George's Complaint: Reforming the Dragon

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In our fervor to transform schools, we use language that may actually be crippling our thinking about the process of school improvement. Mr. Buxton recommends that we come up with a more suitable metaphor than slaying dragons. ********** Recent commentaries in the pages of this magazine and in Education Week have suggested that our reforms are not entirely satisfying. And dark rumblings in the bellies of the research factories themselves about postpositivist research, deconstructed research, and similar divergences suggest that all is not well, despite the constant outcry on every side for more research-based solutions to our nagging educational problems. In the October 2006 Kappan, Stanley Pogrow lamented the polarization of education reform. The national conversation, he argued, seems to be made up of oscillating versions of hyped certainty. He complained that of us who try to create a science of balance find that there is no constituency for the knowledge generated. (1) At about the same time, in the Commentary pages of Education Week, Harry Brighouse observed that current research in education often fails to account for contexts and values and that this failure leads to a distorted product with a compromised utility. (2) Then in the very next issue, Will Fitzhugh of the famous Concord Review lamented that he could not get funding for research on how frequently nonfiction books are assigned in the history classes in American high schools. He argued that this is a serious issue that reflects on the health of the republic. In the same issue, professors Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves noted, Right now data-driven instruction, results-oriented improvement, and evidence-based education are the watchwords. They observed that these hyphenated eye-rollers serve both political and journalistic ends even as they drive the most simplistic of reforms--from the top down. (3) These complaints are the most recent expressions of a long-standing unease with reformist research. The most common criticisms have been that * its methods encourage a narrow and formalized kind of fact gathering and analysis that avoids the closely controlled experimentation that would justify its pretensions to being scientific; * its research products are unconnected to the realities of practice; * the research fuels polarized debate; and * the research substitutes data for judgment. To address these discontents, let me remind readers of the story of St. George and the Dragon. Hero George appears in his shining armor. He is every inch the reformer. His is an idealistic orthodoxy, and he defends it by means of a conventional technology: horse, lance, and steel plate armor. He defeats the powers of sin by slaying the evil dragon. By applying an orthodox technology, he engineers an absolute solution to a simple problem defined in orthodox ways. But let's think a bit beyond the allegory. Unlike ingenious Ulysses, who must deal with a wife who may or may not be faithful to him in a situation complicated by emotional gods, culture, kinship, and history, St. George does not require complex methods to confront his problem. Indeed, he doesn't even see his problem as complex, nor does he consider it in unconventional ways. The dragon is evil and must be dispatched; superior technology can be applied to this simple problem. No subtle negotiation of conflicting values is required. But when we begin to wonder about the failure of our research orthodoxies to suggest solutions to the problems we confront in our schools, we might want to start by looking carefully at the historical context of those orthodoxies. Any culture is made up of shared assumptions policed by controlling metaphors and implied narratives. We gather in a national tent meeting that unites us in a language of conventions, attitudes, and pieties. …