An Examined Life: A Response to James Kauffman's Reflections on the Field

It is difficult to summarize a career like Jim Kauffman's in just a few paragraphs. And, although I won't even try to do justice to his contributions in the field of emotional and behavioral disorders, I do want to say a couple of things at the outset. What Jim has done for us over the last several decades, even if many of us are not properly aware of it, is to provide a space where we can do our work, secure our grants, train our teachers, and conduct our research without having to fight battles every day defending the efficacy of what we do. Throughout his career, he has been consistently trying to tell us something very important: that ideas and actions matter greatly to the lives of the children we serve and that we had better be as sure as we can that what we propose to do is based on the most reliable information we have at our disposal. That kind of information comes to us through logical, objective inquiry, and we ignore it at our peril.Postmodernism is just the latest permutation in the long, muddled history of relativist flak that has bombarded us throughout the history of special education. Whether it was the ideological lunacy of arguments regarding the use of punishment, the decade-long rush toward The Delusion of Inclusion (Mock & Kauffman, in press), disingenuous arguments that impede prevention efforts (Kauffman, 1999a; Kauffman, in press b), or a hermeneutical philosophy that not only proposes false solutions but also prevents us from even seeing and formulating our problems (Kauffman, 2002; Kauffman, in press a), Jim has consistently stepped into the middle of it to expose the folly of much of what has passed for educational expertise. Perhaps it is because he was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, absorbed the lessons of Mark Twain into his bones, and was thereafter constitutionally unable to suffer fools gladly. Or, perhaps he has just seen things more clearly than many of the rest of us. Whatever the reason, we are indebted to him for showing us that, as Tallis (1999) once stated, "to pursue truth, one should not be too deeply entrenched in any hole" (p. 93).Kauffman's "Reflections on the Field" neatly sums up our current struggle to develop and maintain effective programs in a climate saturated with political solutions based on rhetoric and persuasion (Kauffman, 2003). His message is that those who seek the truth as closely as is humanly possible will not begin with conclusions and then look for arguments and facts to support them. Rather, they will examine all relevant data in the hope of finally arriving at an accurate account of the needs of children and youth with emotional or behavioral disorders.When Jim warns us of new forms of racism packaged in progressive notions of "democratic epistemology" (Kauffman, 2003, p. 207), he gets to the heart of the postmodern conflation of political and epistemic goals. That is, many of these otherwise seemingly bright people routinely commit the elementary logical mistake of confusing warrant with belief or truth with acceptance. As he has demonstrated in his recent work (Kauffman, 1999a,1999b, 2002), one of the reasons that this relativist sophistry has gained popularity is because too few of us who might have been expected to resist the putsch understood what its instigators were saying. When applied to special education, the result is a devaluation of empirically tested procedures, a perverted characterization of special education as a form of punishment, and a concomitant valorization of so-called "full inclusion" to outcome variable status rather than, correctly, as a treatment option within the context of an array of possible treatments. When applied to racial issues, postmodern multicultural dogma dissembles into an ardently advocated, veritably messianic political program, and, like most political programs that have succumbed to the Utopian temptation, it does not take kindly to true difference.Conceptual and Practical IssuesJim's comments regarding our field point toward a number of conceptual and practical issues that we must address immediately if we are to continue to meet the needs of our students. …