Educational Administration and Leadership

Theoretical Foundations

David Burgess, Paul Newton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138825765
• eBook ISBN: 9781317577874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume provides diverse perspectives and paradigms in educational administration and leadership. Focusing on particular philosophical and theoretical schools of thought, it traces the contemporary history of debates in the field while also exploring emerging, non-traditional schools for insight and potential contributions to educational administration in multi-cultural contexts. It critically examines trends and issues in society and their impact on educational theory, and gives an overview of the scholarly study of organizations, administration, and leadership to develop introductory understandings of significant concepts and theories.

Part I
Antecedents and Debates

1
Examining the Antecedents of Methodological Diversity in Contemporary Educational Administration

David Burgess and Paul Newton

Over the field of study dedicated to the administration, management, and leadership of educational institutions is cast the long shadow of the history of science. As progeny, appropriator, and contributor to the larger body of disciplines known as the social sciences, educational administration continues to develop understanding of itself both often in reaction to and, occasionally, in advance of (a) the contemporary context of schooling and pedagogy; (b) the social, economic, and political contexts of schools at local, regional, national, and international levels; (c) the insights of cognate disciplines and fields of study; and (d) the history of epistemological development since at least the mid-seventeenth century. Others of our colleagues have provided valuable histories of educational administration, and we do not here intend to repeat their important contributions (cf. Allison, 1989; Callahan & Button, 1964; Culbertson, 1981; Evers & Lakomski, 2000; Oplatka, 2009, 2010; Willower, 1979). Rather, in this modest introductory chapter, we offer a methodological and epistemological context for the wide variety of contributions made to the understanding of the administrative theory in education over the past forty years. In the paragraphs and pages that follow, we argue from the postulate that one’s understanding of theoretical context is assisted by an analysis of prevailing trends in thought in the eras preceding. As such, to examine the roots of the growth in methodological diversity in our field since the mid 1970s—the bulk of the present volume—one ought to examine the space that was made for such diversity. To understand this space, one must examine the event that spawned it—on our view in this book, Thomas Barr Greenfield’s presentation at the Third International Intervisitation Programme in 1974, and the point of departure as offered by Riveros in chapter three. To understand this event, which created the space for diversity, one must examine the contexts that preceded its origin and represented the foil of its critique. Thus, ours is a brief review of this final link in the chain. The contributions of our colleagues throughout this book more closely align as reviews embodied in the former two links.

Western beliefs about the practices, and expectations for the products, of (social) scientific understanding and research have their roots in Christian Europe of the 1600s. At this time, what we understand as the genesis of the “modern scientific view” had emerged as recognisable to the modern observer, and yet much of the European psyche remained anchored in a past seemingly so antithetical as to appear contradictory to that same observer. But not, it would seem, by contemporaries. The 1600s, as Dolnick (2011) has described, on the one hand, vibrated with possibility emerging from the unabashed questioning of dogmas embodied in the status quo; on the other, they were constrained by general conservatism and reluctance to break from many forces of the past. The confrontation between a questioning attitude and the inability to fully appreciate the degree to which one is influenced by the past is not a new phenomenon, and neither was it new in the 1600s. It is representative, in many ways, of the time in the study of educational administration in which the chapters of this book begin. To make this situation more clear, we believe it is helpful to explore the paradigms (as Kuhn called them in 1962) that provide the backdrop—the past(s)—questioned, and often re-questioned, by important contributors to our field, at different times within recent decades, in their pursuit of understanding social organisations and phenomena embodied in institutions of education. Additionally, such backdrops often represent concealed anchors for those who question. For our purposes, the backdrop to the backdrop (the 1600s and the origins of modern Western scientific reasoning that itself is the backdrop of the social sciences) begins at least 600 years ago.

Any review on any subject suffers under the paring knife of brevity. Ours is no exception. We see the pages that follow as a modest testament to the works of countless individuals whose efforts underlie the vignettes and discoveries we employ as markers along the path of an important, complicated, and at times disputed trail from origins to predominance in the second half of the twentieth century. Naturally, our view is limited. The history of epistemology extends well back in time beyond our starting point, and indeed it extends along lines on which we have chosen to remain silent. Further, the history of epistemology and science is nuanced and intricate and our choices are made at the expense of others. Nevertheless, it is our belief that the sections that follow represent a minimal depth of exposure to the select works of select key individuals. On our view, their influence is present in the recasting and reexaminations found in contemporary philosophical pronouncements within the study of educational organisations and their administration.

Origins

Before 1450, life in Christian Europe was almost exclusively rural. Most people were born, lived, and died in the same house, rarely if ever venturing more than 10 km afield. Daily routine was immediate and attached to one’s surroundings. It was rough and dirty, intimately dependent on the weather, informed by rhymes learned as children ¹ and in paintings and reliefs on church walls, and lived in a state of almost perpetual-present with a past no farther back than the lived memories of familial experience. At this time, what you knew was what you or someone with whom you were familiar had personally experienced or what was written in the Bible and read to you by the parish priest. He was your link to the world beyond your domain of experience. He could read, and this was to you a mystical power. The Bible from which he read was hand copied from an earlier copy—mistakes and all—by dedicated monks whose work was itself seen as mystical and holy (Burke, 1986; Ehrman, 2005).

The odd, but requisite, procedure of not correcting mistakes in meticulously copied texts, even perhaps obvious ones, employed by monastic scribes was one example of a practice that had emerged in scholarship rooted in the intellectual philosophy of the time. Called Scholasticism, the influence of St Augustine of Hippo, beginning in roughly 400 CE, solidified its dominant place in the Roman Catholic view of the world. St Augustine’s was a view, itself influenced by the work of the Roman philosopher Plotinus and the Neoplatonist school, focused upon eternal ideals or universal forms. In the theological and scholastic contexts of the Church, this implied an unquestioning focus on (a) the soul and afterlife as opposed to the here-and-now material order of the world—one need not bother with originality in material life since God’s predetermined plan for your soul will not change as a result (Burke, 1986)—and (b) those facts derived from first principles and established in ancient wisdom generally, and by Aristotle in particular (Butterfield, 1965; Crombie, 1952; Dear, 2009; Dolnick, 2011). On this view, one simply did not ask questions in life, nor ought one to question eternal knowledge from the past.

The influential view originating in the teachings of Plotinus in the 200s CE and in the Neoplatonists (and itself originating in the writing of Plato) was that a dualism exists between the world as we experience it and the real world that rests underneath our experiences—the so-called realm of the forms. Neoplatonists argued that a hierarchy existed in this real (form) world based on a descending scheme of abstraction, beginning at its apex with a singularity or unity of the good and the beautiful (which Plotinus called the “one”—rooted in the mathematical metaphysics of Thales and in the Pythagoreans—and which has been understood in later interpretations as a Neoplatonist creator-god), descending into the metaphysical realm of the forms, into the realm of souls, and then finally descending to the world of human experience—each level being progenitor of those below. The early Church absorbed these ideas into a reading of Aristotle that suggested every thing in the universe had been created by God as a unique and individual entity—never changing but eternally interested (in a philosophically intentional, almost biological, manner) in returning to its natural place in the world (fire to the heavens; rock to the Earth; humans to the realm of souls). The only distinguishing factor was found in terms of an object’s value, and this was based on its placement in closer and closer proximity to the centre of the universe (read, the Neoplatonist “one”) (Burke, 1986). One might consider for oneself those remnants of this view that remain visible today in the artistic murals and reliefs produced to adorn the walls and altarpieces of medieval churches. For the illiterate onlooker, the size and proportion of each figure increased in proximity to God: Christ and/or Madonna are largest; smaller are apostles, archangels, the Pope, kings, bishops, priests… trailing down to miniscule common people. ² Everything was hierarchical, and you knew your place within whether you could read or not. But all was not lost, as you could be rewarded in death with ascension to a realm closer to God than that from which you came.

Consistent with Neoplatonist thought, the Scholastics subscribed to the belief that knowledge (a form, so to speak) was separable from its representation (how we interpret the material world through our humanly senses). Representations were merely shadows of what was real—the real was the ideal form upon which each sensual opinion-based representation was founded. Objects of our experience, on this line of thinking, are mere opinions of the forms. Their value is miniscule in comparison to that of knowledge of the forms. The human body, for example, was simply a shadowy representation of the real soul—so too was any other body, object, or matter—thus knowledge of the world around us was at best an opinion. Focus study upon what is real (like God, the soul, and heaven), said St Augustine, and not on upon that which is shadow and opinion (like the material world of our experience). Scholarship—a peculiarly spiritual and introspective version of what we now understand this word to mean—of the Church followed St Augustine’s edict, and Europe ran headlong into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the later Dark Ages, efforts were focused upon better reconciling and harmonising Aristotelian, Neoplatonist, and Roman Catholic Church teachings. The texts from which these scholars worked were often poor copies of poor Latin translations of copies of Greek originals. Nevertheless, the picture of the universe at which medieval science arrived throughout this reconciliation, known as the Ptolemaic system, overlapped nicely for most concerned. In almost perfect accord with Aristotle, ³ the Earth was placed at the centre of everything, surrounded by concentric invisible spheres upon which the moon, five known planets, sun, and stars travelled around the Earth in occasionally reversing directions (Burke, 1986; Dear, 2009; Kearney, 1971). This Earth-centric view was appropriate for the Church—since God had placed humans here at the universe’s centre.

In the 1500s, universities dominated European intellectual life. The curriculum reflected Scholasticism, and focused on reading and writing Latin and Greek texts (Dear, 2009). Intellectual acuity was officially measured in one’s knowledge of Aristotelian wisdom. Oxford University had decreed a century before that “Bachelors and Masters of Arts who do not follow Aristotle’s philosophy are subject to a fine of 5 shillings for each point of divergence” (Dolnick, 2011, p. 62). Both philosophy and divergence, however, was expanding in scope on account of two important discoveries. First, vast volumes of pre-Christian European (Archimedes’, Euclid’s, Hippocrates’, Plato’s, Ptolemy’s, and those of many others) and Arab scholarship (that of al-Haytham [Alhazen] on optics and vision, al-Majusi [Haly Abbas] on medicine, and other Golden Age Islamic works) that had been preserved by the Moorish libraries were re-discovered following the capture of the Muslim-controlled (now Spanish) Córdoba and Toledo in the 1100s. Yet, given the relative cost of monastic book production in the intervening centuries, the ancient works found were not widely spread until 400 years later. ⁴ Second, in a rediscovered work by Aristotle found preserved in these libraries (the “Prior Analytics” of the Organon) was offered a means of expanding one’s knowledge on almost any subject. Known as syllogistic deductive reasoning, knowledge about two premises would lead to knowledge of a previously unknown third logical conclusion. Ironically, such reasoning would in time deprecate the Aristotelian universe.

By the 1550s, print-runs of the Greek and Arab texts in translation were available across Europe. Further, scholars could produce texts accompanied by accurately replicated woodcut illustrations at such reduced cost and such increased speed that (a) books on any subject were now available to practically anyone with an interest, and (b) what was available on any subject could not only be easily read, but could also be easily verified in the emerging renewed conception of the real (formerly shadowy) world—and not exclusively for remnant medieval typos. Clearly, but slowly, literacy and science waxed; the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church over European scholarship was slowly starting to wane, both the former and latter of these particularly so in the ever-growing Protestant Northern Europe (Burke, 1986; Kearney, 1971).

Revolution

Dolnick (2011) has succinctly captured the state of affairs for the common man in seventeenth-century England. Fascinating is the fact that little had changed in many respects when compared to the image offered above of life two hundred years earlier:

Few ages could have seemed less likely than the late 1600s to start men dreaming of a world of perfect order…. In the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, the natural and the supernatural still twined around one another. Disease was a punishment ordained by God. Astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens.

… The same barges that brought vegetables to the city from farms in the countryside returned laden with human sewage, to fertilize the fields.

… No one bathed, from kings to peasants. The poor had no choice, and the wealthy had no desire. (Doctors explained that water opened the pores to infection and plague. A coat of grease and grime sealed disease away.) Worms, fleas, lice, and bedbugs were near-universal afflictions. Science would soon revolutionize the world, but the minds that made the modern world were yoked to itchy, smelly, dirty bodies.

(pp. xv–xvi)

It is not an overstatement to say that these same minds were similarly yoked to beliefs held fast in a peculiarly conservative Scholasticism. Isaac Newton, whose questions—along with those of Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Tycho Brahe—brought on the downfall of Ptolemaic cosmology, remained entwined in the Scholastic-inspired belief that all that he had discovered (including his own detailed work on optics, his in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Antecedents and Debates
• PART II Diverse Perspectives
• Epilogue: Engaged Scholarship, Epistemic Cultures, and the Worlds of Practitioner and Scholar
• Contributors
• Index