Abstract
In times so grim for educational research in various parts of the world, where educators and researchers are subjected to an increasingly ruthless audit culture, we have had the privilege of interviewing one of the few philosophers who question this type of educational management from a philosophical perspective: Paul Standish, Professor and Head of the Centre for Philosophy of Education at University College London Institution of Education. One of his main criticisms focuses on the abusive transport of accounting procedures, characteristic of the field of administration, to proposing educational policies that supposedly aim at an equivalent accounting transparency. He refers to philosophers like Wittgenstein and Austin, among others, to deconstruct the myth of accounting transparency in education, when evaluative and management measures are adopted. Such supposedly objective and efficient measures have actually resulted in the imposition of empirical models of behaviour and thinking which are extremely reductionist and dogmatic. According to him, most of these models come from the field of psychology, which, despite having substantially changed its theoretical apparatus as well as its practices over the past few decades, has brought initial beliefs which have left trail-effects in the imaginary of common sense, acting surreptitiously on the basis of the audit culture that has established itself in the field of education. Throughout the interview, Standish also addresses issues relating to the place of analytic philosophy in education, with its various approaches, questions how post-structuralism has been appropriated by educational research, criticizes the use of the termscience of education when one disregards the fact that the most fundamental issues of education cannot be resolved empirically, reflects on teacher education and the different ways of transmitting knowledge, and emphasizes the importance and fecundity of Wittgenstein’s ideas aiming at the clarification of the philosophical confusions that we become entangled with when language “goes on vacation”.
Philosophy of education; School evaluation; Educational administration; Educational theory and practice; Wittgenstein
