of the child, his analyses try to enable an understanding of the educational sciences as inscription devices that function as intellectual tools to map the interior of the self, rendering the characteristics of the individual visible and amenable to government. Or, when Marshall, Peters and Irwin (2003) examine the shifting national educational research policies in New Zealand during a number of administrations, government commissions and reports, they conclude that in spite of wide-ranging differences in ideology, the inexorable trend has been an increase in the discourses of scientism, efficiency and usefulness in the shaping of criteria for government-funded research. Similarly, when Fendler (2006), focuses on the US federal standards for educational research as found in publications of the What Works Clearinghouse (US Department of Education, http://www.whatworks.ed.gov /) she observes that these research standards are based almost exclusively on the book Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Research by Campbell and Stanley (1963). Indicating that one of the foundational assumptions underlying the random-sample research design is that the results of such research are meant to be generalizable beyond any particular research study, she concludes that generalizability has to be understood as a local phenomenon, not generalizable to other times and places.

12.4.2 Drawing Further Implications of What Is at Stake In many cases one finds not only reminders of what is really at stake, but authors also point to the implications of particular positions. For example where Tröhler (2003) discusses the argument against Dewey’s pragmatism and its notion of the citizen in the development of German educational sciences, i.e., the geisteswissenshaftliche Pädagogik, where education retains autonomy from social, economic and political contexts, he argues that the notion of Bildung (during the 1920s Weimar Republic) embodied skepticism towards democracy. Or when Levering (2003) deals with contemporary traditions of educational research and indicates that they suffer from a ‘chronic disease’; he also identifies the optimistic belief that research can model or engineer the individual. Similarly, Fendler (2003), when analysing three influential traditions that have contributed to common understandings of the term ‘community’, argues that in some cases forging identity and facilitating empowerment comes at a price because these discourse practices simultaneously effect exclusion and assimilation. Thus she warns that the rhetoric of community can serve as sheep’s clothing for the wolves of exclusion, normalization and antagonism. In another paper Fendler (Fendler, 2008) offers a critical analysis of norm-referenced standards in educational research and schooling and questions the relationship between education

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and empowerment. Another example is Cuypers (2003), who argues that the usual postmodernist challenges can be met. First, the metaphysical vulnerability admittedly inherent in the correspondence theory of truth can be avoided by drawing on Tarski’s semantic truth-theory. Second, foundationalism in epistemic justification can be avoided by way of a persistent policy of fallibilism. Third, the perspectivistic dangers of this policy can be fended off on the strength of a realist theory of knowledge invoking Popper’s notion of verisimilitude. Other examples are, for instance, as follows: Black (2007), who concludes that technology may create us; Tröhler (2008), who observes that ideas of progress and concepts of education have been closely connected; Vansieleghem and Vanobbergen (2008), who outline that progressive education too is characterized by the historical reality nowadays that forces us to relate ourselves in a particular way to both others and ourselves; Hodgson (2008), who claims that ‘normalisation’ is now discussed in terms of the demand on the contemporary subject to orient the self in a certain relationship to learning informed by the need for competitiveness in the European and global context; Watts (2008), who asserts that by framing social problems as educational problems and by leaving higher education to deal with them, there is a risk that educational researchers are seduced by the government’s policies and fail to notice that the strategies they generate all too often perpetuate the very social injustices they are intended to overcome; Popkewitz (2008), who claims that the expertise of the social and educational sciences is a particular historical practice that emerges in the 19th century and mutates into the present. He argues that science has two overlapping qualities in modern societies. First, science involves a calculated approach to knowledge of social and personal relations. This approach manifests itself in research about learning. Second, ‘science’ can also refer to the knowledge brought into daily life for ordering personal experiences, such as the ‘rationality’ involved in planning one’s biography or the way in which we think about ‘learning’; and finally, Masschelein and Simons (2008), who elaborate on how today’s entrepreneurship implies an adaptation ethics based on self-mobilization through learning. They show how advanced liberalism draws upon a kind of learning apparatus to secure adaptation for each and all.

12.4.3 Offering Additions to the Research Agenda On the basis of their analyses, many contributions outline imperatives for future change insisting that new and previously ignored issues be dealt with. For instance, Peters and Araya (2007) conclude that in order for educational institutions to effectively serve the needs of the 21st century, they will have to be transformed within educational networks. Burbules (2007), in thinking about the online environment as a space, a continuous location where people spend time, interact, and do things, draws attention to the factors that shape the kind of collaboration that develops. He considers which voices are dominant, and which are marginalized, how disputes are resolved and whether the knowledge produced is viewed as shared or

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proprietary. Lambeir and Ramaekers (2007) show how words can slow you down, how the concept of ‘attention’ and ‘authorship’ change, and how ‘blogs’ enable researchers to spread new messages (an interesting and complementary alternative way for researches to publish ideas they wish to share with a larger public). From a different angle, Bridges and Watts (2007) add to the agenda when they suggest that it is, perhaps, too early to assess whether the ‘network society’ and its supporting technologies constitute a thoroughly radical innovation in social practice on a scale which disrupts earlier epistemological assumptions. They remain ready to acknowledge that this possibility continues to be open. In their turn, Coessens and Van Bendegem (2008) ask whether educational researchers are aware of the merging of the processes of globalization, democratization and postmodernist conceptions or whether they are just caught up in current practices and forms of transmission of cultural capital. Thus they ask whether there is a place for a really reflexive and ethical attitude concerning the educationaliztion of cultural capital.

12.5 Cluster B Answers: One Should Take into Account . . . 12.5.1 Prioritizing Something Else on the Agenda The majority of arguments put forward by members of the research group are dedicated to ‘simply’ changing the agenda of education and/or educational research. Thus for instance Postma (2003) draws our attention to the intrinsic value of nature. He is critical of particular notions of liberal autonomy and authenticity and thus of certain fundamental assumptions of modern educational projects with active choice at their heart. Postma argues that we thus seclude ourselves from the very sources of authentic identification, among them, the silence, beauty and inspiration we find in our natural environment. In order to fulfil its ethical mandate, educational research must take the intrinsic value of nature into account. Focusing on the relationship between the self and the other, Standish (2003), who draws on Taylor and Levinas, argues that certain understandings of identity politics foreclose ethical relations by constructing totalizing and, therefore, limited possibilities for recognition. Given the necessity of a proper (my italics) understanding of the social in social science, he argues that educational research that does not take this complexity into account must be unsound. Elsewhere (Standish, 2008), he emphasizes that the strengths of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s approach indicate richer ways of thinking about education. Smith (2006) draws attention to problems within the tradition of technical reason, of which the current emphasis on ‘what works’ is a recognizable by-product. Drawing on the very different tradition of Aristotelian phronesis or practical judgement, he argues that such judgement is vital and ineluctable in educational practice and inquiry. Though many features of judgement are susceptible to misapprehension, such misapprehension only reveals the dominance of perspectives drawn from technical reason. In another paper, Smith (2008) claims that metaphoricity, and even

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rhetoricity, are ineliminable from philosophy as from other uses of language and that the boundary between philosophy and literature is not a secure one. To acknowledge this is to admit a richer range of language to thinking about questions of education and, thus, to conceive education itself more richly and with greater sensitivity to its diversity, nuances and differences. This understanding of things also appears (though it is somewhat hidden) in Smith’s (2003) examination of current policy efforts to base school quality, effectiveness and improvement upon evidence-based research. He states that while this particular empirical conception of statistical and quantitative research methods is supposed to identify what works in school, it may in fact work against school improvement and the quality of education. One can observe similar sentiments in Marshall’s (2006) study of the introduction of oral Maori language in the national examinations of New Zealand. The ‘What Works’ approach did not work and could not work, he says, because it foreclosed on the aspirations of the Maori people in their quest to maintain their language, essentially an oral language. Similarly Smedts (2007) indicates how experts’ advice is formulated in means-to-an-end terms and follows the line of technical reason – that this technical reason normalizes parenthood and introduces (rather than reduces) fear because parents cannot live up to the advice they are given. She goes on to note that some parents break through normalizing tendencies by introducing the need for practical judgement. In another paper (Smedts, 2008) Smedts proposes that educational research should acknowledge that the meaning of being a parent might differ from the ways in which parenthood has been defined. Recognizing this state of affairs may alter the practice of educational researchers who could encourage parents to be more self-reliant and fully attentive to what technology means and how it may be exceeded by one’s life experiences. Coessens and Van Bendegem (2007) argue that modernity has offered (and still offers) various ways in which the capacity for reflexivity and self-reflexive awareness can be put to work. Moreover, in accepting the lessons of modernity they suggest that researchers should become meta-modern artists. They want us to merge ‘engineery’ dreams with the ‘bricolage’ (the heterogeneity and flexibility, contingency and irony) of society, knowledge and responsibility so as to create discursive networks whilst re-imagining education under conditions of globalization, flexibility and technoculture. Smeyers and Depaepe (2007) emphasize the need for an interpretative stance in educational research in order to do justice to the nature of education. With this in mind, they discuss the involvement of the researcher in the moral debate that is always and necessarily present. This reinterprets Wittgenstein’s dictum to bring back words from their metaphysical to their everyday use, and opens up the sphere of being responsive to the situation the researcher as well as the practitioner finds herself in. Hodgson and Standish (2007) indicate the kinds of activity (the kinds of conversation, of engagement with texts and problems) that can assist our thinking within the context of educational research methods courses. Being ‘defiantly prescriptive’ they translate their ideas into practice offering twelve points of advice which include: ‘Set the focus not on the problems you want to solve . . .’ and ‘Remember that PhDs can come to easily’. Finally, in his contribution, Keiner

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(2006) suggests that uncertainty may serve as a basic category providing the opportunity to justify ‘why what cannot work, probably will work’. He borrows this categorical assumption from educational practice.

12.5.2 Seeing the Point of What Appeals (or Has Lost Its Appeal) Depaepe and Van Gorp (2006), whilst focusing on the ‘good practices’ of Jozef Emiel Verheyen, document how his narratives about the New Education were welcomed as long as they did not hinder modernization. Verheyen used the poetic and ‘romantic’ but common (and canonized) language of the New Education, in which teachers easily recognized themselves. The message of the progressive heritage of child-centredness, with Rousseau at the origin, was the pedagogical credo teachers wanted to hear. In order to be able to be of service to modernity, aphoristic language was stripped from the underlying conceptual frameworks so that it became useful for everyone’s purposes and could be integrated within its own structure. Similarly, Tröhler (2006) who concentrates on ‘what works’ as a slogan, reconstructs the emergence of this new educational language and demonstrates that it is a weak fit with democratic cultures, which are, for example, represented by local school boards. Thus he also deems the possible effects of this language and its slogan ‘what works’ to be rather limited, for there is an important difference between long-term historical and cultural processes and much shorter-term fashions that resonate through the dominant new language that has been spoken for the last 20 years. Cornelissen, Simons and Masschelein (2007) deal with the network infrastructure and identify it as a space that mobilizes doctoral students asking that they display an ongoing preparedness to ‘forget’ the past and constantly reposition themselves. And in their dealing with punishment, Herman, Depaepe, Simon, and Van Gorp (2007) observe that a policy of discouraging punishment ensued on a rhetorical level and could not be directly integrated into teachers’ pedagogical repertoires of action. Adherence to the time-honoured ‘grammar of educationalising’ prevailed, and punishment formed an unmistakeable part of that. The result was a slow (but sure) shift from physical punishment to more politically and pedagogically acceptable forms of psychological punishment.

12.5.3 Stressing Belonging to a Community of Researchers Others draw explicit attention to the practice of educational research. Bridges (2003) argues for instance that a research group is a group of people joined in a network of mutual obligations (created by epistemological and social conditions), which shape the integrity of the group. Smeyers and Depaepe (2006) show how the formation of groups can have negative effects when he directs attention to Project STAR, the Tennessee class-size study, generally regarded as an illustration that large, long-term randomized controlled field trials can be carried out successfully in education. He

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points out that it is difficult to see how these long-term studies can accommodate for historical/situational change, particularly if the favoured design (i.e., randomized controlled field trials) seems to ignore the fact that teachers deal with class situations (or learning situations) in a creative manner. Thus he suggests that it is not inconceivable that the community of researchers has created a kind of industry, which generates its own needs and answers its own questions. Bridges, in a later paper (2006), shows how a discourse replete with phrases such as ‘international’, ‘internationally refereed’, ‘internationally benchmarked’ and ‘world class’ mingles intimately with, and sometimes apparently substitutes for, the discourse of ‘quality’ in a way which is confused and unsatisfactory. According to Bridges, these discourses marginalize forms of social science research, which arguably provide the best chance of informing practice in a manner that is both contextually sensitive and convincing to practitioners. Stone (2006) shows that ways of understanding what is thought to ‘work’ are often normalized, that is, taken for granted. She goes on to point out that when something is taken for granted it is difficult to change. She analyses and compares typical graduate research training in ‘normal science’ and in education. Thus she draws comparisons (be they explicit or implicit) between training in science and in education. Finally, Marshall (2007) concludes that though there is little doubt that IT has brought tremendous benefits, the theory and assumptions that have come with it about human beings also issue a warning about what might happen to individual persons in the future. Knowledge about the self was not only improved through collegiality but knowledge for the improvement of the self was also advanced through it. He argues that if we do not seek collegiality, then we may lose a great deal.

12.5.4 Stressing Belonging to the Community of All Those Involved in the Educational Debate Bridges (2003) draws attention to the fact that the processes of defining, prescribing or negotiating the meaning of terms themselves reflect different kinds of power relations between the ‘analyst’ and other members of the linguistic community. Burbules and Lambeir (2003) argue similarly that educational research shares (along with other fields of inquiry) an intrinsic interest in interactions across many categories of phenomena. Ramaekers (2003) argues that in view of the diversity of perspectives in our ever-growing multicultural world, the classical quest for certainty can no longer be a fruitful approach for educational theory. In the light of this, he proposes a reappraisal of skepticism itself. This is inspired by Cavell’s interpretation of the work of the later Wittgenstein, according to which education as initiation is not so much seen as initiation into knowledge but rather as an initiation into a community. What is important here is not so much epistemic agreement about the truth of propositions but rather our existential agreement in what we say and do in the language community. Finally, Coessens and Van Bendegem (2006) redirect attention to some of the characteristics of science in general. Starting from

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an analysis of what scientific research and practices can (not) and could (not) do, domain-internal and domain-external limits of the scientific enterprise are tackled. Four areas are analysed: (i) the difficulty of translation – from reality to science and from science to society; (ii) the force of the tool or the mediation of interpretation by models and theories; (iii) the time lag, as scientific, societal and human timescales do not always match; (iv) the presence of the context (scientific, cultural or ideological).

12.6 Educational Research: Rhetoric, Evocation and Commitment What is being argued for in using these examples/illustrations is reminiscent of Polkinghorne’s claims concerning the field of ‘narrative inquiry’ where he stresses that in a ‘narrative analysis’ the researcher is not (as in an ‘analysis of narratives’) looking for common features in different cases in order to define them within a broader category Rather, she arranges events and actions by showing how they contribute to the thematic line of the narrative (the narrative structure that shows how different events contribute to a narrative) and thus brings out an order and a significance that were not apparent in the data as such. The result is not so much an account of the actual events from an objective point of view as a series of constructions deriving from the research itself. To some extent what researchers and those who reflect upon research are doing is circular. But this kind of circularity is not to be dismissed for it is characteristic of all explanation. Science, as for that matter any kind of explanation, will always take the data which are to be interpreted to a higher stage of abstraction, thus invoking a particular theoretical construction which makes sense. This is a circular process in which each level is taken to account for, to derive from, or to elaborate on the other. Thus instances are explained by patterns and patterns by instances. Dick Pels makes a similar point: “. . . the epistemological break between science and (scientific) common sense, or between observer and observed, does not turn upon the conventional distinction between ‘merely partial’ views and views that claim the ability to totalize, but upon the somewhat unconventional distinction between views that are self-consciously circular and views (both everyday and sociological-scientific) that deny this circularity in order to claim a ‘straight’ transcendent foundation” (Pels, 2003, p. 176). Going back to the two questions that were raised and the clusters of answers that were suggested, what follows from this more generally11 ? What can we affirm? (6) That the dominant mode of doing research (and how this is taught and learnt) should be a never-ending quest involving reflection on ‘method’ (which is another way of saying that there is not a method but only methods conceived as sound arguments, but also that we should not have an altogether dismissive attitude towards method (the way to proceed). Also, what is at stake here is the

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danger of becoming unintelligible that may result from giving up on science and its form of ‘rationality’ for that which resembles fiction or comes down to delusion or fortune-telling); (7) that the logic of educational research is of the world and should not aspire to be off the world (characterized by ‘crystalline purity’) which would result in neglecting the force of context; (8) that research should be seen as a performative intervention; (9) that educational research only adds one voice to the ongoing dialogue of all those involved. This does not imply that values should be placed high on the agenda of education ‘again’ (if that were possible at all) but that a particular way of dealing with reality that obfuscates (or even silences) this dimension should be resisted. The real danger is not so much that values play a less important role but that we get used to or convinced of the fact that we could speak of reality via an apparatus that does not take them into account. Otherwise, what is meaningful and significant and what makes sense for us is excluded and so-called neutral concepts that identify what is effective and efficient set the stage and become the only reality we can conceive of. This presupposes, however, that the logic of this reflection, can still appeal to those who are involved – that the ‘tortoise’ will open up and allow herself to be convinced. It is questionable whether ‘Humpty Dumpty’ would welcome it. Thus a new kind of sadness overwhelms ‘Achilles’. It is similar to but more profound than the sadness pertaining to logic, which could be surpassed or transgressed. What remains for us to do is perhaps nothing more than redefining the field along the lines of what John Elliott argued for, which not only comes down to giving up methodology and ‘method’, but giving up research into education in favour of educational research. For Elliott, educational research is “. . . a form of inquiry aimed at the formation of practical insights and judgments” (2006, p. 169). The knockdown argument we are left with is thus of a rhetorical or evocative kind. It finds a foothold in seduction and attraction in order to instil a new way in which something may make sense to us. The saying goes that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Similarly, the strength of an argument depends on the weakest link. Thus a genuine disappointment that all links are made of words looms on the horizon. It is echoed by a touch of sadness. Words, words, words.12

Notes 1. That this area has its own problems such as temporal asymmetry, and the so-called frame problem is something that one happily tends to forget. 2. That for many writers, educational research that is of an interpretative kind (such as history or philosophy of education) raises even more doubts goes without saying. 3. A third answer, which I will not deal with here, is the possibility that advocates of deconstruction and postmodernist writing generally (along with the negative dialectic that goes with these approaches/positions) refuse to take a stance in relation to many educational

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issues, because they do not want to prioritize a particular take on reality (See Smeyers, 2009 for an elaboration on this point). Though deconstruction and postmodernism present potential for a theoretical counter-move, writers who draw on these areas do not want to argue for a particular stance as being more rational or reasonable. Derrida’s deconstruction is paradigmatic here. Deconstruction opens up an ethics sensitive to the demands not of presence but of absence and not of identity but of difference. Unlike the mainstream work on the metaphysics of morals, deconstruction does not invoke universal, rational or natural laws. It does not answer to them but assumes responsibility for them and investigates their extraordinary power to marginalize everything that seems particular, irrational or unnatural in their light. Deconstruction is set in motion by the responsibility to the rights of the different. Derrida argues: “The event being singular each time, to the measure of the otherness of the other, each time one must invent, not without concepts, but by going each time beyond the concept, without any guarantee nor certainty. This obligation can only be double, contradictory, and conflictual, since it calls for a responsibility and not a moral or political technique. . .. Each time, one must invent in order to betray as little as possible. . . with no previous guarantee whatsoever of success” (Derrida & Ewald, 1995, p. 288). The result of this is ‘justice,’ the experience of the aporia, of the impossible, of the undecidable. Deconstruction involves singularity, always demanded, never accomplished. “It concerns the ‘other as other,’ in a unique situation, irreducible to principles of duty, rights, or objective law” (Kearney, 1993, p. 36). Justice is, for Derrida, the idea of a gift without exchange, of a relation to the other that is utterly irreducible to the normal rules of circulation, gratitude, recognition or symmetry. That is why it appears to imply a certain kind of madness or mystique. Here Winch refers to one of his earlier arguments (Winch, 1958, p. 55): “This leads Oakeshott to say, again quite correctly, that a form of human activity can never be summed up in a set of explicit precepts. The activity ‘goes beyond’ the precepts. For instance, the precepts have to be applied in practice and, although we may formulate another, higher-order set of precepts prescribing how the first set is to be applied, we cannot go further along this road without finding ourselves on the slippery slope pointed out by Lewis Carroll in his paper, justly celebrated amongst logicians, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” Evidently, it is possible to continue to practise philosophy and/or history of education in the way most academics are used to. However, if one accepts that philosophy and history of education should speak to all those involved in educational contexts, the overall consequence that is spelled out should be accepted. This is equally true of this chapter which professes to make explicit a direction in which the debate should be going. It too is evocative and rather than expressing a logical set of consequences which have to be accepted, takes the form of an appeal. (This also applies to the argument that has been developed concerning the characteristics of ‘judging’ that accompany any kind of practice.) In the sense that a particular method is prioritized over others. That this transgresses the classical debates between the a priori and the a posteriori, between facts and values, between epistemology, ethics and anthropology, as well as between theory and practice, goes without saying. Moreover, this position also departs from the debate concerning the priority of the epistemological compared to the ethical order (or vice versa). All references are made to the published material indicating the year of publication (thus not to the proceedings of and/or the conferences themselves). This brings forward the problem of underdetermination. What is taken up here embraces a contextualist view about knowledge (as developed for instance by Williams, 2001) and is consistent with the ‘Situated Philosophy of Education’ stance (as developed by Burbules & Abowitz, 2008). As the clusters (and their subdivisions) are closely related, the category in which a particular example is placed is not that significant. The illustration serves as a way to make explicit a particular dimension present in the argument developed by the work of (the) author(s) that is/are put under scrutiny.

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11. The result of the analysis in sections 4 and 5 should not surprise the reader: on the one hand it is a meta-analysis of what philosophers and historians of education argue for; on the other hand it may be asked ‘What else can or should they do – make more sophisticated distinctions, look into the presuppositions of particular agendas or try to see the implications of these?’ Yet it may be interesting to note that, more often then not, they (try to) change the agenda, sometimes using the expression ‘I am interested in. . .’. For this approach to gain any purchase then a perceptive community of scholars and practitioners must be in place that is willing to take what they argue for on board. Such a community must be able to take on board that which is not simply logically entailed. The implications of this are spelled out below; see (6)–(9). As argued in footnote 5 this receptiveness must necessarily be applied to this chapter. 12. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act 2, Scene 2.

References Burbules, N., & Abowitz, L. (2008, April). A situated philosophy of education. Paper presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, Cambridge, MA. Carroll, L. (1977). The complete works of Lewis Carroll. London: Nonesuch Press. Derrida, J., & Ewald, F. (1995). A certain “madness” must watch over thinking. Educational Theory, 45, 273–291. Elliott, J. (2006). Educational research as a form of democratic rationality. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 40, 169–185. Kearney, R. (1993). Derrida’s ethical re-turn. In G.B. Madison (Ed.), Working through Derrida (pp. 28–59). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Pels, D. (2003). Unhastening science. Autonomy and reflexivity in the social theory of knowledge. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Smeyers, P. (2009, April). Chains of dependency: On the disenchantment and the illusion of being free at last. Paper presented at the Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2003). Beyond empiricism. On criteria for educational research. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2006). Educational research: Why ‘what works’ doesn’t work. Dordrecht: Springer. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2007). Educational research: Networks and technologies. Dordrecht: Springer. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2008). Educational research: The educationalisation of social problems. Dordrecht: Springer. Winch, P. (1958). The idea of a social science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Williams, M. (2001). Problems of knowledge: A critical introduction to epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 13

Reasoning from Educational Research to Policy David Bridges

13.1 Educational Research and Policy: The Context This chapter1 is written in a context in which there has been publicly expressed discontent among the educational policy community about the failure of educational research to engage effectively with and to inform policy (Hargreaves, 1996; Hillage, Pearson, Anderson, & Tamkin, 1998; Tooley & Darby, 1998; Blunkett, 2000), echoed slightly less volubly by discontent among the educational research community with the failure of policy makers to take any notice of their research. These complaints have been associated with a number of developments in educational research and its relationship with policy formation, including the following: (i) The promotion by government (in the USA and the UK) and others of ‘evidence based policy and practice’ on a model derived from medicine (see on this National Audit Office, 2001; No Child Left Behind Act, 2001/2002; Hargreaves, 1997; Slavin, 2002, 2004, 2008; Oancea & Pring, 2008 and the following websites in particular: EPPI-Centre (2006) Systematic reviews: Methods. Online at http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Default.aspx?tabid=89 [accessed 3 October 2006] and What Works Clearinghouse, USA http://ies.ed. gov/ncee/wwc/ [accessed 6 January 2008]); (ii) The development of structures and practices designed to give ‘users’ and ‘stakeholders’ more of a say in the priorities which shape educational research funding (through their participation in decisions about research funding and through requirements on those bringing forward research proposals to demonstrate user engagement) and evaluation (through, for example, the participation of ‘users’ in the UK Research Assessment Exercise);

D. Bridges (B) University of East Anglia, Norwich, England e-mail: [email protected]

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(iii) Empirical enquiry into the actual processes of policy formation – asking among other things, what are the sources of opinion which do in fact influence policy (Ball, 1990; Ozga, 2000; Whitty, 2002, 2006). These developments leave a number of fundamental questions unanswered, however. The promotion of ‘evidence based policy and practice’ has been extensively critiqued primarily on the grounds that it adopts too narrow a definition of the kind of evidence which might (and should?) inform policy, as well as on the grounds that it has too crude a view of the relationship between evidence and policy (see, for example, Smeyers & Depaepe, 2006; Bridges, Smeyers, & Smith, 2008; Bridges, 2008). Its promotion nevertheless continues unabated – another testimony to the disregard by policy makers2 of educational research. These critiques prompt the questions ‘what kinds of evidence can and should inform policy?’ and – central to this chapter– ‘what view should we have of the manner in which different kinds of research evidence might and should inform policy?’ The development of structures and practices aimed at ensuring ‘user engagement’ with educational research point towards social and political processes designed to achieve the proximity of research to policy and hence its influence in policy. These processes may serve, in some measure, to ensure the relevance of research to the concerns of policy makers (alternatively construed as the subservience of the research community to the priorities set by policy makers) and to ensure that the outcomes of the research is drawn to the attention of at least some of those in policy-making positions. But, even if these processes were to guarantee a hearing for the research, and there is not a lot of evidence that they do, they do not resolve the question as to how different kinds of educational research ought to impinge on the process of policy making: what part can and should different kinds of evidence play (among the myriad other considerations) in decisions about what policy makers ought to do? Similarly, empirical studies of the processes of policy making in education can tell us about the considerations which do, as a matter of fact, influence policy decisions. It is important to be aware of the political realities of such processes, but that is not the end of the argument. Here – no more than in any other sphere of public reasoning – can we simply derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Several of these considerations lead me to want to distinguish between how policy is made and how it ought to be made, and I need to explore this relationship a little further before trying to develop a normative epistemology of reasoning from research to policy.

13.2 How Policy Is Made and How It Ought to be Made: A Sustainable Distinction? Hammersley has observed that some of the frustration in the debates about the relationship between research and policy are perhaps rooted in a failure to distinguish clearly between some different questions: “factual questions about the roles that

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research has actually played, theoretical questions about the roles which it can play, and value questions about the roles that it ought to play” (Hammersley, 2002, p. 1). I am concerned less with the question ‘what, as a matter of fact, does lead policymakers to take notice of research in formulating policy?’, though I shall want to retain a solid ingredient of political realism in what I go on to argue, and more with the questions ‘what place can it legitimately occupy?’ and ‘what place ought research to occupy in the formulation of policy?’ The ‘ought’ here, which joins issues of moral responsibility with epistemology, is derived from a tradition of philosophical writing on ‘the ethics of belief’ illustrated by the following extract from William Clifford’s essay with this title: Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours, not for ourselves, but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. (Clifford, 1879, pp. 182–183 and see also James, 1937; McCarthy, 1986)

The argument is that, in particular where the beliefs we hold have consequences for the welfare of other people, ensuring that these beliefs are well founded (which in Clifford’s terms means that they have stood ‘in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning’, but we may have other requirements) is not just a functional requirement of a utilitarian character or an epistemological condition for claiming true belief: it is a moral duty. It is a matter of taking moral responsibility for our actions and, with this, for the quality of the judgements which underlie our actions. Such obligations have application in the private sphere but have special significance in the context of national and other policy making, where the consequences of carelessly or inappropriately arrived at opinion and misjudgement can be so far-reaching for good or ill. In fairness, it should be acknowledged that the ‘evidenced-based practice’ movement has been motivated by much the same principles that I am indicating here. Most obviously, it is calling for practice (and policy) to be based on evidence as opposed perhaps to whim, prejudice or embedded custom. Second, the movement wants that evidence to be derived from rigorous or high-quality research. I have no disagreement with these first two principles. Unfortunately, however, in some models it sees these principles as coterminous with research that conforms to the manner of the double-blind controlled experiment (see on this Oancea & Pring, 2008 and more widely in Bridges et al., 2008). It is part of my argument that those who have drawn such restrictive boundaries around the kind of research which ought to be taken into account in policy formation have themselves made a misjudgement which the ethics of belief requires us to challenge and them to correct. What I do share with the evidence-based practice movement, however, is a belief that there are some considerations which ought to count for more than others in the shaping of policy and practice. How can one begin to draw this distinction? There may be some relatively easy cases of considerations which we could agree should not have a place in the forming of policy, though as I write this I can immediately

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imagine someone leaping to challenge even these. I suggest that we might feel that there was something wrong about education policy being based upon: (a) The fact that a business, in which the policy maker had a significant interest, would profit if this policy was introduced (b) The fact that the policy maker had picked up a rumour about some flaw in the system (c) The fact that the policy maker’s child had come home from school upset at what appeared to be some manifestation of current policy (d) The fact that some other country had introduced this policy (e) The fact that some friends in his/her pub or club had urged this policy direction (f) The fact that his/her boss had urged him/her to come up with something within 24 hours to grab the newspaper headlines If these bases of policy seem inappropriate, it is worth considering why. There seems to be a mixture of ethical and epistemological considerations. Some objections seem to be to do with the moral inappropriateness of acting on this basis (e.g., where there is a financial or other personal interest at stake). In some cases, the concern might be with the insubstantial or unreliable character of the evidence which prompted the decision (a rumour, a single and unsubstantiated report, a pub conversation), though any of these might legitimately prompt some further enquiry. In the case of copying practice from some other country the concern might be to do with the insufficiency of the reasoning: one would want some reassurance that very different sociocultural and historical circumstances had been taken into account. In the final example, one might reasonably judge the decision to be ill-considered. We might have debates about the ethical or epistemological legitimacy or otherwise of particular examples, but I suggest that the intelligibility of such debates at least indicates the possibility and reasonableness of operating with both ethical and epistemological principles of the kind illustrated to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate bases for policy formation. One can acknowledge this and still recognise that there will be difficult cases where this distinction will be much less clear-cut. To take first the category of ethically unacceptable considerations, we might have a more difficult debate as to whether the following considerations provide an acceptable basis for policy formation or not: (g) Support for the policy would virtually guarantee that the member (of Parliament or the County Council) would lose his/her seat at the next election (h) Evidence from focus groups and opinion polls suggests that this policy would win a lot of popular support (i) The policy would enhance the Minister’s standing in contention for the party leadership Are we here looking at ‘the real stuff of politics’ stripped bare of ethical responsibility or at the legitimate working of a democratic political system and the ways

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in which a democratic citizenship properly exercises its influence in the system? To what extent, for example, is it right to take into account in policy formulation the popularity or unpopularity of a particular decision? Levin describes how: Organizations which are in the public eye – governments, of course, but also many other large organizations – are inevitably sensitive not only to the views of their internal participants but also to larger political currents. One of the rules of the political world is that what is true is far less important than what people believe to be true. A government may be in a position where it is caught between what it believes to be the best course of action and what it believes to be publicly acceptable. In a world where public acceptance is the key to survival it is easy to predict which interest will dominate. It is only when public beliefs shift that government will feel required or able to move. (Levin, 2004, p. 6)

At one end we may decry as pusillanimous the leader who is unwilling to take a stand on a matter where there is unequivocal evidence of public benefit: at the other end we might decry as authoritarian the leader who has no regard for public opinion. There is presumably a role for such ‘leadership’ in seeking honestly to persuade public opinion of what the evidence indicates or what morality demands to be the right course of action. I would distinguish between, on the one hand, a kind of single- minded political expediency linked to the desire for political survival whatever the policies that this might require, and, on the other, a perfectly sensible concern for the extent to which the public (or a particular subset of the public e.g., teachers or parents) might be persuaded to accept a policy which research or other evidence indicated was the best. The latter might be thought to have a legitimate part in the determination of policy (politics being, after all, ‘the art of the possible’): the former, while an understandable preoccupation for a political careerist, is a step too far in the direction of the corruption of the deliberative political process in the interests of personal ambition. In other words, political deliberation ought to leave at least some space for the consideration of reasons, evidence and arguments for doing this rather than that – and is not just a matter of finding out how many people want this or that, even if this is part of what has to be considered. I have already indicated that we might reject some grounds for policy which, for example, lacked substance or were unreliable, which were insufficient for the purpose for which they were being employed, which were not properly thought through (what would be the consequences of doing this? what would be the cost? what are the alternative possibilities?) or perhaps were irrelevant – in short, we would reject them on the basis of considerations of an epistemological character. Again, I do not want to pretend that decisions as to what evidence is sufficient, what might properly be counted as relevant, what would be a legitimate inference from a particular set of information or what place ideological considerations might legitimately play in policy are always easily made. What I want to hold onto is the belief that we do, we can and we should make some such decisions in determining what ought to go into policy formation and that, at least in part, these rest on epistemological considerations. The alternative is a kind of reductivism which sees policy formulation only in terms of warring interest groups (among them, perhaps, the research communities) in an arena in which ‘evidence’, ‘research’ and ‘argument’

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may have residual rhetorical functions but where even these have lost the legitimacy they might once have had through their association with sound epistemological considerations. This conclusion points to two questions. The first, which I shall dispose of fairly briefly concerns what sorts of evidence might (legitimately) and should (against some normative standard) inform policy. I do not want to rehearse what are already well-documented debates in the literature, including some emanating from contributors to this volume (e.g. Smeyers & Depaepe, 2006 and Bridges et al., 2008). It has been well observed that the uncontroversial requirement that policy should be informed by good quality research becomes elided into a more normatively laden requirement that policy should be informed by research that meets certain ‘standards’ (or, more correctly ‘specifications’). Then the standards become specified in ways which privilege certain kinds of research (notably the double-blind controlled experiment) and excludes others (see, e.g., What Works Clearinghouse, USA http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/ [accessed 6 January 2008]). Even on more liberal definitions of the standards used, for example, by the EPPI Centre at the London Institute of Education online at http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Default.aspx?tabid=89 [accessed 3 October 2006], whole swathes of what is normally regarded as legitimate educational research (including case study, narratives, biography, history, philosophy, critical theory, classroom action research) are excluded. Why on earth should all this work, which is clearly conducted in the educational research community on the assumption that it has an important contribution to make to the informing of educational policy and practice, be excluded? It would be difficult to argue that all this work was comprehensively of inferior quality to the kind of research which is privileged. The problem seems to be that people cannot see how one could legitimately infer or otherwise derive policy from some sorts of research or how policy might be legitimately informed by such research. It is a problem about the argumentative pathway, about the ‘reasoning’ – and it is this that I want to begin to explore. We are led, then, to the second question, which is perhaps even more difficult to answer, but it is closer to the main theme of this volume. It concerns the nature of the ‘reasoning’ which might take one from research to policy, though as my bracketing perhaps indicates I am not at all sure that ‘reasoning’ is the right term.

13.3 ‘Reasoning’ from Research to Policy The language which is commonly used to refer to the relationship between research and policy itself traps us in some misconceptions. In particular the notion of ‘evidence based policy’ implies (i) a foundationalist view of policy under which the collection of evidence precedes and provides a basis/foundation for policy which is constructed upon it; (ii) an almost mechanical, perhaps algorithmic process by which policy can be inferred from research and (iii) an expectation that what research provides is ‘evidence’ as distinct from, for example, critique, argument,

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insight, interpretation or understanding. Each of these features of evidence-based policy provides a misleading picture of the relationship between research and policy. I shall comment more fully on each of these in turn.

(i) Research as Providing a Basis for Policy The first fallacy seems almost to assume that policy is developed in a vacuum. Policy thinking does not, however, wait upon research. The policy/political world pre-exists the research (or at least any particular piece of research). Before they encounter any specific research reports, policy makers live in a mental and political space riddled with presumptions, prejudice, ideological commitments and political principles, experience (and everyone has vivid experience of education at first hand), advice from all quarters, promises made in the party manifesto, anxieties about their political security, aspirations and selectively provided evidence from lobbyists, think tanks, civil servants and newspapers. Their problem is not a lack of information or guidance but a super-abundance of it; their problem is more to do with getting rid of the garbage, making sense of what they have already, judging in what direction it points rather more than a need for more information. Even if they do need (and recognise they need) something more from the research community, the important thing to recognise is that this is never coming into an empty space of policy orientation: it is joining what William James once described (with reference to early childhood) as “a blooming, buzzing confusion” (James, 1890, p. 488). Notice that I have introduced a term here which lies between research and policy seen in the abstract – and that is the policy maker. It seems to me essential to an understanding of the process by which research might get translated into policy or practice to introduce the personal intermediary of the policy maker through whom such translation takes place. But the introduction of such an intermediary carries important implications. For example, since we are now thinking of how research might affect, inform or change the opinion of a policy maker, this tends to suggest that we need to bring to the question some theory of learning. Further, given that such a policy maker comes to any reading of research equipped already with a whole host of relevant understanding, then this points more specifically towards a constructivist theory of learning. Clearly, policy makers do not engage with research with blank minds. They learn by accommodating their previous understanding to new knowledge (if they engage with it all) and assimilating new knowledge into their existing frameworks of understanding. These processes involve (re)interpretation, selection and rejection and the construction of meaning in ways which may be influenced by what the author has intended to convey but are at least as importantly influenced by the readers’ prior experience and expectation. Further policy makers need to engage in some way with research texts (whether written or spoken). This points in turn to the need for a theory of (research) literacy to provide an account of how policy makers may draw meaning from research reports. Again we have to look towards the idea of the co-construction of meaning. The distortions which researchers complain about in the way in which their

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research is interpreted and applied by others is not just wilful malpractice (though it may include such malpractice), it is also an inescapable part of the process of reading. This is the case even where research is conducted in a more formal way with ‘conclusions’ and ‘implications’ explicitly drawn by the author. It is all the more the case in forms of research writing which comes closer in style and ‘indeterminacy’ to works of literature, for example, in the form of case study, phenomenography, personal stories, history, biography – writing which “offers views and opens up perspectives in which the empirically known world of one’s own personal experience appears changed” (Iser, 1971, p. 8). Its very indeterminacy requires a reader “to bring personal experience, cultural background, imagination, predisposition, and even idiosyncratic knowledge with him or her so that a co-construction of meaning with its author is achieved” (Pike, 2002, p. 358). While Iser talks of ‘indeterminacy’ (as, roughly, the space which a literary text provides for the reader to construct meaning) Jauss (1982) writes of ‘aesthetic distance’ meaning “the disparity between the given horizon of expectations and the appearance of a new work, whose reception can result in a ‘change of horizon’ through negation of familiar experiences or through raising newly articulated experiences to the level of consciousness” (Jauss, 1982, p. 25).

(ii) The Derivation of Policy from Research These kinds of accounts of what is involved in reading and in learning from reading3 open the way for something other than a mechanical rationality which might take one from research writing to policy. The evidence-based policy movement seems almost to presuppose an algorithm which will generate policy decisions: If A is what you want to achieve and if research shows R1, R2 and R3 to be the case, and if furthermore research shows that doing P is positively correlated with A, then it follows that P is what you need to do. So provided you have your educational/political goals sorted out, all you need is to slot in the appropriate research findings – the right information – to extract your policy ‘as if by machinery’ as Richard Smith puts it (Smith, 2007 – following Bacon’s Novum Organum). There is, as Nussbaum argues following Aristotle, “no general procedure or algorithm for computing what to do in every case” (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 73). Good deliberation is like theatrical or musical improvisation, where what counts is flexibility, responsiveness, and openness to the external: to rely on an algorithm here is not only insufficient, it is a sign of immaturity and weakness. . .. Practical insight is like perceiving in the sense that it is noninferential, nondeductive: it is an ability to recognise the salient features of a complex situation. And just as the theoretical nous comes only out of long experience with first principles and a sense, gained gradually in and through experience, of the fundamental role played by those principles in discourse and explanation, so too practical perception, which Aristotle also calls nous, is gained only through a long process of living and choosing that develops the agent’s resourcefulness and responsiveness. (Nussbaum, 1990, pp. 74–75)

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The ambition to achieve such tidy and compelling chains of reasoning is confounded on at least three fronts (and here I follow Nussbaum’s ‘sympathetic exegesis’ of Aristotle): (i) the failure of those in the Platonic and, later, Utilitarian school to provide a convincing argument in favour of the reduction of human values to a single instrumental value, varying only in quantity, that is common to all alternatives and which it would be our concern to maximise; (ii) the priority which Aristotle argues for of particular judgements over universals – which those of us working in education might recognise as the critical importance of the particulars of context and the agency and aspirations of individual teachers and learners in a particular educational context for the success or failure of proposed strategies; and (iii) the defence of the emotions and imagination as essential to rational choice. These arguments are spelled out in detail in Nichomachean Ethics and in Nussbaum’s excellent treatment of his writing on this topic (Nussbaum, 1990) and I do not propose to go into them in more detail except by way of illustration to some of the points which follow. Together they provide a pretty daunting set of obstacles to attempts to render the process of policy making more ‘scientific’ and they lend support for the conclusion of Elliott and Lukeš that “Streamlined rational judgement is often, and almost always in the context of policymaking, a convenient fiction, a ritual of justification” (Elliott & Lukeš, 2008, p. 110). All of this suggests that we need to change the language we use to articulate the relationship between research and policy. The language of ‘research based policy’ is misleading in too many ways. The simple shift, which Hammersley (2002) proposed, towards looking for understanding from research rather than seeking solutions and towards making claims which are tentative rather than advanced with evangelical certainty has quite radical implications for the research/policy relationship. ‘Research informed policy’ is an improvement on ‘evidence based’ (at least it removes the foundationalism and it suggests a more tentative relationship), but even this fails to capture the variety of forms of engagement between research and what I have proposed is the existent body of thought that any policy maker brings to the task. How do we best describe, then, the ways in which research might – to select a fairly generic language – affect the mind or consciousness of the policy maker? I have drawn from Jauss’s literary theory to suggest that research might effect a ‘change of horizons’; Iser wrote of opening up new perspectives and Stenhouse of ‘making the familiar strange’. It may help you see what you are dealing with in its historical or social context, perhaps even sub specie aeternitatis. Research might challenge one’s assumptions (through unexpected empirical data but also through theoretical critique or vivid illustration of policy at work in one setting). It might provide new confidence in one’s beliefs through confirmatory evidence; offer hitherto unconsidered alternatives or new ways of thinking or classifying experience; remind one of or challenge one’s core values; explain why things have not happened as expected; explain possible causal relationships; illustrate the interdependency of different courses of action; or demonstrate the dependency of the matter under consideration upon contextual considerations (see Conroy, Davis, & Enslin, 2008 and on all this Griffiths & Mcleod, 2008).

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Any of these processes requires the application of reason: the observation of contradictions or conflicts between what the research leads one to think and what one had previously thought, the drawing of implications from what has been said or written for one’s own beliefs, the development of a point of view which is consistent with the evidence one has been persuaded to accept. But it also draws on other capacities which, though not inconsistent with reasoning seem to suggest something closer to aesthetic or moral sensibility and intuition or. Aristotle argues in his Nichomachean Ethics that rational practical choice becomes worse rather than better as it aspires to become ‘scientific’. He offers instead the notions of ‘discernment’ and ‘perception’, which Nussbaum interprets as referring to “some sort of complex responsiveness to the salient features of one’s concrete situation” (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 55). She later explains Aristotle’s notion of perception as “a style of public rationality” (ibid., p. 99). Smith suggests that “instead of knowing the world we might be attuned to it, sensitive to it. We might resonate with it, share its rhythms – the way we might be at one with the natural world if we opened ourselves to it instead of analysing it, reducing it to its constituent elements, as a certain kind of scientist does” (Smith, 2008, p. 186).

(iii) The Resources Which Research Offers Policy Makers As soon as one opens oneself to some different ways of knowing, of course, one also opens the way to different kinds of representation of experience, to different kinds of ‘evidence’. You get a different perspective on research if you move from looking to it for ‘information’, scores, numbers or facts (‘evidence’ of the kind provided by the kind of narrow range of empirical science favoured by the What Works Clearing House and even the EPPI Centre) to looking for different kinds of cognitive objectives and epistemological resources: the ‘illumination’ provided by illuminative evaluation; the ‘rich description’4 and ‘grounded theory’ from case study; the revelatory shock of deconstruction or discourse analysis; the compelling narrative of little stories or biography5 ; the careful argument and incisive analysis of philosophy; the critical challenge of feminist and post-colonial research; the longitudinal perspective of history etc. Of course we would want the best rather than the worst of these different genres of educational research to be informing policy making, but this concern for quality cannot legitimately be used simply to dismiss a whole genre of research as irrelevant. On the contrary, part of the responsibility of the moral agent (a fortiori, therefore, of the agent making what are inherently morally informed judgements on behalf of a wider society, as policy makers are doing) is to be open to all perspectives. “The Aristotelian agent is a person we could trust to describe a complex situation with full concreteness of detail and emotional shading, missing nothing of practical relevance” or in the terms which Nussbaum borrows from Henry James, someone “finely aware and richly responsible . . . a person on whom nothing is lost” (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 84). But though it is entirely plausible that any and all of these (and other) research resources might have a role to play in informing (including challenging)

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the practical wisdom, judgement or phronesis of policy makers (who, I suggested earlier, are not exactly without all sorts of pre-existent understanding of their own), they cannot substitute for it. We need a picture of research informing/challenging/revising/extending the practical wisdom of policy makers – which is itself constructed also out of their own life experience and all sorts of other learning. Their thoughts and decisions on policy issue from this amalgam of practical wisdom may to a greater or lesser degree be informed by research. In other words, to invoke my earlier distinction between how policy is made and how it ought to be made, the idea that research can generate policy un-mediated by the practical judgement, the phronesis, of policy makers is not only unrealistic (i.e., as a matter of experience it does not work like that) but also inappropriate It is inappropriate because, even if it were possible to move in this way, the policy decision would not benefit from the wider range of practical wisdom which was at the disposal of policy makers (singly or collectively). It is inappropriate because it suggests an over-simple relationship between research ‘findings’ (in particular where the research is limited to empirical data) and what Nussbaum refers to as “the sheer complexity and agonising difficulty of choosing well” (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 55) – a fortiori, one might add, in the public arena.

13.4 Complexity, Reasoning and Public Deliberation It is perhaps worth pausing to consider the range of consideration which might enter a policy decision, for example, to allow people of all faiths to establish faith schools with government support. Even brief consideration will indicate that the policy maker would probably need to take into account the following: • Political estimations of public demand for the change and predictions of the likely scale of such development if it were allowed • Evidence and predictions regarding the social impact on communities, on other non-faith schools, etc. of allowing such developments • Evidence of the benefits and dis-benefits for children attending such schools (and any differences observable between schools of different faith) • Ethical and political consideration to do with, for example, parents’ rights to choose such schools, with issues of justice if one were to allow some faith groups but not others, with the compatibility of such a policy with different views of education and more particular education for citizenship • Estimations of the political advantages and costs of adopting such a policy • Anticipation of the disruptive effects • Cost • Implications for the teacher training system . . . and no doubt a good deal more.

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What is readily seen from such a list is the scale and complexity (I might think impracticability) of ensuring that all aspects of such a policy decision were properly founded on a basis of research. Few educational researchers have the competence to deal with such a complex range of considerations and few research programmes are funded on a scale which would allow the interrogation of such a wide range of considerations. One can see how research (including philosophical work) might contribute here and there, but in the end someone is going to have to make a judgement drawing on a mixture of such research, advice, personal experience and intuition and their core moral and, in the wider political sphere, ideological principles. For all the complexity involved such judgement need not be just a matter of picking an answer from the air. It is unlikely, however, that even the most fully briefed and well-informed policy maker will have expert knowledge across the whole range of considerations which I have illustrated. Inevitably he or she is going to have to fall back on the kind of practical wisdom that Aristotle associates with stochazesthai, which Nussbaum interprets as “an improvisatory, conjectural use of reason” (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 71). Such improvisation need be neither irrational nor without its own form of reasoning. Hannah Arendt explains: The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. And this enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its individual limitations, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others  in whose place it must think, whose perspective it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all. (Arendt, 1961, pp. 220–221)

Arendt’s reference to this internalised or public conversation chimes with several of the contributions to the TLRP work on research and policy that link issues of the ownership of and participation in the processes of research and policy with the conditions under which a community may come to have confidence in the knowledge which is informing that policy. Pring and Oancea argue, for example, that “Reasonable policy and practice can arise only from a deliberation of these different sources of evidence [teachers, policy makers, parents and pupils] and [their] logically different sorts of explanation – and, hence, in a context where this deliberation is democratised. By democratised we mean both that the different research and evidence voices are heard and that conclusions remain tentative and provisional, welcoming further dialogue and criticism” (Oancea & Pring, 2008, p. 33). Conroy et al. (2008, p. 174) urge that “philosophical analysis more widely conceived ought to be in permanent ongoing dialogue with the policy-making enterprise”. Smith reminds us in his contribution to the same volume (Smith, 2008) of Leavis’s account of literary criticism as “a collaborative and creative interplay. It creates a community and is inseparable from the process that creates and keeps alive a living culture” (Leavis, 1961, quoted in Matthews, 2004, p. 55). Elliott and Lukeš write of enquiry

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undertaken in ‘the spirit of a conversation’ which alerts participants to their prejudices. The reconstruction of such prejudices is, they suggest “an alternative view of understanding itself”, though it is one which seems at some distance from the kind of understanding required by systematic reviews (Elliott & Lukeš, 2008, p. 113). Such perspectives stand firmly in the tradition of liberal democratic political theory, which is of course also a theory of knowledge or at least a theory of the social conditions under which knowledge can best be advanced. The following passage from Mill’s essay On Liberty might be directly addressed to policy makers in education or elsewhere: In the case of any person whose judgement is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him: to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. (Mill, 1859/1865 edition, p. 12)

For Polanyi (1951), for Hayek (1960) and for Popper (1963), similarly, the democratic principle of free and open discussion and the exposure of opinion – whether it be opinion about national policy or scientific theory – to such discussion are not just political concessions to the entitlements of the people, they describe the conditions under which we may discern, as Mill puts it, ‘whose or what judgement’ is ‘really deserving of confidence’. Thus, too, in the more narrowly academic sphere the attachment to the exposure of academic work through publication and the third component of Lawrence Stenhouse’s definition of research as “systematic and sustained enquiry made public” (Stenhouse, 1980, p. 2). Such analysis points to a requirement for academic researchers and policy makers (among others) to engage in vigorous debate and discussion. It is a contemporary commonplace to imagine that if only researchers and policy makers could simply talk to each other all would be well. Elliott and Lukeš warn, however, that the kind of conversation they describe does not automatically lead to a “neater picture” of the situation nor does it necessarily produce a “social good”. There is the danger of viewing ‘disciplined conversation’ as an elevated version of the folk theory on ideal policy: ‘if only everyone talked to one another, the world would be a nicer place’. Academic conversation (just like any democratic dialectic process) is often contentious and not quite the genteel affair it tries to present itself as. (Elliott & Lukeš, 2008, p. 113)

Nor should academic researchers imagine that the traffic in disruptive evidence and idea and in critique is one way in such encounters. The practical wisdom of policy makers should be expected to challenge and disrupt the comfortable assumptions of researchers at least as often as the results of their own enquiries might challenge the practical wisdom of policy makers.

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13.5 Epilogue: What Sort of a Theory Do We Need to Provide and Account of the Relationship Between Research and Policy? The question which is at the centre of this chapter is what account can we give of the way in which research can and should inform policy. The meta-question behind this is to do with what sort of answer, what sort of theoretical framework, does this require. I made the move of translating the question from ‘how can research inform policy?’ to ‘how can research inform policy makers?’ (emphasising that these engaged with research – if they engaged with it all – on the basis of an already rich repertoire of understanding). This move seemed to open the way to treating the question as one which invited a theory of learning or perhaps (since engagement with research involved in some way a process of ‘reading’ research products) a theory of literacy. But the discussion also led me to literature which treated decision making in the public as well as the private domain as essentially a theory of choice. There is of course a substantial literature (which I have not touched on here, though perhaps I should have done so) on rational choice theory, but, having argued elsewhere (Bridges & Watts, 2008) that normative preferences are at the heart of any educational policy decisions I was attracted to a theory which is probably best viewed as a theory of moral choice, though not one which is inconsistent with rationality. This led in turn to a reaffirmation of the importance of practical wisdom in policy making but also of social, dialoguic processes which permit the interaction between the work of researchers and the practical wisdom of policy makers and other stakeholders – in other words I end with a social/political theory of the conditions under which judgement (on what I have suggested are often hugely complex issues) is most likely to be best informed not only by research but by the wide range of resources upon which policy making needs to draw. I hope that this chapter prompts further consideration of both the first-order question to do with the nature of the movement between research and policy and also of the second-order question as to what kind of a theoretical explanation this requires.

Notes 1. This chapter draws on material developed with the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) project on ‘The epistemological bases of educational research’. It includes some material from a paper which was jointly authored with Michael Watts on ‘Educational research and policy’ and an introduction to the collection of papers which issued from the project co-authored with Paul Smeyers and Richard Smith. This full set of papers (a number of which are referred to here) was published as a Supplementary Issue of volume 42 (2008) of the Journal of Philosophy of Education and, subsequently, in Bridges et al. (2009). 2. Not only policy makers disregard the criticism from the educational research community. When Robert Slavin, one of the leading proponents of evidence-based practice from within the educational research community, spoke at the 2007 conference of the European

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Educational Research Association, he studiously ignored the whole plethora of critique of his position which had appeared in leading educational research journals. (See Slavin, 2008 and my own response Bridges, 2008). 3. For current purposes I do not think that it makes any difference if one is thinking of an oral or written presentation of a research ‘text’ – both allow and require the interpretative work of the listener or reader. 4. “Fine conduct requires above all correct description; such description is itself a form of morally assessable conduct.” (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 84). 5. “The content of rational choice must be provided by nothing less messy than experience and stories of experience. Among the stories of conduct, the most true and informative will be works of literature, biography and history.” (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 74).

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Matthews, S. (2004). The responsibilities of dissent: F.R. Leavis after scrutiny. Literature and History, 13(2), 49–66. McCarthy, G. D. (1986). The ethics of belief debate. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholar Press. Mill, J. S. (1859/1865 edition). On liberty. London: Longman Green. Munn, P. (2005). Researching policy and policy research. Scottish Educational Review, 37(1), 17–28. National Audit Office. (2001). Modern policy making: Ensuring policies deliver value for money. London: National Audit Office. No Child Left Behind Act (Elementary and Secondary Education Act), US. (2001/2002). At http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html [downloaded March 2008]. Nussbaum, M. (1990). The discernment of perception: An aristotelian conception of private and public morality. In love’s knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oancea, A., & Pring, R. (2008). The importance of being thorough: On systematic accumulations of ‘what works’ in educational research. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42, 15–40. Ozga, J. (2000). Policy research in educational settings: Contested terrain. Buckingham: Open University Press. Pike, M. (2002). The canon in the classroom: Students’ experiences of texts from other times. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35(3), 355–370. Polanyi, M. (1951). The logic of liberty. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and refutations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Slavin, R. E. (2002). Evidence-based education policies: Transforming educational practice and research. Educational Researcher, 31(7), 15–21. Slavin, R. E. (2004). Education research can and must address ‘what works’ questions. Educational Researcher, 33(1), 27–28. Slavin, R. (2008). Evidence based reform: What will it take? European Educational Research Journal, 7(1), 120–128. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (2006). Educational research: Why ‘what works’ doesn’t work. Dordrecht: Springer. Smith, R. D. (2007). As if by machinery: The levelling of educational research. In D. Bridges & R. D. Smith (Eds.), Philosophy, methodology and educational research. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, R. D. (2008). Proteus rising: Re-imagining educational research. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42, 183–198. Stenhouse, L. (1980). What counts as research? (Unpublished mimeo). University of East Anglia, Norwich: CARE archive. Tooley, J., & Darby, D. (1998). Education research: A critique – a survey of published educational research. London: OFSTED. Whitty, G. (2002). Making sense of educational policy. London: Paul Chapman. Whitty, G. (2006). Education(al) research and education policy making: Is conflict inevitable? British Educational Research Journal, 32(2), 159–176.

Notes on Contributors

David Bridges is Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia (where he was previously Pro Vice Chancellor) and Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where he continues to direct the Centre for Educational Research and Development in the Von Hügel Institute. He was until recently Director of the Association of Universities in the East of England based in the East of England Development Agency. He is a Council member of both the British and European Educational Research Associations and is an Honorary Vice President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. His publications include ‘Fiction written under oath?’ Essays in Philosophy and Educational Research and, edited with Richard Smith, Philosophy, Methodology and Educational Research. Nicholas C. Burbules is Grayce Wicall Gauthier Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on philosophy of education, critical social and political theory and technology and education. His major current projects include work on ubiquitous technologies in education, virtual reality and dialogue and ‘third spaces’. His most recent book was written with Michael A Peters and Paul Smeyers, Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishing, 2008). He is also currently the Editor of Educational Theory. Kathleen Coessens is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science) and at the School for Music and Arts in Antwerp (Artesis Hogeschool). She teaches semiotics and sociology of artistic practice. She is a senior researcher in the international research group ORCIM (Orpheus Research Centre in Music) in Ghent. Her current research domains are representation and epistemology, creativity and bodily practices in performance art, meta-analysis and philosophy of education. Forthcoming book publications in 2009 are De mens als Cartograaf. Filosofisch essay in de cartografie [The human being as a cartographer] (Brussel: Academic and Scientific Publishers) and, with coauthors Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto (Leuven: Orpheus geschriften, Academische Pers Leuven). Marc Depaepe is Full Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Campus Kortrijk, where he is chairing, as coordinator of the Human Sciences, the Faculty P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings, Educational Research 4, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3249-2_BM2,  C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the Campus Kortrijk. He is both former President of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education and the Belgian Dutch Society for the History of Education. Since 2005 he has been the co-editor-in-chief of Paedagogica Historica. The International Journal of the History of Education. He has published in several languages on the historiography, theory and methodology of the history of education; the (international) history of the sciences of education; the history of primary education in Belgium; the history of colonial education in Congo, and the educational history of Belgian migrants in France. Naomi Hodgson is a doctoral student at the Institute of Education, University of London. Her research is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). She is researching the relationship between citizenship and education in European thought. David F. Labaree is a Professor in the School of Education at Stanford University. He is former president of the History of Education Society and former vice president of AERA Division F. His research focuses on the history and sociology of American education, with current emphasis on the history of school reform in the US and the distinctive development of the American system of higher education. Frank Simon has, since the beginning of the 1970s, been Professor in history of education at Ghent University. He is doing socio-historical research on education, more specifically on preschool and primary education. Most of his research is in collaboration with the research group on the history of education of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (M. Depaepe, A. Van Gorp) and deals with education policy, teacher unions, the teaching profession, and Progressive Education (Ovide Decroly). In the last decade the research has focused on everyday educational practice, classroom history and curriculum history. Since August 2006, he has served as chairperson of the ‘International Standing Conference for the History of Education’ (ISCHE). Geertrui Smedts obtained her doctorate in the educational sciences at K.U. Leuven in December 2008. Her research focuses on what technology implies for being a parent at institutional, interactional and conceptual levels. Her contribution to this book reflects the main thoughts of her doctoral research project. Paul Smeyers is Research Professor for Philosophy of Education at Ghent University and part-time Professor at K.U.Leuven. He teaches philosophy of education and methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften (Qualitative/Interpretative Research Methods). He has a wide involvement in philosophy of education (more than 250 publications). He holds, or has held, several positions in the International Network of Philosophers of Education (President since 2006). For almost a decade, he has chaired the Research Community Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education: Evaluation and Evolution of the Criteria for Educational Research established by the Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen). Together with Nigel Blake, Richard Smith and Paul Standish he coauthored Thinking Again. Education after Postmodernism (Bergin & Garvey, 1998), Education in an Age of Nihilism (Falmer Press, 2000) and The Therapy of Education

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(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and co-edited The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (2003). Together with Marc Depaepe he co-edited several books published by the Research Community (Dordrecht: Springer). With Michael Peters and Nick Burbules he co-authored Showing and doing. Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher (Paradigm Publishers, 2008). Richard Smith is Professor of Education at the University of Durham, UK, where, for many years, he was Director of the Combined Degrees in Arts and Social Sciences. He is Editor of the new journal Ethics and Education and Associate Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. His most recent authored book is (with Paul Smeyers and Paul Standish) The Therapy of Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). His principal research interests are in the philosophy of education and the philosophy of social science. Lynda Stone is Professor of Philosophy of Education, Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of Culture, Curriculum, and Change in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has published numerous articles and chapters internationally for 25 years. Currently, she is a member of the task force on establishing reporting standards for humanities-oriented research of the American Educational Research Association. Since the beginning of 2009 she has been President of the John Dewey Society. Daniel Tröhler is Full Professor in Educational Sciences at the University of Luxembourg. Previously he was Director of the Pestalozzianum Research Institute for the History of Education and Professor at the Zurich Teachers College. His research interests are in the languages of education, international comparative education and history of education. He is the editor in chief of the Journal Zeitschrift für pädagogsiche Historiographie. His latest books are: Zukunft bilden. Die Geschichte der modernen Zürcher Volksschule. Zürich 2008: NZZ Libro (Ed. together with Urs Hardegger); Persistenz und Verschwinden/Persistence and Disappearance. Pädagogische Organisationen im historischen Kontext/Educational Organizations in their Historical Contexts. Wiesbaden 2008: VS Verlag (edited together with Michael Göhlich, and Caroline Hopf); The Philosophy of Education by George Herbert Mead, edited and introduced by Gert Biesta and Daniel Tröhler (Boulder, 2008: Paradigm Publishers); Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (Bern, 2008: Haupt/UTB). Jean Paul Van Bendegem is full-time Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels) where he teaches courses in logic and philosophy of science. He is director of the Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (www.vub.ac.be/CLWF/), where currently 11 researchers are working. He is also president of the National Center for Research in Logic (http://www.lofs.ucl.ac.be:16080/cnrl/), founded in 1955 by, amongst others, Chaïm Perelman and Leo Apostel. He is the editor of the journal Logique et Analyse (http://www.vub.ac.be/CLWF/L&A/). His research focuses on two themes: the philosophy of strict finitism and the development of a comprehensive theory of mathematical practice (Cf. also http://www.vub.ac.be/CLWF/members/jean/index.shtml). Recently he edited, jointly with Bart Van Kerkhove, Perspectives on Mathematical

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Practices. Bringing together Philosophy of Mathematics, Sociology of Mathematics, and Mathematics Education (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006). Michael Watts is a Senior Research Associate at the Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where his research focuses on widening participation in higher education. His PhD addresses the issue of access to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and integrates the capability approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education. He is the lead editor of the new journal Power and Education.

Index

A Adaptive preferences, 5, 99, 100–102 Argument(s), 1–37, 41, 46, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 127–148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163–165, 167, 169, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185, 186 Author, implied, 5, 110, 119, 120, 121, 122 B Belgium, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 162, 166 Bibliographies, 27–28, 32 Bildung, 2, 9, 10, 11, 19, 167 Booth, W.C., 5, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118–119, 120, 121, 123, 124 C Capability approach, 5, 93, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105 Care, 4, 73, 78, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 Carroll, L., 7, 139, 163, 164, 165, 175 19th and 20th Centuries, 25, 77 Citizenship, 4, 51, 52, 61–74, 112, 181, 187 Communication, 4, 18, 63, 77, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 122, 123, 157, 188 Complexity, 7, 10, 11, 56, 162, 163, 169, 187–189 Concept creation, 90, 121, 135–136, 149, 168 Counterfactuality, 104 Credibility, 6, 48, 58, 118, 145, 146, 148 D Data, 6, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 173, 185, 187 Democracy, liberal, 42–43, 44, 57, 70 De Saussure, F., 12, 13 Dialectic, 6, 58, 89, 117, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 174, 189

E Educational books, 84, 85 Educational, formalism, 41–59 Educational, goals, 3, 41, 42, 43, 44–46, 49, 51, 52–53, 54, 101 Educationalization, 58, 77 Educational languages, 2, 17–19, 171 Educational memory, 34–35 Educational, organization, 58 Educational, progressivism, 47–48 Educational, reform, 3, 41–59, 114 Education journals, 3, 25, 26, 27, 34, 190, 191 Elster, J., 5, 100, 101, 104 Epistemology, 111, 123, 175, 178, 179 Ethics, 4, 11, 15, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 87, 88, 90, 95, 110, 111, 115, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 148, 165, 168, 169, 175, 180, 185, 186, 187 Ethics, of belief, 7, 179 Ethos, 5, 109, 110, 114, 117–118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 144, 147 Europe, 4, 12, 28, 31, 34, 61, 62, 63–64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 168, 190 Exemplar, 5, 78, 80, 109, 110, 115–122, 130 Extension, 5, 50, 57, 109, 110, 111, 114, 116, 122, 141 F Foucault, M., 2, 4, 12, 14, 15, 16, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 111 G Governmentality, 4, 62, 70, 73, 74 H Higher education policy, 94–95 Histories, 2, 3, 4, 13, 23–59, 63, 74, 112 Historiography, 23, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 51, 59, 70

197

198 History of Education, 2, 3, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35, 47, 51, 52, 58, 162, 166, 175 Hyperreality, 5, 93, 95, 97, 99, 102, 104, 105 I Iconophobia, 34, 36–37 K Knowledge economy, 4, 61–74 L Linguistic turn, 2, 14, 115 Listening, 6, 119, 149–160 Literature, 4, 6, 13, 33, 58, 61, 112, 116, 118, 119, 123, 124, 131, 151, 162, 170, 182, 184, 190, 191 Logicism, 129 M Method, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 19, 26, 33, 51, 111, 113, 115, 116, 120, 122, 143, 156, 161–176, 177 Methodology, 174 Modern sciences, 10, 117 N Nussbaum, M., 100, 101, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191 O Open access, 45, 144, 145 Open source, 144, 147 P Paradigms, 1, 3, 6, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 33, 34, 35, 84, 116, 130, 159, 161, 162, 175 Parenting, 4, 77–90 Pedagogical periodical, 25–27, 34 Pedagogical press, 3, 25, 26 Philosophy, 2, 5, 6, 7, 12–14, 18, 23, 25, 26, 110, 112, 113, 114, 123, 124, 136, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 166, 170, 174, 175, 182, 186 Philosophy of Education, 5, 109, 114–115, 120, 156, 159, 174, 175, 190 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), 10, 11, 131, 140 Plato, 6, 112, 113, 123, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Pocock, J.G.A., 13, 14, 17, 18

Index Policy, 4, 7, 8, 10, 20, 28–31, 32, 50, 52, 54, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 94–95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 105, 115, 117, 146, 168, 170, 171, 177–191 basis of, 63, 180, 182, 183–184, 188, 190 deliberation, 19, 112, 120, 187–189 educational, 29, 47, 50, 52, 93, 105, 115, 177, 182, 184, 190 evidence based, 7, 177, 178, 182, 183, 184 judgement, 7, 179, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 Proof(s), 2, 3, 5, 6, 23–37, 127–141, 156, 163, 174 mathematical, 5, 6, 128, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139 Publishing, electronic, 6, 144 R Reasoning, 1, 5, 7, 23–37, 81, 87, 128, 131, 133, 134, 137, 140, 143, 149, 154, 161, 165, 177–191 Research as adding a ‘voice’, 2, 7, 8, 116, 146, 174, 188 community, 2, 7, 8, 147, 148, 162, 166, 177, 178, 182, 183, 190 educational, 1–8, 10, 11, 14, 23, 31, 61–74, 93–124, 130–132, 143–148, 160, 161–191 ethics, 148 as ‘off the world’, 7, 174 as a ‘performative intervention’, 7, 174 as ‘of the world’, 7, 120, 174 Rhetor, 119 Rhetoric of reform, 3, 51 Rhetoric(s), 1–8, 13, 24, 26, 29, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58, 93, 95, 96, 109–124, 127, 128, 130, 131, 143, 146, 153, 155, 156, 159, 167, 170, 171, 173–176, 182 S Self-writing, 4 Sen, A., 100, 103 Significs, 137 Social class, 34, 53 Sociology of Education, 94 Sources, 2, 3, 6, 7, 23–37, 46, 55, 57, 58, 118, 123, 124, 136, 143, 144, 147, 169, 178, 188 material, 34–35 Standards (AERA), 5, 120, 121, 124 Statistics, 3, 10, 24, 28–31, 33, 64

Index T Teaching, 3, 4, 5, 11, 23, 30, 33, 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56–57, 72, 77, 82, 88, 133, 158, 190 Technology, 1, 4, 64, 69, 73, 77–90, 120, 144, 157, 158, 162, 168, 169, 170 Textbooks, 11, 31–34, 47, 52, 70, 135 Tradition, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 27, 36, 47, 48, 50, 55, 56, 63, 64, 65, 66, 100, 109, 110, 111, 112–115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 144, 147, 157, 163, 165, 167, 169, 179, 189 Truth, 6, 14, 15, 71, 72, 81, 111, 116, 118, 119, 120, 132, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 159, 164, 165, 168, 172, 179

199 U Usefulness, 7, 162, 163, 167 Utilitarianism, 5, 48, 93, 95–102, 103, 104, 105, 179, 185

V Validity, 145 Virtue, 2, 13, 18, 19, 44, 149 Visual material, 24

W Whorf, B.L., 12 Winch, P., 7, 150, 164, 175