Paradigm and Ideology in Educational Research: The Social Functions of the Intellectual

I accept much that Popkewitz says in his impressive book. I wish I didn't! He writes with great elegance and power on many issues of current interest: the social and cultural location of research activities; the relationship between theory, research and practice; the social role of the intellectual and the epistemological and social assumptions inherent in professional practice. I read the book with a degree of elation, inwardly nodding and saying to myself: Yes, yes, yes. And yet after finishing it I experienced a certain post-reading tristesse. The analysis of the nature of educational research, strategies of educational change, the process of evaluation and problems of educational consultancy is trenchant but the question with which one is left is not: What is the future for these activities? but: Have these activities any future? Popkewitz's discussion of different research paradigms will be familiar to most readers who are already university teachers or members of the research community, but it constitutes a very clear and sophisticated introduction for students coming fresh to the discussion of conflicting methodologies. He is fair to all perspectives, but his own position is quite clear. In stating that the purpose of this book is to probe 'how social assumptions, cultural location and political interests become inextricably tied to conceptual procedures and design questions' it is clear that the idea of rational, objective, value-free educational science isn't going to come out on top. And so it proves. However, though a critique of Western liberal-bourgeois objectivist social science will be familiar to many, Popkewitz's chapter on Soviet pedagogical sciences may well cover unfamiliar ground. The point which he elaborates is that the Western emphasis on schooling as a psychological problem and the Soviet emphasis on schooling as a pedagogical problem have to be seen not simply as differing in their utilitarian purposes but as rooted in the different historical and social circumstances in which educational goals are decided. Soviet research is based on Marxist analysis underpinned by the philosophical assumptions of dialectical materialism, but Popkewitz explores various contradictions and the challenges made by a number of Soviet educationists.