The Academic Department Chairmanship and Role Conflict

than ten years ago, there will still be methods courses like this. You will practice some teaching skills, but during your first year of teaching you will probably wish that you were taking this course. So if these ten paradoxes are valid, education seems to be a field of great confusion. But that confusion is para doxical too, as I discovered when I tried to choose a title for this lecture. first was The Schizophrenia Lec ture. I envisioned a schizophrenic as the multi-personality kind, with his separate worlds having no knowledge of each other. If we personify teacher education as a schizo phrenic, he or she certainly has many different personal ities. However, I rejected the Schizophrenia title because it denotes an illness?one or all personalities are out of touch with reality. In education the many personalities are by no means all sick or in their own separate worlds. Education's diversity brings about healthy, not pathologi cal, conflict. Next I considered calling the lecture Oxymora. An oxymoron, as you know, is the joining of contradictory terms, such as harmful benefit or Milton's darkness visible. An oxymoron may be a casual jest or profound poetry. It is delivered mainly for dramatic effect; one does not analyze it for the purpose of resolving its contradic tions. This lecture was not for dramatic effect, but for pointing out some contradictions with which educators have been coexisting. These are contradictions which need analysis. Next I thought of this title, The You-Can't-Please-All The-People-All-The-Time Lecture. When one considers the issues discussed in this lecture, one is tempted to choose sides and staunchly never budge. Rather than seek imaginative solutions to the contradictions, we tend com placently to accept the problems as never-ending, and just hope that our opinions will place us among the some of the people who are pleased some of the time. So we end up with The Deca-Paradox Lecture. I hope that the first part of the title will connote the Olym pic importance of these issues to teacher education, and 111 offer the second part as enticement to engage in their analysis and solution.