Educational Sciences and the Normalization of the Teacher and Child: Some Historical Notes on Current USA Pedagogical Reforms

Abstract

In the past decade, US==A reforms discourses link strategies of professionalizing teaching with pedagogical research practices. This article explores the different reform practices as the effects of power. It focuses on educational policy and research as governing through the reasoning inscribed in the knowledge generated for action and participation. Political rationalities are inscribed in pedagogy as “a culture of redemption. Pedagogy is to save the child for society and to rescue society through the child. The saving of the child embodies norms about social/cultural progress that makes the science/scientist as the prophet.

The first section examines turn of the 20th century USA practices to professionalize the teacher and redefine pedagogy. Pedagogy embodies a concept of progress that revisions the child from a religious entity beholden to God to one that embodies certain collective social norms related to political rationalities. The child is to be a self‐motivated participant in a liberal democracy. The teacher is also revisioned as a redemptive agent but now in the worldly name of progress and a populism. Professional knowledge is interpellated in service of a liberal democratic ideal.

The second section focuses on the revisioning of the redemptive culture in contemporary USA educational science and reform discourses. Examining two seemingly different ideological discursive practices ‐‐ a state‐sponsored discourse of “systemic school reform” and a “post‐modern” critical pedagogy ‐‐ the author argues that similar redemptive images of progress, expert‐knowledge and populism are utilized. The redemptive discourses focus on the teacher fand child) who participates, collaborates, and constructs (makes) knowledge within a “community” rather than as a participant in social, collective norms. As with the redemption at the turn of the century, contemporary educational sciences inscribe principles of order that relate to changes in the governing systems for constructing individuality, but these systems are different from those produced at the end of the century.