Engaging the Future? Are the Educational Sciences Its Prophecy in Riding to Democracy?

• In Event: Research and the Promise of Educational Improvement: International Perspectives on a Vexed Question

Abstract

The race to the future through science has become the 'commonsense' in the conduct of the business of modernity. Science is the Philosopher's Stone of the present, providing practical and useful knowledge to smooth the path so that the race to the future is ensured. While there are national cultural differences in what such research of planning looks like, the orthodoxy joins policy and research in organizing the present in order to achieve the better future. This assumption of science also travels into principles governing reforms: school leaders, teachers and parents ask the researcher about how research can identify what makes the excellent teacher and eliminate the achievement gap.
This paper asks two historical questions to focus on the orthodoxy that science is about the future, its prophesy and arbiter of change.
(1) First, how did this way of reasoning about change and science become historically possible?
It has not always been this way. A particular kind of knowledge becomes visible in the European and American enlightenments. It begins to join reason (wisdom) and rationality (science) in initially the hands of the philosopher who is given the possibility to interpret the contemporary conditions of humanity to offer the knowledge that fulfils the dream of the envisioned future. By the end of the 20th century, the human sciences were to replace the philosopher (and as some argued to replace the bible as well) as the arbiter of the moral life that intersected in the arenas of social, cultural, economic and the personal, psychological. The human sciences gave particular attention to changes that were reflected on through new classifications of poverty, family, childhood, and community that linked schooling with theories of progress. These classification of change were expressed differently with Comte, Marx, and America's Dewey, Hall, and Thorndike; but each differently gave expression to the enlightenment dream of knowledge making of society; and in this remaking the conditions in which progress was to be sought (an enlightenment hope) was the remaking of people.
(2) Second, what are the limits of this orthodoxy about change? As a strategy to evoke democratic principles of freedom in the processes of change?
I draw on two not necessarily the same bedfellows - Foucault and Rancière- to consider (a) how planning to change conditions produce inscriptions to change people; and (b) in its particular brands of utopianism placed change in the name of democracy that paradoxically embodies comparative systems and hierarchies that produce inequalities in the efforts for equality.
This historical understanding of the present recognizes the double need of an educated critical social 'body' in which planning is important, and the need for a critical science that does not inscribe orthdoxy of planning of the future of society (and planning of the people who are to initiate that future) . This is where Foucault's notions of freedom and resistance and Rancière's discussion of democracy as not something institutionalized can be played with.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin