Whither Schools of Education? Whither Education Research?:

In Whither Schools of Education? John Goodlad provides an account of the history of teacher education that strikes me as both wise and historically accurate. Having just written a book entitled An Elusive Science; The Troubling History of Education Research (which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the spring of 2000), I was also struck by how similar the problems are in teacher education and education research. Given that both activities take place in schools of education, the similarity is not surprising, I suppose, but the convergence does lend urgency to questions of reform. Echoing Goodlad, then, let me suggest some of the issues that will need to be addressed if change is to Occur. Right at the start of his article, Goodlad (1999) points out that schools, colleges, and departments of education were born into an inhospitable surround (p. 1). That is right, I believe, and the inhospitality of the surround becomes even more evident when one juxtaposes the history of education research with the history of teacher education. The early educationists, men like Charles Hubbard Judd of the University of Chicago, Paul Monroe of Teachers College, Paul Hanus of Harvard, and Ellwood Patterson Cubberley of Stanford, were a determined and optimistic lot. They were convinced that by developing a science of education they could improve the functioning of the nation's schools. Sadly, however, their view of the potential of educational science was not shared by their noneducationist colleagues. Quite to the contrary, most of their peers in other schools, colleges, and departments of the nation's rapidly growing and changing universities thought it was silly even to talk about serious scholarship in education. Typically, as one Stanford colleague told Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, they did not believe that education could be either an art or science (Sears & Henderson, 1957, p. 57). At Harvard, this conviction led a colleague of Paul Hanus's to sneer that when Professor Hanus arrived in Cambridge, he had brought the onus of his subject with him (Kucklick, 1977, p. 247). In their disdain for education, noneducationist scholars reflected the thinking of their peers outside of academe, which one might note parenthetically underscores Goodlad's point concerning the importance of contextual matters in developing strong programs of teacher preparation. Throughout American history, education has been revered as a means of personal advancement and social improvement, but it has also been subject to a persistent disdain. Indeed, what I call anti-educationism has been and is pervasive in American culture. Similar in some ways to the suspicion of intellect Richard Hofstadter called anti-intellectualism, anti-educationism is a set of attitudes, beliefs, and values concerning the supposedly simple, mindless, and inexpensive character of education. Anti-educationism allows people to believe that education can be effective in developing human competence even when teachers lack rigorous professional training, when education research is woefully underfunded, and when resources are too scarce to provide schools with sufficient personnel, teaching materials, and facilities. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, many Americans believe that he who can, does; he who cannot, teaches. Anti-educationism is at the root of that belief. Anti-educationism grew out of the fact that since the early 19th century, teaching has been a predominately female profession. Until quite recently, attitudes about gender, especially about a woman's supposed capacity to nurture but not to think, made it difficult, if not impossible, for people to believe that teaching was (and is) a profoundly intellectual calling. To a considerable extent, that is why, as Goodlad so rightly laments, teacher education has tended to be more practical and technical than intellectual. Important, too, anti-educationism and the attitudes about gender that are central to it explain why teaching and education research have existed at much too great a remove from one another. …