Abstract
Underlying the twelve very diverse contributions to this collection lies a largely unspoken question: is it possible to achieve a consensus about the kinds of knowledge that should characterise the field of study that goes under the name of ‘education’, one which gives the field coherence, shows how its sub-fields relate to each other, and enables it to put forward a brave face to the world, giving the lie once and for all to those who see it as ‘soft’ and barely worth a place in the academy? The answer to this question, given again and again in this book, is ‘no’. This is not because education does not deserve a place in the academy, but because the diversity of teleology and structure within the field, the political and practical pressures to which it is subject, even the complexity of the attempts to subject it to epistemological definition, render the task unattainable.
Failure to achieve consensus is not just ontologically in relation to defining the essence of educational studies, but empirically in terms of what people working in the field actually do and how they conceive of what they are doing. The diversity of approaches to the study of education is also not just across the global education community as a whole, but similarly inside most of the jurisdictions covered by the book’s case studies: France, Germany, Latvia, Australia, China, the USA, and the UK. But this does not mean that the absence of an answer to this ‘largely unspoken question’ is a problem. Indeed, as David Labaree explains in his excellent concluding chapter, the existence of such a diversity of approaches and of such strong and distinctive national traditions is a strength and an opportunity. It may be something we have to wrestle with, but it is not an obstacle to be removed.
Reading this book reminded me of the Oklahoma bucks in the Wallace Stevens poem which swerve to the right to get round the bristling firecat, then swerve to the left, but never get through, and when the firecat eventually falls asleep are left wondering why they ever wanted to go in such a unilinear direction in the first place. For Labaree the one unilinear direction for educational study and research to be avoided at all cost, and the only one currently being actively pursued, is driven by ‘human capital uber (sic) alles’ and threatens to rationalise the production of educational knowledge around economic productivity and the raising of PISA scores.
PISA and OECD are rarely flavour of the month in this collection, for reasons with which those who believe there is still life left in traditional western and Confucian notions of an education that draws on deep philosophical and ethical foundations will readily sympathise. It is encouraging to hear, despite the current dominance of western utilitarian assumptions about education and educational study in China, that some voices are beginning to urge re-acquainting its education system with the traditional Chinese legacy of scholarship. It is similarly reassuring to find the spirit of Immanuel Kant still informing the philosophical and ethical focus of much of educational study in Germany and Latvia. The national distinctiveness of Latvia’s Pedadoģija, with its tripartite origins in German philosophical traditions, Deweyan progressivism and a Vygotskian conception of learning, is particularly intriguing in the way it bears the imprint of the country’s turbulent history, though I must admit to struggling to pinpoint what in practice this interesting amalgam actually involved.
The contributions from Australia and the USA are particularly vehement in their criticism of the contemporary obsession of education systems with producing what the French philosopher of education Laurent Fedi has called un nouveau homme (a new man), one with the skills and mindset enabling him to take his place in a flexible, nomadic global marketplace, accepting this place without protest, cooperative, conformist, adaptable, and free from strong opinions and attachments. While accepting the validity of the critique I am not sure how helpful it is to label it as a phenomenon of the ‘New Right’ or of governments wedded to ‘economic liberalism’. As far as I can see the itch to hijack state education systems for purposes of social engineering of one kind or another is apparent right across the political spectrum and one of the major threats to some of the older traditions of ‘liberal education’ discussed in the case studies.
The book, ably introduced by the editors Furlong and Whitty and neatly concluded by Labaree, is divided into two main parts: the six national case studies and four generic chapters which explore ways of conceptualising educational knowledge. The generic chapters also draw on the experiences of particular countries, especially England and Germany. Some of the discussions about conceptualising the ‘field’ – which even extend to exploring whether ‘field’ is an appropriate term to apply to education – verge at times on the scholastic and may be mostly of interest to the small number of specialists in this area. A little bit of Bernstein and Habermas can make one look at things afresh; too much can make educated lay readers feel they are being driven down a side track.
Nonetheless how one conceptualises educational knowledge is at the heart of the book and the discussions of this, whether in the context of a national case study or in the generic chapters, highlight tensions and choices that people working in this field have to face: whether one starts from the perspective of the independent disciplines (psychology, sociology, philosophy, history, etc.) which can be applied to educational contexts, or from the issues, which may relate to a number of disciplines, that emerge from the educational contexts themselves; whether one’s study is disciplinary, multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary; whether one is searching for knowledge which can lay a claim to be ‘scientific’ or for knowledge which is happy to categorise itself as ‘craft knowledge’, or for one which integrates the two; whether the purpose of one’s research is ‘pure’, that is truth-seeking, or whether the objective is to support a cause or directly to ‘make a difference’ out there in the world.
As this list of possible approaches suggests, the choices one makes are bound to be influenced by the contexts within which the study and research is taking place. If educational knowledge is being produced in a teacher education context, or in a project addressing concerns within a school, one may be drawn to different choices than if one is working within a university department which still manages to investigate issues simply because they are an important part of contemporary or historical reality and not because the results of the investigation might help to raise PISA scores.
Contributors here explore the relative importance of the various sites of ‘knowledge production’, which include government bodies as well as private (including international) ones, showing once again how this varies hugely across different national contexts. There are no ‘Anglo-Saxon’ versions of France’s specialist research institutes based on different disciplines, for example, or anything outside Germany akin to Erziehung with its deep philosophical and moral roots and deliberate distancing of its concerns from the world of practice (not that this distancing means that its impact on practice is not very real).
Why is all this conceptualisation important outside the world of the particular research community to which contributors to this volume belong and which, one assumes, will provide the main readers of this book – and for which this will be a significant contribution to its ‘sub-field’? There are three reasons.
First, it is important simply because education is an essential part of contemporary social reality, as it has also been historically, and it is crucial that efforts are directed to studying what it is, how it has been shaped by its political, economic, social and cultural context, and how it in turn impacts on that context. It is also central to our understanding of how people learn. It is important that there is a public understanding of what the different approaches to studying education involve, what these approaches purport to achieve and what they are unable to achieve, and how they relate to each other.
Second, if we are clearer about the different kinds of educational study and the different purposes for which it is undertaken it might be clearer where these are best located and what role they might play in the initial and continuing education of practitioners. It might even lead, in England for example, to a re-examination of current views about the irrelevance of education’s core disciplines (philosophy, etc.) to the initial education of teachers, though I will not be taking any bets on it.
Third, for all these reasons, it is important that education shakes off the low status that is repeatedly lamented in the course of this book. Greater conceptual clarity about the diversity of approaches that educational study involves, and what one can expect (and what one can not expect) from these, will not by itself transform the situation – but it will help.
The status of education in the academy may also be helped by greater attention to how findings are written up. Although not the worst offenders among scholarly communities – as recent incursions on my part into the realm of literary theory have shown – educationalists are often their own worst enemies when it comes to coating their observations with jargon, or failing to use necessary technical language in ways which suggest the presence of at least a hint of empathy for lay readers of their works. This volume contains some excellent scholarly writing; dense, rigorous and clear in its definitions of the heavy Bernsteinian terminology which permeates its pages. It also contains a small amount of less helpful writing, some of which could have easily been sorted out by a copy editor providing assistance to writers whose first language is clearly not English, but some of which does not have this excuse. When ‘social affairs’ are said to ‘transpire’ within a ‘plenum’, and ‘practices’ are said to form ‘fields, complexes, textures’, without any explanation of the specific meanings of these terms, one cannot help thinking that the main point – that learning takes place in different ways in different contexts – is being gift-wrapped to make it sound grander than it is, and unnecessarily obscured into the bargain.
But this is a minor blemish in a book which makes the reader think about fundamental issues, not just those to do with the ‘production of educational knowledge’ but also the eternal questions underpinning this production about the aims of education.