The Decline of Western Educational Research and the Unfortunate Balance of Trade in the Marketplace of Bad Ideas about Scholing

Abstract

The thesis of this article is that Western education research has widely failed to shape educational systems that cultivate public purpose in mass education and that, hence, other cultures that import this project play into the hands of transnational corporations ready to update those cultures to serve their purposes. This poor trade in the marketplace of bad ideas is already being made and it seems an unwise choice everywhere, but particularly among nations that confront most stringently the depredations of globalization. I warrant the thesis (1) with evidence of the shift of recent decades in Western educational aims from public to private purposes and (2) by describing the consequent accommodations made by Western education research, with particular attention to the role played by research in school administration. Two warnings and four alternatives seem especially apt. These are the warnings: (1) because power elites find critique inconvenient, they seek to undermine or hobble the critical mission of education research; (2) because globalization suppresses local conceptions of a decent life, the aims of imports from Western schooling should be greeted with doubt—and doubt is the home of critique in research. I suggest these alternatives to the unfortunate balance of global trade in bad ideas about schooling: (1) looking at schooling from the perspectives of ordinary people, not from that of the power elites or the school profession; (2) thinking about what distinguishes research that honors a critical mission from other sorts of writing and other sorts of action; (3) regarding the deployment of methods critically studying locally a trendy Western only by first problematizing it; (4) when thinking about schooling, keeping education much more clearly in view.