And the beat goes on....

A recent article (Kohn, 2006) rekindled interest in a paper begun years earlier but never completed. Stimulated by Mile Kohn's observations concerning the misuse or even abuse of research in the educational community the author looks back over a lengthy career in academe and laments that the discipline of education is still on the outside looking in.

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Although science has been defined and redefined over the centuries, at its core it is a human enterprise which has as its basic goal the formulation, understanding, and utilization of an accurate conceptual model of the universe. Education is a human enterprise, and education, too, has been defined and redefined. But the comparisons end. If education is a science, or if there is a science of education, its basic purpose has thus far eluded searchers. Questions as to the nature of education's ultimate goal or goals abound in the journals and media of today and may be traced as far back as Aristotle, and perhaps even to the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately, the background noise accompanying the quest for educational truth is so loud that for all practical purposes the search itself is doomed, for as few can profess to be scientists or to have done science, almost all have experienced education at one time or another. Thus, everyone (including the author!) lays claim to an experiential expertise of sorts and has his or her pet theory as to what education is or ought to be.

In the spring of 1969, the author was completing a university-coordinated internship as a Supervisor of Science in a small agricultural community in a moderately large northcentral state and living in a two-room apartment on the northern end of a local motel. As a participant in a National Science Foundation-sponsored Institute for Science Supervisors, and as a young man looking for the next step in his professional life, he needed to make a decision--return home to a waiting job as a high school chemistry teacher, look for a position as a supervisor of science, or stay at the university and enter the doctoral program. He chose the third alternative and, as a research fellow housed in the R & D Center at a major research university, soon committed to the quest for a theory of education based upon what has been shown to be true as opposed to what someone hopes or believes to be true. Two sources, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and a chapter by Arthur Foshay in Harry Passow's Curriculum Crossroads, guided his early thinking.

Kuhn's Theory

Kuhn (1964), who wrote of the process by which science advances, was of the opinion that during periods of what he termed normal science all persons working in any given field were possessed of the same paradigm--concepts, ideas, and opinions that pertained to the day-to-day workings of that field of study. He characterized the work of the scientist as puzzle-solving and noted that each individual operates under the same paradigm and under the conviction that any problem is solvable--the answer will come if only the investigator is clever and skillful enough to do what no one has done before. Kuhn observed that progress during times of normal science is rapid because researchers choose to concentrate on problems that will fail to be solved only through their own shortcomings. Troubles arise with the discovery of results which do not fit the existing paradigm. Such results, if persistent, may lead to an uneasy situation until the issue is resolved or a new paradigm is formulated. If the new paradigm is incompatible with the one in place, a Kuhnian revolution occurs--the old paradigm is discarded and a new period of normal science is begun. Normal science is therefore, not random in its choice of direction but proceeds along predictable lines; and research, as Kuhn observes, "... is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies." In other words, investigators, freed from the need to search for the paradigm itself, can devote their energies to the filling of gaps in--or the logical extensions of--the existing order of things.

At times when one paradigm is in the process of being replaced by another, normal science makes little progress. Such periods are marked by insecurity and much debate over what Kuhn describes as "legitimate methods, problems, and standards of solution." He further notes that, without the existence of a basic paradigm, all facts pertaining to a specific situation or phenomenon may be seen as equally relevant. The normal progression of an enterprise conforming to the above conditions would be long periods of slow steady progress interrupted at somewhat irregular intervals by shorter periods of little progress. Moreover, each long period would probably end at the time of (or close after) some truly unique discovery or innovation. From a distance, an observer might see progress in such a system as a function of swift, isolated leaps.

Through Kuhn's eyes one can see the period after Aristotle as normal science of a kind. Disturbing data produced by Copernicus and confirmed by Kepler were ultimately clarified by the new paradigm of Newton. In like manner, the theories of Einstein were as foreign to Newton's physics as his had been to Aristotle's, and relativity became the paradigm of the atomic age. Progress was similar in other areas in response to the contributions of Lavoisier, Pasteur, Darwin, Harvey, Maxwell, and others. In each case normal science, now provided a road map so to speak, could explore along any of the paths indicated as long as it stayed on the map. A new paradigm, however, would constitute a different map, a different set of guidelines, and a related period of new explorations.

But, is the nature of scientific progress unique in the history of mankind? Kuhn's theory had been anticipated and expanded to other areas by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation (1964). Commenting on the cyclic nature of man's creative endeavors, Koestler had noted that

   ... science, like poetry or architecture or painting, has its
   genres, 'movements,' schools, theories which it pursues with
   increasing perfection until the level of saturation is reached
   where all is done and said--and then embarks on a new approach,
   based on a different type of curiosity, a different scale of
   values.

Foshay's Criteria

And what of education, does it, too, have its genres, movements, schools, current and discarded theories regarding the proper functioning of schools? Writing in Curriculum Crossroads (1962), a collection of essays on curriculum edited by Harry Passow and published by Teachers College Press of Columbia University, Arthur Foshay wrote that all true disciplines possess a domain or area of concern, methods or rules of procedure for seeking and handling data and judging generalizations, and a history. He contended that of the three, the establishment of the history was most important, for it was from this history that both the domain and rules of procedure evolved. Education, characterized in its day-to-day workings by bandwagonism and an almost total unawareness of its past, would seem to fail to meet Foshay's criteria. Speaking of curriculum, Kliebard (1968) observed that our "... inability or our unwillingness to develop a sense of where we are in relation to where we have been in curriculum has created a kind of astigmatism such that we cannot see the past for the present nor the present for the past."

Does education have an agreed-upon domain? Pella (1975), implying that in trying to be all things for all people education had succeeded in becoming nothing for a great many, portrayed the field as including "... all of pedagogy and educationese and all of common sense." Koerner (1963), starting with the qualification that education, bound up as it is with the dreams and aspirations of all mankind, may be beyond accurate definition, questioned its most fundamental of all assumptions--that most children are capable of learning--in observing that "... there is no body of evidence acceptable to most educationists to support this assumption, and it may well be ill-founded." He then hedged his bet by adding "... on the other hand, there is no cogent evidence to support opposing or contrasting views." Switching his attack to a perceived lack of consensus among educators as to proper directions and an established body of knowledge, Koerner added that educators are free to explore any question they wish about whatever they deem appropriate. Nock (1932) cited what he termed as errors in the theory upon which education in the United States has been based. These he delineated as "fantastic and impractable" concepts of both equality and democracy, and a "fantastically exaggerated idea of the importance of literacy in assuring the support of a sound and enlightened public order." Nock believed that the United States' commitment to educate all persons was the flaw from which all educational problems emanated. It was his contention that serious education would be a waste of time for all but a small percent of persons, and advocated vocational training for the population in general.

With respect to agreed upon methods or rules of procedure, Koerner (1963) cited the imprecision of stated goals, disagreements as to plans for their attainment, and the growth of a type of language unique to educators as major characteristics of education. Pella (1972) seemingly agreed in noting that the numerous and many times conflicting claims made over the years by a host of educational proponents and critics alike "... have not and in most cases cannot be demonstrated." He added that due to "... inadequacies in conceptual vocabulary and frames of reference for assessment, the results of our research are contradictory." Sounding the same theme in a 1966 publication, he said, "We are unable to communicate with each other because of the lack of meaningful conceptual constructs within the area." Earlier, Paul Hurd, speaking in Theory Into Action in Science Curriculum (NSTA 1964), had observed that a fundamental problem in curriculum development was the absence of a commonly held theory of education upon which decisions could be based, a position comparable to that voiced by Gibboney (1989) who maintained that "... the corpus of educational research provides nothing that advances comprehensive theory or practice."

The absence of Foshay's first two criteria would seem to negate the presence of the third, but that may not be the case. Is it that we have no history, or have we merely ignored our history? Koerner (1963) proposed that education, along with business administration, social work, and a few other fields of study, came into being before it was ready. Perhaps before time--and the subsequent history--had been given enough of a chance to provide the basic foundation of theory and practice characteristic of more established areas. He was of the opinion that education had assumed discipline status "... simply because enough people thought that [it] ought to be a separate field."

Koerner's idea makes some sense. Certainly education has borrowed heavily from some of the other social sciences, particularly psychology, for much of its basic beliefs and methodologies. Outsiders--interested laymen and professionals from other disciplines--have markedly influenced the history of education in this country. Indeed, in this nation we even place the governance of our schools in the hands of local businessmen, lawyers, barbers, insurance salesmen, and a host of other vested-interest representatives, many times with personal agendas diametrically opposed to the best interests of the schools themselves.

One of the practices educators borrowed from psychology was itself appropriated from the sciences. In an article devoted to the nature of research in education, Gibboney (1989) attributed the quest for scientific objectivity to Descartes' seventeenth century attempts at separating the act of measurement from the person doing the measuring. Gibboney voiced the opinion that while the physical sciences have advanced "... on the strong legs of measurement and mathematics," education and the other social sciences continue to pursue "... a naive empiricism that ignores ideas." Observing that in a true science, findings must be related to theories, he characterized educational research as atheoretical and noted that its practitioners routinely mistake isolated facts for scientific truth. Koerner (1963) related education's seeming preoccupation with meaningless quantification as an indication that in its quest for respectability it had fallen into the trap of scientism, and viewed reliance on the scientific method and the search for a science of education as continuing reflections of concern for status and professionalism. It may be this same concern for image that prompted Kliebard (NSSE, 1988) to observe that the cyclic nature of school reform was in some way tied to a breed of school administrator whose success and job security was largely determined by how well he kept the system up-to-date, or prompted this author (Ogden, 1974) to deplore the tendency for educational institutions "... to put ideas into practice for the sake of innovation before researchers have provided them a solid theoretical foundation."

Neglected History

George Sarton (1952), the noted historian of science, observed that "no one should be recognized as a master in any subject that does not know at least the outline of its history." Ernst Mach (1893), the German scientist whose name has come to represent the speed of sound, had earlier noted that those individuals who "... know the entire course of the development of science" will have a better grasp of any current situation than those who, "... limited in their views to the age in which their own lives have been spent, contemplate merely the momentary trend that the course of intellectual events takes at the present." In education, Bellack (1969) has acknowledged the ahistorical nature of school curriculum development and Obourn (1963) observed the past to be "... an ever-present foundation upon which a future must be built." If, indeed, it is possible to "... create a dialogue not only among ourselves, but with our professional forbears" as Kliebard (1962) suggests, what might such a dialogue reveal?

Three theories as to the nature of the learning process had emerged prior to the turn of the twentieth century. The three, mental discipline, natural unfoldment, and apperception, were speculative as opposed to empirical and were based upon assumptions as to man's moral and actional makeup. Mental discipline, the oldest and for a while the most widely held, viewed education as the training of the mind. In place from the days of Plato and Aristotle, proponents saw knowledge as a body of universal truths. Benefit could not only be derived from the possession of such knowledge, but also from the discipline that the mind itself would derive as a result of the interaction. Natural unfoldment, stemming from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalossi, broke from mental discipline in viewing the learner as basically good rather than evil or neutral. Although both theories assumed an active nature for man--characteristics are inborn--they differed as to his moral nature and the role of the environment with respect to developing or corrupting the individual. Apperception, as opposed to both mental discipline and natural unfoldment, assumed a neutral/passive nature and held that everything comes from the outside. Although the idea can be traced to Aristotle, John Locke's seventeenth century Tabula Rasa or blank tablet theory gave it substance. Locke held that all information comes through the senses and is interpreted in light of what the organism has already experienced. To Locke and to the followers of Johann Friederich Herbart, called Herbartians, education should focus upon training the senses rather than in disciplining the mind. (Bigge, 1971)

Although both natural unfoldment and apperception had impacted American education, particularly by making headway into the curriculum of the teacher-education institutions of the last half of the 1800s, mental discipline was still the standard by which subjects and students were judged. During the 1880s and 1890s, when its supposed benefits began to be questioned, neither was able to fill the void or to counter the serious charges levied by an experimentally-oriented cadre of psychologists. Principles of Psychology, an 1890 book by William James, seriously questioned the claims of mental discipline advocates and, in so doing heralded the beginnings of behavioral theory. Was this a revolution? If mental discipline can be considered to have been a paradigm, then James' work seriously challenged it and set off a Kuhnian debate. Whether the resulting new paradigm is again under question, or whether we have been in a between-paradigm period for the last one hundred and twenty-five and counting years, or whether we are still in search of a first paradigm, educational research continues to produce inconsistent results.

In the early decades of the twentieth century work by such individuals as Edward L. Thorndike and Louis Terman in measurement coupled with advances in science and the related scientific movement in business and industrial management, stimulated by the work of Frederick W. Taylor, caused educators of the time to try to adapt the methods of statistics and business efficiency to education. Writing in the Seventeenth Yearbook (NSSE, 1918), Thorndike noted that "whatever exists at all exists in some amount" and added that "... to know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity along with its quality." Schoolmen, accordingly, sought to capture this image by stressing both quality and quantity in their product and in pursuing a supposedly-attainable science of education which David Snedden (1927), Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia, viewed as capable of providing the answers to questions involving selection of the best methodologies, capabilities of and the social needs of learners, advantages and disadvantages of various types of teacher training, and the effects of time allotment, building utilization, and a number of other unspecified factors.

Increasingly, education came to employ the methods of business management and measurement in the conduct of its affairs. Education for Social Efficiency became the catch-phrase of the times; objectives replaced the less-precise aims in course descriptions; and subcategories appeared for general, specific, immediate, and ultimate outcomes. Franklin Bobbitt, of the University of Chicago, was one who attained national recognition in attempting to apply business efficiency procedures to education. Utilizing a technique called activity analysis; Bobbitt applied field-generated inventories of behaviors to curriculum development. In the Twenty-Sixth Yearbook (NSSE, 1927), he contended that the "... first step in curriculum-making is to formulate a statement of the activities which constitute a proper quality of human living." He then added, "These are the processes. They are the curriculum."

Callahan (1962) viewed the consequences of attempting to convert the nation's schools to the business model as an-American tragedy in education. He saw the situation as one in which an emerging profession, lacking a strong foundation of tradition and accepted ways of handling public pressure, found itself swept up in a national obsession. Following decades of concern for reform, a supposed research-based panacea from a prestigious sector of society, bearing the irresistibly appealing label of scientific management, and championed so extensively in the public media of the day, was impossible for a status-seeking cadre of top educators to resist. Callahan viewed the heart of the tragedy to be the "... adoption of values and practices indiscriminately and applying them with little or no consideration of educational values or purposes"--applying attitudes and procedures found to be successful in the production and sale of things and services to the education of children. Accordingly, emphasis came to be on that which was most measurable (cost) as opposed to the product (an educated child), and the paying public loved it!

Of additional importance were the parallel but related efforts of other educators in changing normal schools to colleges, colleges to universities, and in the creation of the Doctor of Education degree. These efforts were not in and of themselves harmful, but, in Callahan's words, by labeling its accounting procedures scientific, educational leaders had "... built an empire of professional courses on a foundation of sand." Given such a foundation, and the prevailing attitude of many doctoral dissertation directors that any practical school problem could tightly be studied under the umbrella of scientific investigation, Callahan was probably justified in characterizing much subsequent educational research as a dissent into trivia. Koerner (1963) may have been a bit harsher in noting that many graduate programs of the time turned out both school personnel and future professors of education who were what he saw as the very "... antithesis of the liberally educated person." Callahan noted that for years to come, through their own efforts and those of their students, such professors would control the direction of education and educational research to maintain that which he characterized as the cult of efficiency.

Conclusions

Kliebard (1968) observed that "each generation [of educators] is left to discover anew the persistent and perplexing problems that characterize the field." Is the current generation any closer to resolving them than when its ancestors grasped at the first straw? Is education a discipline? Probably not, but it seems to be based upon disciplines. Is education a science? It doesn't seem to be. Is a science of education possible? The answer is probably no. Can education be studied scientifically? The answer is probably yes ... but with modification.

Like it or not, education is a human enterprise with all the frailties, tribulations, and triumphs that that designation suggests. In her excellent 2000 publication. An Elusive Science, the title of which subsumes much of the content of the current manuscript, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann correctly points out that "... successful innovations in education are more dependent on entrepreneurship than on the validity of the research that supports them." In an earlier issue of this journal the author (Ogden, 2002) also noted "... curriculum and methodology matter nothing if not put into play by a competent, caring teacher." First, educators need to realize that the behavioral model--which fails to even consider the possibility that organisms can think--while apparently satisfactory for dogs, pigeons, rats, and other more conditionable life forms, is probably of limited use with human beings. In electing to concentrate only upon observable behavior, researchers have made the assumption, which Gibboney (1989) has so succinctly captured, that" ... visual acuity compensates for the misdirected eye." In other words, researchers are focusing upon surface data and ignoring the underlying conditions which may, or may not, produce it. Even astronomers question if that which is observable at the surface of a star is an accurate indication of conditions in its interior. Much of educational research is concerned with surface phenomena--class size, time on task, size of school, ability grouping, and methodology employed--to the exclusion of that which really matters: the interaction among student, subject matter, and teacher that produces learning. Why? Because it's vastly easier to apply numbers to that which is observable--think quantifiable, think (gasp) trivial.

What has time revealed with respect to most of the variables studied? Has Snedden's belief in the potential value of research been realized? One of the most depressing answers is contained in J.M. Stephens' 1968 publication The Process of Schooling. Chapter seven, "The Constancy of the School's Accomplishment," delineates factor after factor for which years of research have yielded approximately equal numbers of conflicting studies plus larger numbers of studies reporting no significant difference. The conclusion seems to be that regardless of what they are taught, and why or how they are grouped, instructed, or tested, kids seem to show pretty much the same advances. Although Stephens' book was published in 1968, little has been revealed in the intervening years to contradict his findings. Either the tests are not measuring correctly, are measuring the wrong things, the factors researchers have been studying don't make much of a difference, or (back to Kuhn) in the absence of a basic paradigm, all arguments may seem equally relevant--or irrelevant!

Second, if educators must (and by now the use of measurement in educational information gathering approaches what Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof would characterize as tradition) apply statistical analyses to our research efforts, let's be a little more correct in their usage and let's be a little more realistic in our expectations. Use of parametric statistics is completely inappropriate below the interval level of measurement, where the difference between ranks is known and usually equal, yet, they are many times employed in the analysis of ordinal or even nominal data. Additionally, if external variables are so difficult, if not impossible to hold constant, why are researchers so riveted into the .05 or .01 levels on tests of significance? Why not .50 or .70? Wouldn't teachers find something helpful if, with limited numbers of subjects and in the absence of controlled variables, expectations were a bit less stringent? An article by Frymier and associates (1989) discussed the results of a study involving simultaneous replication and proposed the technique as a useful one for conducting large-scale research. Smaller confidence intervals might be feasible in simultaneous replications where the total number of participants would be large. Remember--the smaller the number of subjects, the larger an effect needs to be to show statistical significance--and vise versa.

One of the fundamental problems involved in trying to force a physical science research model onto investigations involving human beings is that controls cannot be governed as rigidly--students, unlike bacteria or mice or molecules, do not exist in a tightly regulated environment in which all variables but the one under study can be held constant. Moreover, scientific replication, a hallmark of the hard sciences, in education and other social sciences is almost nonexistent. Acknowledging that even if true replication was attempted it would be difficult to achieve, Frymier's team rightfully pointed out that most educational research is purposefully modified to fit local conditions--procedural changes, time constraints, modification of instruments, and the like. Nevertheless, simultaneous replication, conducting identical studies at the same relative time in a number of different locations, can be a reasonable and workable method for studying a problem,

A second technique referred to in the Frymier article was that of meta-analysis-comparison of similar studies conducted independently and most likely at different locations and times. While meta-analysis, coming as it does after-the-fact, cannot control variables as tightly as in simultaneous replication, it, too, is a workable method of making comparisons among related studies; and both may prove to be useful in moving education from the fact to the theory or principle level.

Reprise

And, as the old Sonny and Cher song suggests, the beat goes on. In the absence of demonstrable evidence supporting ideas for educational practice, the voice of authority--or maybe just the voice of someone with strong vocal chords--still rings loud! In the rapidly approaching forty years that have passed since that spring of 1969, and as the now not so young man now contemplates retirement from a career that has spanned all levels of the educational ladder, are educators any closer to the millennium their counterparts of the first third of this century envisioned or does the search continue? Assuming that education, like science and poetry and architecture and painting, is a human activity taking place in human society, and remembering Kuhn's (1964) contention that in the absence of a basic paradigm any and all arguments may be seen as equally relevant, can education be seen as an enterprise in search of (maybe "lacking" is better) a basic paradigm? Acknowledging the contention (Koerner, 1963) that education became a field of study before the years and "countless individual and group efforts" had evolved "... a substantial body of specialized knowledge of proven worth and techniques for continued investigation and advancement of the subject," and that as such it fails to meet Foshay's (1962) criteria for a "true discipline," are we in education simply to hang our collective head and go away? Probably not ... but maybe it's time we put egos aside and listened to the evidence!

References

Bigge, M.L. (1971) Learning theories for teachers. New York: Harper & Row.

Callahan, R.E. (1963) Education and the cult of efficiency. Chicago: University of Chicago Pess.

Foshay, A. (1962) in Passow, H. Curriculum crossroads, New York: Teachers College Press.

Frymier, J., L. Barber, B. Gansneder and N. Robertson (1989) Simultaneous replication: technique for large-scale research. Phi Delta Kappan. 71(3), 228-231.

Gibboney, R.A (1989) The unscientific character of educational research. Phi Delta Kappan. 71 (3), 225-227.

Kliebard, H. (1962) in Witt, P.F.W. Technology and the curriculum, New York: Teachers College Press.

Kliebard, H. (1968) Curricular objectives and evaluation: A reassessment. The High School Journal. 51 (3), 241-47.

Kohn, A. (2006) Abusing research: The study of homework and other examples. Phi Delta Kappan. 88(1), 9-22.

Koerner, J.D. (1963) The miseducation of American teachers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Koestler, A. (1964) The act of creation. New York: Dell Publishing Company.

Kuhn, T. (1964) The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lagemann, E.C. (2000) An elusive science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

National Science Teachers Association (1964) Theory into action in science curriculum practice. Washington, D.C.: NSTA.

National Society for the Study of Education (1918) The seventeenth yearbook of the national society for the study of education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

National Society for the Study of Education (1927) The twenty-sixth yearbook of the national society for the study of education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

National Society for the Study of Education (1988) The eighty-seventh yearbook of the national society for the study of education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nock, AJ. (1932) The theory of education in the united states. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Obourn, E.S. (1963) Prologue to the future. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 1(1), 10-11.

Ogden, W.R. (1974) Objecting to the behavior. Theory into Practice. 13(1), 54-57.

Ogden, W.R. (2002) The real crisis in the classroom: Where have all the teachers gone?" Education, 123 (2), 365-369,374.

Pella, M. (1966) A structure for science teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 4(4), 251.

Pella, M. (1972, March) Scientific literacy within the framework of science. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Los Angeles.

Sarton, G. (1952) A history of science. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Snedden, D. (1927) What's wrong with American education? Philadelphia: LB. Lippincott Company.

Stephens, J.M. (1968) The process of schooling. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc.

William R. Ogden, Professor, Educational Leadership, Text A&M University-Commerce.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. William R. Ogden at [e-mail].