A Reply to Professor Plunkett

Abstract

Since Plunkett and I so obviously view the world from such divergent perspectives, it should come as no surprise that our approaches to social and educational change should be at such variance. The crux of our disagreement is summed up by his contention that what is definitely not plausible is the systematic attribution to the economically and socially privileged ... of a kind of malevolent conspiratorial approach to all dealings with the poor and the implication that there is a need for a politics of perpetual confrontation. I not only disagree categorically with his assertion, but I shall show below that his unacknowledged political biases force him to take a unilinear view of the development process which he admits has failed to achieve its stated goals. In the mid-1960s Plunkett and Mary Jean Bowman, the University of Chicago economist, undertook a study of the elites of eastern Kentucky in an attempt to ascertain their attitudes toward social and economic change. The conventional wisdom of the period in the United States held that the key to societal modernization in the less privileged areas of the world lay in the mobilization of the traditional social and economic elites and in the creation of new ones to forward the developmental effort along lines of modified laissez-faire capitalism. This human-resources theory of development was, of course, lavishly supported by the major donor agencies. Efforts within the United States clustered around the Office of Economic Opportunity; carrying the gospel abroad were such organizations as the Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation. Indeed, from the late 1950s on the Ford Foundation championed this approach to development by nurturing, through training offered in elite educational institutions, a cadre of potential leaders whose outlook and values would be consonant with those who controlled American social, economic, and political institutions. These Ford-sponsored leaders and experts then assumed their predetermined roles in the American meritocracy, or, if foreign nationals, they assumed comparable positions among their nations' elites.1 While change and mass participation were deemed desirable for societal