The paradoxes of practical research: The good intentions of inclusion that exclude and abject

Abstract

There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century social sciences to change urban conditions and populations, and appears today in international school assessments and professional education.

The article explores the paradoxes of practical research through a history of the present. Different historical lines activated in contemporary research are discussed: (a) the object of practical knowledge is making kinds of people; (b) the sciences about changing the present embody desires about the potentialities of society and people that research is to actualize; and (c) the “useful, practical knowledge” paradoxically embodies comparative styles of reasoning that inscribe inequality in the search for equality.

The argument focuses on science as “an actor” in governing. It argues that governing in modernity occurs less through brute force (although it is still present) and more through the principles that order and classify conduct. The sciences of the modern school are central in this governing. The article methodologically draws on social and cultural histories, science and technology studies, and studies of the politics of knowledge.

Keywords

History of present critical studies of science educational change social exclusion the politics of knowledge

Over the past years, I have been interested in the European and American social and education sciences concerned with school reform and change. There is almost a naturalness to thinking about research as generating practical knowledge for school change. This desire for practical knowledge is expressed in the languages of school improvement, children’s learning, and the development of the expert, professional teacher. It is expressed in policy and research as providing the scientific evidence that demonstrates “what works.” This desire for applicability is also embodied in the translations of Donald Schön’s (1991) “reflective practitioner” into action research for the improvement of teacher/teacher education.

The article argues that the principles that order the good intentions of the practical research produce their own impossibilities and paradoxes: the research conserves existing frameworks as a theory of change, and excludes and abjects in efforts to include.¹ The initial discussion explores different historical lines that connect and give intelligibility to the idea of science as generating practical knowledge. It argues that traveling in uneven ways from the European Enlightenment to the present is the concern of science in changing social conditions that simultaneously concerns making kinds of people, such as the citizen of the republic and today’s professional teacher and lifelong learner. Further, making kinds of people as the object of change is not merely about the present, but generates desires in its style of reasoning about future potentialities of society and people that research is to actualize. The desires are paradoxical; they generate comparative styles of reasoning and double gestures: the gestures of hope for the future and for inclusion inscribe gestures of the qualities of populations dangerous to the future. Different contemporary research programs are then examined through the historical lines partially folded into their rules and standards of reason: the qualitative, micro-classroom research on the practical knowledge of the teacher and teacher education, and the macro-statistical analyses of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) International Student Performance Assessments (PISA).

The method is a history of the present. It explores the systems of reason that order and classify practical research. This focus on knowledge is to understand the political in modernity.² Governing in modernity occurs less through brute force (although it is still present) and more through the principles that order and classify conduct. Schooling and its practical sciences are a central site in this governing. The critical engagement of the history of the present is, ironically, a method to think about change. Paraphrasing (and maybe misquoting) Karl Marx’s “Thesis Eleven” in Theses on Feuerbach (1845/1976), the role of critique is not only for interpreting the world, but for denaturalizing and unthinking the rules and standards of the present as a method to thinking about research and change in a different manner (see e.g. Llewelyn, 2004; also see Foucault, 1988: 155).

The exploration connects the study of the sciences of schooling with social and cultural histories, science and technology studies, and studies of the politics of knowledge. Research is treated as a cultural artifact that “animates political energies and expertise, that pulls on some ‘social facts’ and converts them into qualified knowledge, that attends to some ways of knowing while repelling and refusing others” (Stoler, 2009: 30). The argument runs counter to discussions that teachers do not directly apply specific research to the classroom. Misrecognized in this doxa is the phenomenon of science as “an actor” in governing.

A history of the present: the “reason” for practical research and making kinds of people

Reasoning about people, society, and their change through science is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Visible during the European Enlightenments and moving in uneven historical lines to the present, science and technology enter the public imaginaries as “actors” for effecting change, what the Danish historian David Nye (1999) calls “the technological sublime.” Science was to act as liberating of the human spirit and the fulfillment of progress in much of Western Europe and North America. Secular issues about changing social conditions connected with salvation and redemptive themes to change people (Hultqvist, 1998; Sorkin, 2008).

Science as a strategy for making kinds of people, I will argue, was central to the modern school. This section explores schooling, the making of people as the objects of the sciences of school and its practical knowledge. It further investigates how the forms or styles of reasoning of science inscribed desires about potentialities of people that science actualized; the knowledge about children’s growth and development, for example, gave attention to the potentiality-to-be, however, entailed a comparative style of reasoning that generated double gestures, discussed in the final part. The gestures of hope in liberating the human spirit through child development simultaneously projected fears of populations that threaten the future.

Science as making kinds of people

The early founders of the republics in Europe and North America recognized that the citizen was not born but produced as a particular kind of person whose participation was necessary for government (Cruikshank, 1999; Wood, 1991).³ Although the word citizen can be traced to earlier Greek polity,⁴ it becomes particular historical sets of principles about kinds of people in the long 19th century that expresses cultural theses about an individual whose agency and participation enacts the norms of civic virtue that made government possible (Hultqvist and Dahlberg, 2001 ).⁵

Education was central to the production of this kind of person, with the modern school linked to the inscriptions of science for designing of pedagogy and learning to activate the potentialities of the society and people.⁶ While the object of prior Church schools was to ensure the moral life for access to the afterlife, the 19th-century progressive school and the New Educational Fellowship took away the overt theology. Theology was replaced with salvation and redemptive themes that linked individuality with collective notions of “civic virtue” and “the common good” that the school was to actualize. The child was a social subject who by pedagogical interventions enacted the civic obligations of participation as a “citizen” (see, e.g. Popkewitz et al., 2001; Tröhler et al., 2011).

The making of kinds of people is evident in a range of studies about the formation of school curriculum at the turn of the 20th century. The teaching of school subject is like an alchemy, a translation and transformation of disciplinary knowledge into school subjects (Popkewitz, 2004). The alchemists, precursors of modern chemistry, sought to transform metals into gold in efforts to find the Philosopher’s Stone, the ultimate truth given by God. The modern curriculum is also a translation process that works to bring the truth of the world into the representation of the curriculum of science, mathematics, and art, for example. The translation into the spaces of schooling, however, is not a copy of disciplinary or artistic fields. The curriculum is a creative act that generates priorities, ordering patterns and classifications that differ from the cognitive and artistic fields named.

When examined across the different places of American, Swedish, Brazilian, and Portuguese schools, the translation tools of science, mathematics, art and music education were designed to act on the spirit and the body of children and the young (e.g. Diaz, 2017; Gustafson, 2009; Ideland, 2019; Kirchgasler, 2017; Ilha, 2017; Lesko, 2001; Lesko and Talburt, 2011; Martins, 2017, 2018; Ó, 2003; Paz, 2017; Popkewitz, 1998/2017). Pedagogical knowledge was inscriptions of cultural dispositions about collective belonging, and concerns and deviance expressed as the Social Question about urban moral disorders. Today these inscriptions are expressed through the cognitive and learning sciences, for example, through distinctions of motivation, learning, and the “habits of the mind” of the teacher and the child, whose “well-being” expresses the potentialities of being globally competent for future participation, qualities discussed in the next section.

The object of change is the interiority of the child (and teacher)—the dispositions, sensitivities, and awareness given to reflection and action. This changing of the child’s interior has a likeness to that of religious cosmology of the soul, but the principles were not of the providential order for salvation. The earlier notions of the soul transferred and translated into the realm of pedagogical practices concerned with personal self-reflection and self-criticism (Dussel, 2011; Gorski, 1999; Lindmark, 2011). French and Portuguese pedagogy at the turn of the 20th century, for example, was to observe and “register” the inner physical and moral life in order to map the spirituality of the educated subject (“the human soul”). The French pedagogue Gabriel Compayré asserted that pedagogy is an applied psychology “related to the moral faculties of man; pedagogy contains all the parts of the soul and must use always psychology” (cited in Ó, 2003: 106; also see Hultqvist, 1998). The moral and rational qualities of the human mind, Compayré continued, were to enable action for intervening and changing the lives of others to ensure individual happiness and collective (social) progress.

The object of the psychologies was the interior or “the soul” of the child but given the new name of “the mind” by the 1920s (Danziger, 1997; Read, 1997). G. Stanley Hall (1904/1928), a founder of the American Child Studies Movement in the US at the turn of the 20th century, argued that psychology was to replace moral philosophy as the arbiter of the Bible and what was true and moral.

This historical observation about the sciences of schooling as making kinds of people, as I have suggested, travels into the contemporary sciences about practical knowledge. As argued in the next section, contemporary international assessments and teacher research activate principles directed not only to behavior but to the interior of the child (and teacher), discussed through the relating of cognition with norms of acting, motivation, attitudes, emotions, and resiliency (“grit”) that differentiates well-being from moral disorders and deviance (see, e.g. Kirchgasler, 2018).

Science as desires and potentialities of the future

Science and the making of kinds of people requires thinking about different historical lines that intersect to give intelligibility to categories about people, modes of living, and change. Embodied in the distinctions in research of children’s learning, development, growth, happiness, and satisfaction, for example, are different sets of principles that are anticipatory, anticipatory as desires about potentialities to be activated. These desires are not spoken about explicitly but generated through notions of practical knowledge, social improvement, development, action, and change in the ordering and classifications of research.

Desires are embodied in the types of modalities generated in the categories, distinctions, and differentiations of research (see, e.g. Agamben, 1999; Deleuze, 1968/1994; Deleuze and Parnet, 1977/1987).⁷ The desires are not psychological or about people’s overt declaration of intent or purpose. Nor should this concern with desire be confused with the analytic distinction between is/ought. The focus on desire in research is to make visible how the objects of change engender possibilities and potentialities of people and society. What may now seem obvious, research and the notion of change are not about the present but about becoming.

The cognitive ordering and classification of the practical sciences are to manage actions, actions as oriented and providing affect to the shaping of life in the future.⁸ If I use a common trope of markets of neoliberalism in contemporary discussions, it is not a descriptive concept of social conditions. It is an abstraction and a cultural/philosophical ideal of the potentialities of society and people. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776/1991), for example, gave expression to the idea of markets as a fiction to think about differences in the moral order. Smith used the fiction of markets as an abstraction in which he performed measurements and calculations to realize the desired world that was hoped for (Poovey, 1998). The numerical representation gave expression to what could be counted and correlated and then applied to actualize the potentialities of the philosophical ideal embodied in the theoretical abstraction of market.

Desires are epistemologically embedded in practical research, linking the object of changing people with the idea of progress, for example. Progress is a particular salvation theme that entails the wholesale awareness of change, the future, and history, with the Faustian notion of becoming rather than being. The modern notion of progress organizes the present with the future; with its affect about the potentialities of people and society that are not in the here and now.

The modern idea of progress giving directionality and potentiality to the present is a relatively recent invention. The Greeks, for example, reasoned about the world that did not place people at the center of the stage; nor was there a conception of society as an abstraction about collective belonging—that needed to wait until the long 19th century.⁹ Nor was change considered as having a rational order and temporal sequence that could be made visible and managed for human fulfillment. For the Greek Stoics, reason was the act of memory; a practice that liberated one’s own being. Knowing oneself meant knowing the past that was drawn from the wisdom given by the gods (Foucault, 2005: 468). A mind preoccupied with the future was considered as consumed by forgetting, filled with hubris and incapable of action.

The modern idea of progress, in contrast, was “a secular version of the Christian belief in providence” that moves into the Enlightenment to think about the promises of human reason and science (Gray, 2002: xiii). During the 19th century, progress connected with the idea of social improvement that brings heterotopically what was novel and different in organizing relations of the past to the present while simultaneously looking forward to a utopic future (Hetherington, 2001). Social improvement appears as a way to systematically organize and plan change as narratives of development placed in regular, irreversible stages of social and individual history. The factory was one site in which this utopic desire was inscribed, simultaneously evoked in capitalist and socialist narratives of modernization. The Faustian becoming and change was spoken of as the necessity of social improvement.

To foreshadow the last section, the contemporary “reason” of practical research embodies desires generated in principles of social improvement, visible as the salvation themes of change, for example, in notions of benchmarks, standards, and instructional improvement and teacher development. The desire is as anticipatory, directed to producing the potentialities of societies and people if there is the proper mixture of science and policy applied to actualize the potentialities embodied in words like improvement and development.

The double gestures of hope and fears of populations

If the making of kinds of people to ensure a more progressive society was simple, then the problem would be straightforward: keep eliminating the errors that hinder and restrain that goal. But the complexities of these desires in the reason of useful and practical knowledge of schooling embodies paradoxes. Change focuses on inequality to find equality that, paradoxically, inscribes comparative principles to differentiate and divide. The comparative principles entail double gestures: the gestures of hope in making the future through child development and learning simultaneously engendered fears as part of the hope—the fears of the populations that threaten the future.

The comparative style of reasoning was given expression in the Enlightenment, brought forth in the reformist idea of the moral cultivation of civilizations in a temporality that made the arbitrariness of difference necessary and inevitable (Rancière, 1983/2004: 205). The universal human reason in the Enlightenment projected double gestures of degeneracy on the lower categories of taxonomies of humankind; relocating human differences from what was previously the doctrinal opponents in sectarian disputes in the European religious wars (Boon, 1985: 25). Humanity was placed in a continuum of value and hierarchy that ordered and divided people, races, and their civilizations. Differences in people and states of their rehabilitation cast those outside of normalcy as “incapable of ever acquiring a taste for the philosophers’ goods—and even of understanding the language in which their enjoyment is expounded” (Rancière, 1983/2004: 204). To “civilize” was to endow what is common to all human beings, which was, in fact, about the potentiality-to-be differentiated from the potentiality feared as what was not-to-be.

The comparative historical ordering of people and differences was activated in the human sciences during the 19th century. Often lost when considering the formation of the social science, its focus was on deviance. The social and psychological sciences in northern Europe, England, and the US, for example, gave expression as the Social Question (Rodgers, 1998). The Social Question, what German social theorists called “Die Soziale Frage,” was part of broader cross-Atlantic Protestant political and social reform movements that focused on economic dislocations and the social and cultural disorder of the changing landscape of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and racial differences.

The Social Question in the sciences of American Progressivism embodied gestures of the hope of liberating urban populations that simultaneously engendered fears of moral disorder of the immigrant, poor, and racialized family and childhood as threatening to the future of the republic. G. Stanley Hall’s Child Study Movement spoke of scientific psychology as a salvation theme of “conquering nature” and developing “reason, true morality, religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoyment” (Hall, 1904/1928: vii). Child Studies was to change the unwashed in order to bring the purity of the spirit into being and to prevent corruption through careful education of the senses and perception. Hall spoke of the fears of “the urban hothouse” where alcoholism, delinquency, and prostitution cast particular kinds of people as representative of the moral panic about degeneration.

The sciences produced new and finer distinctions about differences in kinds of people. Hall’s psychology of the adolescent and Edward L. Thorndike’s Connectionist Psychology classified cultural distinctions to differentiate children’s motivation, growth, development, and industriousness in a continuum between the normal and pathological. The distinctions were written into the school curriculum in the alchemy that differentiates the child’s ability in mathematics and science—the children who lack motivation, were not hardworking, not innovative, and so on (Diaz, 2017; Kirchgasler, 2017; Yolcu and Popkewitz, 2019). The differences in ability had little to do with understanding science or mathematics as fields of knowledge production (Popkewitz, 2020b). They generated continua of values between the normal and the pathological.

The differences in kinds of people, the alchemy of school subjects, and the Social Question are folded in and partially activated in the objects of change generated in contemporary “practical research.” Today, the sciences of the child and pedagogy fold into the salvation and narratives about global competences, lifelong learning, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) of the knowledge society that reactivate cultural principles of the Social Question. The comparative logic creates spaces of differences and divisions that move not only internally within nations but in the colonial production of imperial presence (Lowe, 2015).

The historical paradoxes of practical knowledge: contemporary research, making kinds of people and differences

The prior historical discussion was to give visibility to particular qualities that I explore as they fold into and are activated in contemporary sciences. Two research projects are exemplars of practical, applied research: the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/)¹⁰ and teacher education/teacher effectiveness research (e.g. Ball et al., 2009; Grossman et al., 2009). The first appears as social spaces for connecting global measures of educational performance, national policy, and research for social improvement. The teacher research focuses on the professional knowledge for improving pedagogical practices. The present is told, however, not as a continuous historical movement but of historical lines partially assembled and articulated in a manner that disconnects from the past.

At first glance, the two research projects to produce a practical knowledge to change seem dissimilar. If I use the common distinctions of qualitative and quantitative research, the OECD international assessment draws its model of change from big data sets amenable to macro statistical and correlational studies to compare national school systems. Teacher research, in contrast, focuses on micro-classroom studies to identify the expertise that makes the professional teacher.

The commonality is embodied in the rules and standards of “reason” as the differences melt. Each is historically “implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning” (Butler, 2005: 7–8). These conditioning norms are embodied in the desire for a practical knowledge to change kinds of people. The knowledge generates a continuum of value and double gestures. The intention to create equality is bound to principles of inequality that paradoxically reinscribe inequality.

Making kinds of people and the chimera of research: the alchemy of the objects of change

As with the turn of the 20th century sciences, the OECD’s assessments and the teacher/teacher education research generate desires written into the rules and standards of the reason of research. The social conditions of belonging and the material qualities of daily life, as well as the technologies of science in which the desires are generated, entail particular sets of historical lines that are connected in the present.

Traveling in both the international assessments and teacher education research is the object of change as producing the globally competent child and teacher as professional. The professional is a cultural/philosophical ideal about kinds of people that novice teachers should become. This is expressed, for example, as problem-solving. Problem-solving is given a universality that expresses “the role and contributions to society of science and of science-based technology, and their importance in many personal, social, and global contexts” (OECD, 2013: 99). The ideals appear as universal qualities and characteristics that have no author or “context”; or, ironically, no empirical research. They are cultural ideal about potentialities that research inscribes as modes of living to actualize.

The well-being the child is an abstraction and a normative claim that is utopic, a phantasma about the “human nature” that brings “socially and emotionally” health of the child (OECD, 2015b, nd). The cultural/philosophical principles of “well-being” are enacted in the new territory of standardization and codifications of measurements. That territory is occupied by psychological and social-psychological distinctions about the cognitive, physical, social and psychological qualities of populations and individuality. The measures act as if global competences do exist as something to say about schools, nations, social life and the happiness of societies. The normative inscriptions are erased; in the excesses of the science that are visualized as the comparative logic of numbers, equivalences and magnitudes presented in charts and graphs. The cultural/moral principles appear as something else: psychological classifications as “Students’ life satisfaction, sense of purpose, self-awareness, and absence of emotional problems.” The classification are also social psychological processes of “Students’ social relations with family, peers and teachers, and students’ feeling about their social life” (OECD, nd). The a priori assumptions about the moral order appear only as calculations of well-being as “adapting to a healthy lifestyle”. The empirical evidence is the historical agent to effect the abstraction into actionable “data” points given as variables and their patterns.

The abstractions of the children and teachers as “ordinary people” serve as universal kinds, with particular modes of living that become the normalive object of change. Children’s development for successful and socially productive lives is anticipated as “the lifelong learner” who participates in the knowledge society. In the OECD, the potentialities are expressed as national calculations as “to what extent students at the end of compulsory education can apply their knowledge to real-life situations and be equipped for full participation in society” (OECD, 2015a: 306). The teacher and teacher education research express the potentialities through the making of the novice into the professional teacher. The professional and authentic teacher, names given to the potentialities, is not only about how the novice is to become the professional teacher, but also about children’s dispositions, sensitivities, and awareness that teaching is to produce.

Traveling in the discourses of practical knowledge are references to the objects of change that make the knowledge practical and useful. The teacher education research, for example, codifies and standardizes processes to operationalize the abstraction of professional expertise expressed as “novices learn how to do instruction, not just hear and talk about it” (Ball et al., 2009: 459). Understanding mathematical thinking is not about mathematics, but who the child should be: “mathematical [thinking], and [to] communicate using mathematics. . . [is] central to a young person’s preparedness to tackle problems that arise at work and in life beyond the classroom” (Piacentini and Monticone, 2016: 5).

The “preparedness” to be actualized through mathematical thinking in work and life is not empirically derived but formed through the application of psychological theories that entail cultural and social principles about modes of life (see, e.g. Danziger, 1997, 2008; Rose, 1989).

Problem-solving in the curriculum is given as respecting the authority of science and technology in children’s daily life. In place of the cultural and social spaces of science are generalized images and narratives folded into principles governing children’s behaviors and dispositions. Research measures of the communicative process and children’s problem-solving in using numbers in classrooms entail theories that engage social and cultural principles. When textbooks concerned with scientific literacy are examined, for example, differences emerge in what counts as literacy that are related to notions of national belonging and citizenship, and not about science (McEneaney, 2003a, 2003b). Similarly, the qualities and characteristics of the mathematically able child in reform programs are desired qualities that have significance in particular historical spaces about the ordering of conduct—the American curriculum reforms that define mathematical ability within particular liberal principles about being logical, independent, flexible, self-sufficient, free-thinking—qualities that have little to do with mathematics (Diaz, 2017; Yolcu and Popkewitz, 2019).

The cultural principles are elided in the research (Popkewitz, 2018). This brings back into view the alchemy of school subjects embodied in the curriculum. The problem-solving and the benchmarks that form the competencies for children to obtain are not about “doing” science, mathematics, art, and music in school subjects. If I use the current acronym of STEM, the translation tools in which the curriculum modeling of science and mathematics is designed as a unified and global language brought into the institutional spaces of schooling (Zheng, 2019). The different epistemic machinery of the sciences and mathematics (Knorr Cetina, 1999) were translated into a particular language of social psychology and psychology concerned with the moral development of children.

The universalizing in mathematics, science, reading, and civic and citizenship education, among others, is ordered and classified through distinctions and differences about desired interactions, communication, and processes that order conduct. “The evidence base [of the well-being” indicators] goes well beyond its statistical benchmarking. The measures are to examine children’s “enjoyment of life”, asking:

Are students basically happy? Do they feel that they belong to a community at school? Do they enjoy supportive relations with their peers, their teachers and their parents? Is there any association between the quality of students’ relationships in and outside of school and their academic performance?. . . Together they can attend to students’ psychological and social needs and help them develop a sense of control over their future and the resilience they need to be successful in life. (OECD, 2017: 3)

The distinctions perform as spaces of action in the making kinds of people. Distinctions about personal well-being, “enjoyment of life,” happiness, belonging, and self-realization are inscriptions about modes of conduct. The categories are projected potentialities found in assessments of global competence “to prepare young people for an interconnected world where they will live and work with people from different backgrounds and cultures” (OECD, 2016).

The measures and the pedagogical knowledge of the professional teacher are principles that work on ordering conduct. The object of change is the interior of the teacher and the child; the soul spoken about as habits of the mind and which research is to “inevitably impact on a teacher educator’s identity” (Loughran, 2013: 19). Recent measures of PISA concerned with “well-being” entail the codification of distinctions to classify students’ mental health, universalized with system reasoning discussed in the next section as inscribing a consistency, consensus, and harmony across the geographical spaces of nations.

The GPS coordinates of the international assessment, as is evident in the category of well-being, are not merely about nations; nor are the efforts to identify high-value practices for the teacher to learn merely about the teacher. The statistical measures of satisfaction, happiness, and well-being are not transcendental characteristics; they are formed through particular historical lines and spaces that become placed into psychological theories about kinds of people (see Desrosières, 1993/1998; Porter, 1995). What appears in the international assessments is linked to functional psychology, where the standard of happiness is to express a character of self-realization as an ethical ideal that merges social desires and affections with the capacities and desires of the self (Westbrook, 1991). This functionality has homologies to Jeremy Bentham’s principle of utility in which the specific measures of skills and knowledge bring into being the advancing or diminishing of the happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people (see, e.g. McMahon, 2006), indicated in the OECD’s assertion about “psychological and social needs” necessary for people of different backgrounds to develop control over their future and personal success.

The standards of happiness and virtue is a particular artifact of present western culture. The notions include, for example, a calculus of pleasure/pain that has different indexing in Greek antiquity, Christian notions of happiness as redemption through suffering, and, as found in the Apostle Paul’s promise of beatitudes, release, rapture, and passion. The saga of the American nation was told as an evangelical purity and political goodness, joining “the health of the soul and the regeneration of the Christian and the virtuous citizen, exultation of the divine and the celebration of design” (Ferguson, 1997: 43) with the planning of and for human improvement and “happiness.” In the OECD’s metrics of “well-being,” the ultimate question of how can I be saved is turned into the pragmatic one of “How can I be happy?” Pleasure was no longer seen as a distraction for the pursuit of virtue, but virtue itself (see, e.g. McMahon, 2006).

The statistical calculations and “evidence base” of enjoyment and happiness activate multiple principles which are historically indexed and bounded with geospatial specificities that are elided in the metrics. Happiness and well-being are not a global measure. While beyond the scope of this discussion, the historical embeddedness of this notion of pleasure, happiness, and virtue can be contrasted with classical Confucius and Tao notions (Wu, 2013).

The new “kids” on the block: systems and cybernetics in the “reason” of research

The international assessments and the teacher education/teacher research embody a particular form of knowledge about social life that becomes visible in the middle of the 20th century: knowledge formed through systems theory and cybernetics. By the turn of the 21st century, systems theory and cybernetics have become so naturalized that there is no need for any author. Yet the classifications of teacher and student competence, expertise, and benchmarks that are inscribed in contemporary practical research are shaped and fashioned through the particular rationality of systems and cybernetic theories. They shape and fashion principles that constitute the problems addressed as change, the methods to recognize empirical evidence, and objects that perform as testimonials about “what works” and the practical knowledge in the international assessments and teacher profession research.

Cybernetics added to systems theory in the post-war years through bringing the analogy of the relation between the mind and the machine as epistemological principles for the study of social affairs—the machine as the computer and its analogy to the mind as found in artificial intelligence (Halpern, 2014). The machine and mind metaphors seemingly reconcile the dichotomy of mind and body; and the world of meaning with the world of physical laws to think about the sciences of control, mastery, and governance (Dupuy, 1994/2009). To foreshadow a later discussion, the certainty of mechanical notions embodied in the notion of machines, however, does not disappear but appears through the idea of “open systems” (organism) that maintains the objectifications of people and society (the determinism of the machine) that appear as stable entities, such as found in the alchemy of school subjects.

While the idea of social life as a system is evident in the 19th-century work of Adam Smith, it is revisioned and assembled in the post-war social sciences and the educational sciences mobilized to manage the expansions of welfare states and schools (Popkewitz, Pettersson & Hsiao, 2020). The idea of a “system” is an abstraction for thinking about how to change institutions and social life through managing the relation of various components, whether they are a corporation, social life, or the psychological qualities of the “self.”

The abstraction of the school as a system envisions school performance as the potentialities called, for example, benchmarks. The systems/cybernetics classify, standardize, calculate, and manage the interrelated parts to produce efficiency in achieving system “goals.” The OECD’s model of change, for example, embodies a mapping of the hypothesized system components that include categories of competencies (benchmarks) of the student in science, categories about structure, resources, teacher recruitment, retention, and processes that are correlated with the micro-statistical measures of social and psychological factors (student well-being). The mapping functions as universal principles to manage the system. Change is measured as the processes and communication patterns registered as inputs and outputs, networks, flows, circuits, and algorithms for achieving optimal relations. This occurs through taking micro-analyses and recalibrating the data into macro-statistic equivalences that universalize differences for comparison. The universals are ideals from which a model of change is deployed to design “pathways” or highways” that are said to be “tailored” for each nation’s “needs” for improvement of its performance (see, e.g. Pont et al., 2014).

The system is theorized as working best when all its parts function in harmony and with a consensus. That harmony and consensus is expressed in the PISA benchmarks, given as “universal scale[s] of calibration” that create equivalences from “different international assessment scales of student outcomes discussed in education literature” (see, e.g. Mourshed et al., 2010: 7). Teacher professionalization, also, functions through systems theory about consensus and harmony. The profession is defined as a system with the common, standardized unified knowledge that is identified as having a single syllabus for teacher education. Research focuses on classroom communications of teachers to actualize the particular cultural/philosophical ideal of the teacher as professional whose work embodies the harmony and consensus assumed as “learning the work of teaching” (Lampert, 2010). The theory and ideals appear in research as merely descriptive of the real activities and events of schooling. The research is taken as providing more concrete understanding of “what teachers really need to know and be able to do” (Grossman et al., 2008: 247, italics added).

Research is to manage the processes and communication within and across the system components to optimize the hypothesized outcomes. OECD’s PISA large-scale quantitative measures of national educational achievement, for example, imagine the school as an ordered system whose algorithmic rules and processes enable the search for optimal solutions to given problems, or to delineate the most efficient means toward certain given school goals. “The core practice” teacher education research, with different technologies at work, visualizes teaching as a system of classroom communications that can be calculated and ordered as a system for developing professionals’ potentialities through ordering reflection and action as a cycle of planning, rehearsal, and collective analysis.

The measurements become the empirical agent of change. The calibrations of the philosophical universals of the school system link different components in the model of change designed to bring the parts into a harmony or equilibrium in the processes of the school system. Changes are measured as the steps identified as pathways for nations to maintain or plan to achieve optimal performances in science and mathematics, for example (see, e.g. Pont et al., 2014).

The concern with harmony and consensus carries with it the theoretical principles of the system’s equilibrium as its point of optimal efficiency and brings into existence the idea of disequilibrium, those elements of the system that hinder or constrain efficiency. It is when these theoretical principles of systems and cybernetics are brought into spaces such as schooling that the theory “acts” as social and cultural inscriptions to generate double gestures. The system becomes referential in the ordering and classifying the double of potentialities that excludes and abjects in the measures of inclusion. Embodied in the categories of “well-being” and teacher recruitment, autonomy, and professional development characteristics identified as “well-being” are calculations that inscribe differences and differentiations of students and family characteristics.

The paradox of exclusion and inequality as equality

The practical research is not only to actualize its philosophical ideal but to amend social and personal development to correct social wrongs. The OECD asserts, for example, that it is the “world’s premiere yardstick for evaluating the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems” (2017: 3, italics added). The redemptive theme of equity to correct social wrongs is brought into the teacher education/teacher professionalism, expressed in an American National Council of Education report: “open up new pathways and social futures for youth, particularly youth from non-dominant communities” (Gutiérrez and Penuel, 2014: 20).

Within the referential fields provided by systems theory, change is to identify and eliminate the sources of disequilibrium. Change is what hinders or prevents the equilibrium of the system. Practically (pardon the pun), this means the cultural/philosophical ideals function through the distinctions and divisions of social and psychological theories, such as differences in family and community experiences as well as the personality traits—(lack of) engagement. The differentiations and divisions work as double gestures discussed earlier. The Social Question is (re)vision through notions of inequality: paradoxically, the universalizing distinctions of the child’s “well-being” are produced through the objectifications of populations that inscribe desires of redemption and rescue: the abjected qualities of the fragile families and lacking in the capabilities or psychological characteristics to succeed.

The historical micro-sets of data are reformulated within new algorithms to generalize, map, and compare “nations” and their populations. The global explanations in the PISA data, for example, presume differences are from the equivalences constructed as the philosophical ideals. The unity produced through the work of the statistics is recoded to standardize a unity (equivalent) of different populations that erase differences among cultural and historical spaces. The statistical strategies in the international assessments construct differences through sets of equivalences that re-calculate databases about particular populations.

The algorithms are measures of differences that de/reterritorialize particular historical locations and cultural principles embedded in the psychologies and sociologies (see, e.g. Hall and Ames, 1995; Heyck, 2015; Levine, 1995). Embedded in the macro comparative statistics, but elided, are the micro-studies that describe particular historical social and psychological characteristics of children’s knowledge of science and mathematics, for example, that are joined with distinctions and classification of their families and communities. Inequality is expressed through the psychological or social categories connected with the system reasoning such as “lacking”—motivation, self-esteem, work habits or family stability. The recalibration works to explain national performances as a unity to differentiate where there is “significant, sustained, and widespread student outcome gains and as examining why what they have done has succeeded where so many others failed” (Mourshed et al., 2010: 10, my emphasis).

Differences are the nodule points of disequilibrium signified through the reasoning of systems. Differences are calculated and codified as elements of system relations indicated in graphs, charts, and the national ranking. Redemptive themes to express the social commitments in school are bounded as the search for harmony connected with historical lines of cultural distinctions of difference. The particular differences form a continuum of value to establish difference itself as “the socioeconomic background of underperformance and disengagement of boys in schools—to target policies and practices attempting to address boys’ educational disadvantage and poor outcomes” (Borgonovi and Przemyslaw, 2016: 136).

The objectifications perform as double gestures that differentiate the normative good and fears in the measures. They are expressed as “a comprehensive set of well-being indicators for adolescents that covers both negative outcomes (e.g. anxiety, low performance) and the positive impulses that promote healthy development (e.g. interest, engagement, motivation to achieve)” (OECD, 2015b).Teacher education research focuses on patterns of communication and processes, as well as taking the philosophical ideals of the professional teacher as the object of change that erases and reinscribes differences to obtain equality. That erasure occurs as the ideal of teacher expertise as ordered through the system’s principles of harmony and consensus; such as the practical knowledge of research is to identify the expertise of the teacher as the right balance of “doing” and inner qualities (mind-sets) that teachers “need in any setting, regardless of variations” in curricula or teaching styles (Ball et al., 2009: 461).

The logic of the practical research of equality is formed through principles of inequality. The global language of teacher professionalism and the statistical creation of equivalences universalize the objectifications of populations represented as “nations” or the consensus knowledge that is to define the professional expertise of the teacher. The Social Question and the comparative reason are re-inscribed. They are re-inscribed in divisions referenced within the systems theory as objects of change ordered and classified as psychological and social skills and competences of the child related to organizational qualities (e.g. teacher professional development, school leadership).

The good intentions, its impossibilities and science

The enticing and daunting promise of practical research determining the future is like the Sirens, mythical creatures that lured the mariners onto the rocks along the shores of the Rhine River.¹¹ The doxa of this research brings into view another mythical character, that of the Chimera, which relates to the social commitments of practical research. It is a phantasma of things perceived as imaginatively real and dazzling yet wildly implausible and impossible to achieve. Embedded in the chimera of practical research is the (re)visioning of the European Medieval alchemists’ search for the Philosopher’s Stone. The pursuit of change is to find the ultimate Truth of Life that is spoken about, for example, as modeling of life through the mathematical or scientific “seeing” of the curriculum that has little to do with mathematics or science (see, e.g. Ideland, 2017; McEneaney, 2003a, 2003b; Zheng, 2019, 2020). The very measures and assessments of school subjects that circulate in the international assessments and teacher practical knowledge are historical, concerned with questions of making kinds of people, moral disorder, and the Social Question.

The Sirens and Chimera rear their mythical heads but with a materiality when asking historically about the conditions and limits of the practical sciences to change school. First, the research about change is, in one sense, about motion and activity that conserve the very limits of the present that paradoxically the practical research is to rectify. Second and at the same time, the sciences “act.” The philosophical ideals embodied in the theories and methods of the practical knowledge generate desires about the potentialities of society and people that research is to actualize. The conservation and the activation of desires seem to go against each other, but in practice are entangled in each other as the reasoning of change. Third is that the comparative mode of reasoning and double gestures inscribe inequality in the methods to achieve equality.

The practical research travels as a particular kind of science for understanding change that has homologies to Stephen Toulmin’s (1990) argument that perhaps it is time to think of alternative approaches. What is often lost in contemporary discussions is that critique was an important element of the Enlightenment’s concern with progress and change. Critique is to unthink the present so as to open up possibilities as other than those contained within contemporary frameworks. This critical method retains the commitment to the attitude of the Enlightenment towards reason and science, although in a different register, which a colleague Lynn Fendler has called a “whistle blowing.”¹² It is to continually ask how we have arrived at the present and thinking about who we are, who we should be, and the possibilities of change. To return to Foucault,

Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. (Foucault, 1988: 155–156)

Agency is in criticism that cuts into what seems self-evident, challenging the habitual ways of working and thinking in constituting society and people. It is disturbing the present and the self by engaging in the conditions of unfreedom:

If there is an operation of agency or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free. Its struggle or primary dilemma is to be produced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way. This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one’s life, a struggle—an agency—is also made possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of unfreedom. (Butler, 2005: 19)

A final note. While written in the shadow of the European Enlightenment, the discussion recognizes its singularity and also the multiplicities of connections, assemblages, and disconnections in manifold historical spaces that cannot be reduced to “Eurocentrism,” local or indigenous knowledges (see, e.g. Popkewitz et al., 2014; Wu, 2013; Zhao, 2018). The political intent of these latter distinctions is important and often necessary in relation to issues of coloniality, yet the modes of analysis that enable their expression are entangled knowledges that are obscured through the inscription of the binaries that require a continual cutting.

Footnotes

Authors’ note

Presented as a keynote speech at the European Educational Research Conference (ECER), Bolzano, Italy, September 4–7, 2018.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Thomas S Popkewitz

Notes

Author biography

Thomas S Popkewitz is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His studies focus on the systems of reason that govern curriculum reforms, the sciences of education, teacher education, and policy. His research crosses the fields of curriculum studies, the political sociology of education, cultural history, and transnational studies to understand the politics of educational knowledge and the paradoxes of exclusion and abjection in efforts to include. His current projects entail working with Swedish colleagues concerning the changing relations of science, policy, and society through examining international student assessments, post-World War Two mobilizations of the social and education sciences in designing education and the welfare state, and curriculum history for the Spanish journal Historia de la Educación. This article draws primarily from his current book, The Impracticality of Practical Research. A History of Sciences of Change That Conserve (University of Michigan Press, 2020).

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