Source: M. A. Eckstein, "The Study of Education
As a Priority," Teachers College Record, Volume
70, Number 1, October 1968, pp. 13-19. Reprinted by permission.
THE STUDY OF EDUCATION AS A PRIORITY
The origins of many of the current problems facing graduate divisions of education departments generally lie in the circumstances which first created their undergraduate programs: the pressing, practical need to staff public school classrooms. Though preparation for teaching used generally to be given in special schools, most of these have today become liberal arts colleges or universities where the preparation of teachers remains one important task amongst many. In other cases, multi-purpose colleges have assumed the task of teacher preparation and established new departments for this purpose. As for graduate studies in education, these tend to have developed at public institutions as extensions of undergraduate programs. Today they usually provide an extra year or two intended to help the beginning teacher survive the first years of professional practice. They also offer in-service or refresher courses and, in many cases, professional training for liberal arts graduates.
In addition, graduate departments now prepare people for specialized posts in school systems, such as guidance personnel, school psychologists, teachers of exceptional children. Such post-Bachelor's degree programs are comparable with those at the undergraduate level in that they stem from characteristically vocational considerations. The job description is an important determinant of the course of study; the course of study, is a product of the concern to produce better classroom or school functionaries. As a result, particularly in the more effective institutions, field experience and active participation are given considerable prominence. Such activism as "going out into the community" is a mode of operation which education faculties often encourage and even occasionally indulge in. The criterion for judging the worth of the college's offerings and requirements is: do they make teachers (or others) more effective on the job?
The rationale which students use is fairly consistent with this type of concern. They seek help in improving their professional skills and means of enhancing their professional and economic status. "Practical" courses directed at "real" problems and results are at a premium and anything else (often described as "theoretical") is acceptable so long as it adds to the total of thirty or sixty credits required for a salary increment, a promotion or an additional state certificate.
Part-time Facilities
As to the faculty which serves these burgeoning graduate programs, it tends to be, at least at the beginning, a faculty which is in many senses part-time. Some members reach graduate and undergraduate courses; others, because of the need to keep practical experience close to college classrooms, are expert public school teachers on loan to the college. Some are college faculty participating in the daily activities of elementary or secondary schools or other community agencies. They are part-timers, however, not because of the way in which they distribute their hours of work, nor because their skills and activities are in any sense irrelevant or misused. They are a part-time faculty in the sense that they have contradictory or diffused loyalties: to student "needs," community "needs," college demands and professional requirements. Most notably, however, they are part-timers in their commitment to the field of educational studies, as the terms they use to identify themselves tend to reveal. There are educational psychologists and historians, there are even people in elementary and secondary education, all making reference to an academic discipline from which they have come or a particular level of the educational system in which they are interested. Few, unless pressed, identify themselves simply as educators.
In brief, many education departments find themselves in a very confused situation as they grow beyond a primarily undergraduate set of concerns. Their programs grow, their desire to satisfy the needs (expressed or ascribed) of their clientele -- still regarded as largely novice professional workers -- remains, their sense of service to the profession and the community continues unabated. Yet the dissatisfactions grow, not only because of increase in the number of students, but also because of conflict between loyalties to profession, clientele, community, all variously defined.
Dissatisfactions become voiced in a number of ways. From faculty, both inside and outside education departments, comes the familiar accusation of excessive vocationalism and non-intellectualism. "Hard" studies emphasizing theory and general concepts are neglected, they say, for day-to-day problems of a personal and transitory nature. Students and faculty alike sense a lack of direction, a lack of integration as the graduate programs in which they are involved become more and more piecemeal collections of courses in how to teach slow readers, slum dwellers and the new math, spiced, hopefully, by a required course or two in philosophies of education and learning theory. The Master's degree program seems more and more to give further training to the half-trained, special training for some selected groups, and a handful of other discrete courses for all in general and no one in particular. The quality of the academic work is questionable, the success of the product is dubious, and the sparks of intellectual fire and excitement are notably absent.
Problems and Dangers
It is generally conceded that education as a field of study has both its craft and theory, components, that is, its applied and theoretical phases of study. In this, it differs little from many other fields pursued in higher education. However, the burden of this discussion is the belief that the craft considerations which have very properly been recognized and given prominence in the past have come to dominate the thinking of many education departments and have been detrimental in many respects, notably in emerging post-Bachelor's degree programs.
The rationale commonly used to justify courses and programs in education includes two major criteria: will they help teachers or other school functionaries carry out their jobs more effectively? and, will they eventually help pupils and communities? As criteria they are certainly laudable and not altogether irrelevant, but as priorities in thinking about graduate studies in education they are inadequate and possibly even dangerous.
That they are inadequate is suggested by the difficulty of proving that better teachers are produced by a particular kind of preparation. Though we can readily accept the idea that craft and theory are involved, we are less easily convinced that theoretical knowledge is enhanced by craft experience or vice versa beyond a certain as yet undefined point. As to the dangers that lie in an excessive and even dogmatic concern with craft considerations, some have already been noted. Of course it is necessary to keep up with new developments connected with technique and to respond to the urgencies of special problems in the schools. In addition, one can hardly be unsympathetic towards the idea of solving community problems. However, both kinds of priorities may be serious distractions from the work of developing graduate studies in education.
The tendency to develop courses according to the criterion of what students need in order to do a better teaching job leads to ad hoc decisions which, though they may or may not solve an emergency staffing problem, certainly give no stable direction for growth of a graduate program nor for the systematic study and expansion of knowledge in the field of education. The tendency towards community action, the melioristic approach, though often highly laudable in intent, is a priority which leads to involvement in non-professional activity: politicking, administering, public relating and confrontation (even conformity) with the extraneous, frustrating and often irrelevant demands of public bodies holding economic or other power. This is not criticized on moral or snobbish grounds, but simply because of its implications for the academic institution. The dangers may not be so great in well-established, relatively independent universities. But especially where a formerly undergraduate department is struggling to devise a satisfactory graduate program, "service to the community" and a vague "theory of needs" may become serious distractions and even excuses for neglecting responsibilities to both the academic community and the profession. Properly defined, the work of education departments or schools includes professional training and services, the clinical or applied considerations. But it also includes the production of scholars, of thinkers and researchers in education. Much attention has been devoted to the former, which still remains a prime concern; far less attention has been devoted to the latter, for the reasons described.
Philanthropy, in other words, is just not enough to solve educational and other human problems, even though it is a highly desirable individual quality. In the long run, however, critical care and understanding are more important than the well-meant desire to help, especially when one seeks, as in this case, to develop guidelines for the development of graduate work in education.
Proposed Strategy
A blueprint for development and improvement can only be devised by an institution according to its own particular situation. But it is possible to state several general principles to serve as strategic priorities. The problem is to find a proper balance between the claims of training for teaching and the claims of scholarship and research. Where the latter have been neglected, the former must be demoted. Developing graduate departments of education must at least for a period of time abandon the idea that their main tasks are to prepare teachers, conform to state certification requirements, and improve schools in a given metropolis. Instead, they must apply what academic skills they have to identify professional issues and problems, study them, collect data in order to reveal something which has not been revealed before for the benefit of the teaching profession and the academic community at large. This need not necessarily, incidentally, change radically much of the work they engage in from day to day. However, it does provide a consistent focus, a statement of loyalties, some guidelines for judgments.
It is particularly difficult to accept the priority as stated for two major reasons. One is the historical fact that so much teacher preparation as well as other college education has been far removed from the so-called real world and real problems. Anything that smacks of the ivory tower approach is likely to be suspect simply because of the residue of that ethic. Secondly, after many decades of turning their backs on the professors, public institutions and planners are now turning towards them for help. The gap between public school systems and the universities is smaller today than it ever has been and after years of being ignored, men with new research findings and new ideas in education are being actively encouraged to try them out. The effect of this is intoxicating, and to refuse the invitation is very difficult, especially since it is accompanied with powerful inducements -- money and status. Yet the experience of many college people who have been drawn into community action programs as directors or active consultants can only be described as seduction of the innocents,an experience which they often heartily enjoyed.
The claims upon the energies of graduate education departments are three-fold:to continue the education of working teachers; to train a number of specialists for the school systems; and to study that complex phenomenon called education. The immediate tasks to be grappled with are also three-fold: to cure the boredom which suffuses so many graduate classes in education; to get students to read and to discuss rather than merely to verbalize; and to attract the best brains possible to the study of education. Whatever strategy may be devised involves acceptance of the stated priorities and an understanding of the functions (and the rather unsatisfactory results in many cases) of graduate education departments.
The implications of such an approach are several, the dangers considerable and the assurances of success no greater than the vision and energy which inspire it. It may involve setting quite new criteria for accepting or rejecting graduate students, staff and courses or programs. For example, a student will not be accepted for graduate study because he needs help in doing a better job of teaching. This might well be the reason for rejecting him. A course in "how to teach. .. " would not be introduced into a graduate program simply because large numbers of beginning teachers need it, but would either be incorporated in the first (usually the undergraduate) stage of preparation for teaching or rejected because it is a strictly vocational course, distracting faculty and their energies from their main purpose. Students and courses as well as faculty would be accepted on the grounds of offering intellectual superiority and intellectual challenge. This is a major implication of adopting as the primary goal of graduate education the training not of classroom teachers alone, but of more and more skilled investigators into educational phenomena, both theory and function. It involves abandoning, or at least limiting for a period of time, the provision of facilities for teachers to increase their incomes and possibly their professional skills.
Towards New Priorities
It may well be that there are no alternatives to what appears to be a compromise: a bifurcation in graduate studies into one set of programs intended both to make up for the deficiencies of undergraduate teacher preparation and to develop new professional specializations, and another track geared to "theoretical" studies, methods of investigating educational phenomena. This writer, for one, would be unhappy to see such a development as it appears artificially to separate the "craft" and "discipline" components which are held to be complementary. Each part, it is submitted, is enhanced by the other. Yet at this particular time in many institutions, the priorities must be on the "academic" (theory or discipline) side of the coin if the whole enterprise is to be successful, If the "study of education" alternative is preferred over the "preparation of school teachers" priority which currently obtains, better teachers may well be prepared, better in the sense of being more committed to their professional responsibilities, more concerned with and more capable of improving their own efforts as practitioners.
The argument is further supported by the fact that though scholarship has occasionally emerged as a by-product of the traditional teacher training approach, there is little evidence that the prime objective of a competent and efficient cadre of public school teachers has been achieved. A major reason for this, it is submitted, is that educational loyalty and professional expertise in both public school and university people depends upon the growth of a body of communicable, demonstrable and viable theory, of concepts and methods of inquiry, specifically directed at educational issues, problems and data. Whether this is to be found in a specific discipline of education or in a broader, more eclectic realm of "social sciences" is the subject of a separate debate. Nevertheless, without such a basis, craft skills, no matter how valuable, remain just that, craft skills not meriting the attention of advanced workers in any field of study at a university.
The suspicion of theory as a threat to practical concerns has in fact led to a self-defeating denial of the relevance of theory to education and as a consequence to its neglect in favor of "action," generally meaning "practical" teacher preparation and community involvement. At this point, however, little can be lost by abandoning those priorities which have proved so difficult to attain, so limiting and modest, and substituting another at least as likely to fulfill the same functions. At the same time, the new priority appears so much more appropriate to members of an academic community with claims to specific professional expertise.
The early pragmatists made an important distinction between what was true and what was useful. Much of the work in education has been based on the assumption that it was at least useful. But even if it was -- a highly debatable point -- there is no real basis for believing that the work done was in any respect true, that is, verifiable, replicable, teachable.
Envoi
Over a half-century ago, Teachers College, Columbia University was founded on the principle that it should teach everything that a successful teacher needed to know. But circumstances inside and outside that institution have changed and the long-term results of that policy may now be analyzed and evaluated. James Earl Russell's principle is now being challenged, not without strong opposition, on the grounds that it did away with all but the most vague and impermanent criteria for its efforts and permitted no real system of priorities for future developments to emerge. Courses and students proliferated and, in the long run, graduate studies suffered wholesale diminution of quality and general atomization. Only the stature and longevity of some of its faculty giants and the persistence of some devoted and talented individuals have restored to Teachers College in recent years some eminence as an institution of higher learning.
Programs in graduate education at other institutions, though emerging, are now being lured into the very trap from which Teachers College is seeking to escape, though with less reason than she had to succumb. They seek to supply what the market appears to be demanding. Such a policy ensures neither efficiency nor safety in automobiles; it does not encourage quality in TV programming. It cannot ensure efficiency or quality in university programming. The principle, that a department of education's first task is to train teachers, may have been appropriate as a starting point, though even that is debatable, but it is simply inadequate today. At best it is too modest a goal, at worst It is downright subversive as a determinant of graduate education. The worst traps may be avoided, however, if priorities arc stated not in terms of what the market needs, but rather by reference to the demands of the field of study, of professional expertise and of responsibilities to the academic community.