"Whither Schools of Education?" A Response to John Goodlad.

With his consistently careful and nuanced readings of texts and history, John Goodlad has once again provoked me to think again about the political and sociological context of schools of education and, more largely, professional education. A decade ago, when Goodlad, Ken Sirotnik, and I were engaged in the Study of the Education of Educators (SEE), we spent a good bit of time trying to understand the school of education in its larger context. The context is critical. Donald Light (1974) notes that Faculty are defined by the institution that hires them. A doctor is a doctor wherever he may be, but a professor is a professor only if employed by a college or university. This close connection with one type of institution means that the structure of the institutions and the nature of academic work have always interacted with each other (p. 17). More largely, the work and structure of the school of education itself are deeply enmeshed in the bureaucratic, historical, political, and social structure of the larger university/ college structure. As part of the SEE, I examined a portion of the literature pertaining to universities, professional schools, and schools of education and drew a host of conclusions. I speculated that schools of education were in a muddle. My reasoning was thus. There is an uneasy relationship between the university and professional schools because the curriculum of the departments in the university stems from an independent search for truth, while the curriculum of the professional schools derives from state needs for utility. Professional schools work through this relationship by establishing preemptive claims to a particular part of the intellectual terrain, and they develop the means to judge the worth of that terrain and those who labor in it. The schools of education are a peculiar kind of professional school: Whereas other professional schools have their own particular standards to judge themselves, schools of education have asked to be seen and judged as an arts and sciences department. Thus the muddle. They enjoy neither the strength nor the independence of, say, medical and law schools. And their worth is measured by an arts and sciences standard of scholarship inappropriate to professional schools and one that is unlikely to be met. It is not impossible to find a way out of the muddle, if an SCDE wishes to. If a given SCDE were centered, clearly focused, and nimble to boot, it could construct an acceptable argument for acceptance on its own terms. However, in the course of our study, we found few SCDEs that were so centered, focused, and nimble. Rather, we found that most of the SCDEs in our sample were echoing, but not really believing, J. Alfred Prufrock's lament: No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: An attendant lord will do. No, indeed, lesser status as an attendant lord really wouldn't do. They were focused, to be sure, but focused on bigger game: international research university status, recognition as one of the real players, money, the Show. They might be attendants, but by golly, they really were meant to be Hamlet or know the reason why. It is tricky to maneuver when you know who you are. It's just about impossible when you are confused about who you are. (And here we might note that a traditional indicator of sanity is the lack of discrepancy between how you see yourself and how others see you. If so, then many SCDEs, it could be argued, are in need of therapy.) What French Poet Paul Valery says about history has always seemed to me to apply quite directly to the SCDE situation. History, said Valery (1962), causes dreams, it intoxicates whole peoples, gives them false memories, quickens their reflexes, keeps their old wounds open, torments them in repose, leads them into delusions of either grandeur or persecution, and makes nations better, arrogant, insufferable, and vain (p. 114). As in the Balkans, so, too, in our SCDEs. Thus was one way, in the early years of the SEE, to frame the institutional context of SCDEs and their educator preparation programs. …