The legitimation crisis of educational change

Abstract

When Jurgen Habermas published Legitimation Crisis in 1973, he was responding to the splintering of the social movements of the 1960s with a theory of ‘‘universal pragmatics’’ that would make it possible for citizens with many diverse perspectives to authorize governments to act on behalf of the public good. Without legitimacy there could be no capacity. Furthermore, without legitimacy for governments and their institutions, markets most likely would be turned to as vehicles for public provision. Later scholars, and in particular Suchman (1995) disaggregated legitimacy into the three components of pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy. Increasingly, it came to be seen that every set of institutions—corporations, non-profit agencies, and schools for example—would have to persuade the public about its legitimacy across these three domains to survive. Failure to attend to issues around legitimacy could lead to the hollowing out of the state under New Public Management, with diverse provider models increasingly blended with or overtaking traditional civil service agencies. In this neoliberal understanding, markets achieve legitimacy and are the guarantors that government does not plunder public revenues for its own purposes. The quest for legitimacy has driven many governments to turn to data and a more scientific approach to educational change. On the one hand this is a felicitous development, especially for researchers. On the other hand, the pursuit of certainty through the quantification of education has itself proved nettlesome. It seems that the mathematization of teaching and learning can conceal a number of blind spots that can create new problems for teachers and students. How this occurs and can be