THE IDEOLOGY OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

ABSTRACT

In this paper I have suggested that teachers are not well served by the products of educational research. It has an ideology which tends to denigrate teachers in a number of different ways, deprofessionalises them, and legitimates control of them by others. Teachers are not able to resist these processes, partly because they cannot do their own research, and partly because they are so severely communicatively disadvantaged by the dominant positivist research paradigm that they cannot critique the research of others. In the current legitimation crisis in education, educational research plays an instrumental role in an allocation process whereby teachers are seen by the community as those most to blame for public dissatisfaction caused by dissonance between the community's expectations of the educational system and what it actually delivers. The way to overcome these difficulties is by insisting of forms of research in which teachers can co‐operate with researchers on equal terms.