Although dominated by psychology, the field of educational research was once largely restricted to the general discipline of philosophy. Other disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, political science and sociology, have become increasingly prominent.
The status of education as an applied field makes it difficult to identify any specific method or conceptual domain which would single it out from other fields. For most scholars and researchers, however, the study of education has meant investigating activities related to learning, usually within the context of the schools. The problems studied and the method employed vary a great deal, depending largely on the training and background of the researchers. However, in contrast to the earlier, philosophical studies which focused on the aims of education, the prominence of the behavioural and social sciences has signalled a shift in concern to questions of means.
As an applied field of study, the problems investigated in the area of education tend to follow closely the concerns articulated by leaders in business, government and the media. For example, in the late 1950s and early 1960s when US political leaders were primarily concerned with the space race with the Soviet Union and the so-called missile gap, a series of reports by the well-known educator, James B.Conant (1959) focused on the lagging academic quality of education in the USA. Educational research in that country then turned towards developing curriculum units, teaching strategies, school procedure and design that would produce more scientists and engineers. In this period, for example, the ‘New Math’ flourished, and influential educators, such as the psychologist Jerome Bruner, proposed the teaching of science, mathematics and other academic programmes in the lower grades (Bruner 1960).
In the mid-1960s, social pressure built up over the civil rights issue, and the concern of much of the educational research community again shifted towards issues related to equality of opportunity. The work of Jean Piaget provided the intellectual basis for British and US curriculum researchers, who argued for relaxing the structure of the curriculum by allowing more room for the individual expression of interests. Some opposed these moves because they were too permissive, but the intention was to create a fruitful interaction between the developmental patterns found among children and the structure and pacing of curriculum knowledge. However, the apparently reduced emphasis on a hierarchy of knowledge (with science, maths and other college preparatory subjects at the top and vocational subjects at the bottom), and the renewed recognition of the importance of the interest of the individual child as a major factor in the learning process, appeared to be consistent with the wider concern for equality of opportunity.
Equality has continued to be a major issue in educational research and debate in a number of different areas. For example, James Coleman’s (1968) analysis of data from thousands of American schools explored the extent to which different variables affect school achievement across racial lines. His finding that the class and racial characteristics of the student body had an important influence on individual achievement was rapidly used as intellectual support for the bussing of children across racially distinct neighbourhoods in an effort to achieve greater racial balance. At the same time other studies explored the effectiveness of pre-school programmes in raising the achievement levels of blacks and other children from lower socioeconomic classes.
At the time that educational research was exploring the pedagogical factors involved in maintaining inequality, the traditional meaning of equality of opportunity was first challenged. Goleman (1973), in an important article on equality of educational opportunity, suggested that the extent to which this ideal has been realized should be measured not in terms of equality of input—the resources spent on different children—but rather in terms of equality of results—whether or not the pattern of achievement is similar among different racial groups and minorities. Had this conception of equal opportunity been widely accepted, it would have significantly changed the rules of the game. This proposal would thus have mandated the allocation of unequal resources in some cases in order to achieve equal results.
Coleman’s proposed conception was never fully accepted (Coleman himself offered it only tentatively). However, educational policy makers and politicians in the USA did begin to assign federal resources to special groups, such as handicapped people, blacks, women and non-native speakers of English; legal efforts were increased to redress racial imbalance in schools; and affirmative action programmes tried to increase the opportunities for minority students and women in universities and professional schools.
Even prior to Coleman’s attempt to redefine the concept of equal opportunity, there had been other challenges to compensatory policies. The most publicized was an article by Arthur Jensen (1969) which claimed that most compensatory programmes had failed, and therefore children of different intellectual ability should be taught differently. Children with high IQ scores, Jensen argued, should be taught conceptually by problem-solving methods. Children with low IQ scores should be taught through associative or rote methods. Jensen’s article was controversial because of three propositions: IQ tests measure intelligence; in a population intelligence is 80 per cent explained by genetic factors; and blacks as a population score on the average consistently lower than whites on both standard IQ tests and culture-fair tests. Jensen concluded that environmental enrichment programmes were severely limited in their ability to raise IQ scores, and that educators would better spend their time and resources identifying conceptual and associative learners and teaching them through the methods appropriate to their learning style. Jensen himself believed that when IQ tests were appropriately refined to identify the two types of learners, blacks and other minority students would be more fairly treated. He also believed that teaching style would become more consistent with learning style and that conceptual learners from these groups would be less likely to fall victim to the prejudicial judgement of a few teachers. However, he also strongly implied that because of genetic factors blacks would continue to achieve at a lower rate than whites.
An uproar followed the publication of Jensen’s article. The twin studies on which he had built much of his case for the prominence of genetic over environmental factors were discredited. Questions were raised about the whole concept of measurement as applied to intelligence and about the appropriateness of such tests for culturally distinct, minority children. In addition, Jensen’s argument traded on the ambiguity of the claim that ‘IQ tests measure intelligence’. The claim could mean that a conceptual limit exists beyond which an individual cannot reach and an IQ test measures it, or it could mean that IQ, tests measure the speed at which different individuals learn. This ambiguity is especially significant when it is understood that Jensen’s view of associative and conceptual learning is inaccurate in at least one important respect. He believes that children can learn essentially the same basic material either through associative or conceptual methods, depending upon the learning style of the child. But, in fact, the children would be learning the same skills in only the most superficial sense. They might be learning how to translate symbols on a page into oral sounds, or learning to repeat number facts, thus giving the appearance of learning the same thing. However, each group also would be learning something about learning. One group would be learning that learning is a rote affair, while the other would be learning that it is essentially a conceptual and problem-solving activity. Jensen’s article provides no evidence to support the view that such learning styles were irreversible, even though his own proposal seemed to rest upon this assumption.
The debate over Jensen’s article was significant for a number of reasons. One of these went to the very heart of the question of equality of opportunity. For if equality of opportunity means that everyone is to be given the same chance, presumably ability differences should be the sole determinant of outcomes. However, if the major measure of ability, that is, IQ, tests, is put into question, so too is the justification for different outcomes.
Some scholars, while dismissing the significance of IQ tests, continued to justify differential outcomes and to argue against ‘extraordinary’ measures to achieve educational equality. These arguments were often based on the view that governmental intervention creates unrealistic expectations and increases frustration and, possibly, violence. Environmental factors were considered important, but the most significant aspect of environment, the habits, discipline and foresight developed through class culture were thought extremely difficult to change. Because these studies took ‘class-culture’ and the habits and attitudes associated with it as an independent variable, they failed to examine the relationship between a student’s habits, attitudes and achievement, and the work structures that were available to children from certain social classes.
This enlarged focus came only with a renewed interest in Marxist scholarship and, especially, with the work of two economists, Bowles and Gintis (1976). Their study concluded that schooling provided very little mobility, even when research controlled for IQ scores, and that schools largely served to reproduce and legitimize the personality characteristics required by the hierarchical relations found in advanced capitalistic countries.
The findings of Bowles and Gintis were challenged on a number of methodological grounds. However, one of the more significant effects of their work for educational scholarship was to reintroduce a Marxist perspective into the study of education in the USA. This perspective continued a tradition that was already established in Britain, western Europe, Australia, and in a number of Third-World countries. In effect Marxists have shifted some of the focus of educational research from the individual to the larger social, historical, cultural and political context of schooling (Apple 1982; Giroux 1981).
There is no uniform Marxist perspective. For example, the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire (1973), draws not only on Marxist literature for many of his insights, but also on French existentialism, phenomenology, and Christian theology. Some analysts have adopted a structural approach and have examined the limits placed on the educational system by a hierarchical mode of production. Others, utilizing an ethnographic methodology, have explored the way in which a critical working-class consciousness is both developed and blunted in schools. There have been insightful studies on the reproduction of classroom knowledge for different social classes, on the production of educational materials and texts, and on the dilemmas created by radical educational thought for teacher education (Apple 1982; Giroux 1981).
While Marxist-oriented research represents a significant redefinition of the problem of education, it has remained a largely critical movement which only occasionally penetrates mainstream thinking about education. When inequality was a major issue for the educational community and the wider public, Marxism was able to gain a reasonable hearing. However, as unemployment rates in the USA, Britain and western Europe hit post-depression records, educational policy makers steered the agenda away from the issue of equality and towards the educational needs of the high technology revolution. Educational research is following suit as more concern is expressed about developing computer literacy, and about increasing the pool from which future scientists and engineers can be drawn. There have been calls to tighten up the curriculum, raise standards for admission into and matriculation out of higher education, and to reduce the ‘frills’ in the public schools. These concerns seem to signal a return to the era dominated by Conant.
Various forms of feminist scholarship have had an important influence on educational scholarship, focusing it on questions of gender-specific learning styles, knowledge and moral reasoning. Moreover, under the influence of post-modernism, there has been a developing concern with issues of identity, and in the relationship between identity and knowledge. There is also renewed interest in the non-cognitive aspects of schooling and education.
The applied nature of educational research, and its failure to develop an independent research programme, suggests that its future direction will depend on political and economic developments. The last attempt to provide an independent focus for the study of education was developed by the American philosopher, John Dewey (see Boydston 1979). Since Dewey, educational philosophy has taken a different turn, one that emphasizes the anaylsis of concepts and linguistic clarity. Yet the deeper questions about education involve the understanding of intergenerational continuity and change, and the normative concerns that guide the process of social and cultural reproduction. While little systematic effort has been undertaken to explore the process and patterns of social identity, it is possible to specify some of the factors that such a research programme would involve. They would include an analysis of the kind of knowledge that is prized by a given society, the institutional arrangements to protect and carry on such knowledge, the methods used to identify and train those who will bear that knowledge in the future, and the way in which knowledge is distributed among different groups in the society. Such a programme would maintain the interdisciplinary character of educational studies but would provide a focus that has been lacking. It would also provide a critical point from which to appraise present educational practice.
Walter Feinberg
University of Illinois, Urbana—Champaign
References
Apple, M. (1982) Education and Power, London.
Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, New York.
Boydston, J. (ed.) (1979) The Complete Works of John Dewer Carbondale, IL.
Bruner, J. (1960) The Process of Education, Cambridge, MA.
Coleman, J.S. (1968) ‘The concept of equality of educational opportunity’, Harvard Educational Review 38.
——(1973) ‘Equality of opportunity and equality of results’, Harvard Educational Review 43.
Conant, J.B. (1959) The American High School Today, New York.
Freire, P. (1973) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York.
Giroux, H.A. (1981) Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, Philadelphia, PA.
Jensen, A.R. (1969) ‘How much can we boost I.Q. and scholastic achievement?’, Harvard Educational Review 39.
Further reading
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London.
Feinberg, W. (1983) Understanding Education: Toward a Reconstruction of Educational Inquiry, Cambridge, UK.
Sharp, R. and Green, A. (1975) Education and Social Control: A Study in Progressive Education, London.
