Planning Sciences, Policy, and Conserving as the Problems of Change: Should We Take Seriously the Cautions of Foucault and Rancière?

• In Event: Beyond Evidence: Toward a Politics of Concern

Abstract

Introduction

During the Cold War, a prominent American sociologist wrote about the two Marxisms: the intellectual project to understand historically the conditions that made the present possible and the sciences of planning for the future utopia. The former continues as extremely influential; the other fell apart after its 70th birthday in the 1990s. This distinction between science as historically studying the present and science as planning the future, however, is not merely a remnant of the Cold War. The dream of contemporary education sciences is to be tied to present policy aimed at planning the future.

Objectives

This paper explores the limits of the ability of the social sciences to design the future. It examines, first, historically and empirically, the system of reason that orders and classifies such research. Second, it explores the political dimensions of this science of planning the future by examining historically how planning to change social conditions simultaneously plans the people who are to inhabit that future. These include “the lifelong learner”, those “at risk”, and the children represented in “the achievement gap”. In so doing, this paper seeks to interrupt the taken-for-granted project of the social sciences of predicting, controlling and designing the future.

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework

The paper utilizes a history of the present—an excavation of the system of reason through which reform research gives intelligibility to its objects of reflection and action. It is treats the rules and standards of “reason” as the political project of schooling. It interrogates how the principles of judgments are made are generated; how conclusions are drawn; how rectifications are proposed; and how fields of existence are made manageable and predictable in school reform.

Methodology and Data Sources

Methodologically, contemporary education sciences are viewed as a historical “event” to explore the styles of reason (epistemology) and construction of objects (ontology) as assembled, connected, and disconnected from broader social practices. The notion of event historically differentiates the method from the concept of “data,” whose conventional use inscribes a problematic realism.

The empirical focus is on (A) OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that asserts an undefined future practical knowledge that children will need in science, mathematics, and literacy; (B) benchmarks about school progress; (C) value-added knowledge of teaching; and (D) the empiricism of ‘what works’. These projects aim to satisfy The Knowledge Society that is simultaneously what is here and is yet to arrive. Examining leading US and European educational research journals, the mode of analysis is discursive, revealing the system of reason that orders, differentiates, and divides the subjects of policy – the children, parents, and teachers.

Results and Scholarly Significance

The significance lies in recognizing the limits of the commonsense of the planning sciences and making visible the political embodied in its system of reason that is rarely considered in educational research. Further, the ‘history of present’ provides an alternative style of educational research to address issues of change and social wrongs without inscribing research (and researcher) as shepherds of designing the future by designing people.

Author

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin