The Future is Not in Planning People, and Practical Knowledge is Not Practical

• In Event: The Usefulness of Post-Structuralism in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

The dream of the future is a mainstay of contemporary social science’s offspring in education. Filled with the search for “useful” and practical knowledge and the desire for rigorous methodologies, education sciences are projects for planning the present in the hope of planning the future. Like the 17th century Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, the present supersedes what it precedes and the best is to still to come through the correct mixture of policy and the expertise of science. While the promise of finding the future is daunting and enticing – as Sirens’ singing to beckon the mariners - my task in this paper is ironically to look to the past in the present as the possible future of social science. My argument proceeds, first, to explore a genealogy of social science as planning the future. That planning to design people is visible in the long 19th century. This planning to design the child, the family, and community joins utopian narratives in the planning associated with the social sciences; linking human agency to effect change with spaces of collective belonging given in the names of democracy, the common good, and the nation. The scenario of design in contemporary research is taken up in the second section. Research related to the New Public Management, inequality, and teacher effectiveness are examined as utopian visions whose claims for practicality are a chimera and impractical. The final section turns to a different notion of practice as an alternative practical science, that is, a history of the present. Excavating the past is to explore how what is “seen”, thought, and acted on in the present are made possible and given intelligibility. Making fragile the causalities that present themselves as natural and given in daily life is a form of resistance and a “theory” of change that holds the possibility for alternatives other than those interred and enclosed by the contemporary “order of things.” The argument, however, is not against planning but the limits of the contemporary social and education science.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin