The where and what of education today: a leadership perspective

What an interesting task I have before me: to comment upon education today from a leadership perspective. I’ll dispense with the usual how-difficult-the-task, how-ill-equipped-am-I posturings as being givens, and trust that the reader will grant me these considerations. I am left with no recourse, no other option, and so take up my obligation as editor of The International Journal of Leadership in Education to provide a commentary, or coda, to this exceptional display of the thinking by some of the finest educational leadership scholars working today: Ira Bogotch, William Tierney, Lynne Schrum and Barbara Levin, Erica McWilliam, Ellie Drago-Severson, and James Ryan. These are the contributors to this special, special issue of the journal.

Those on the editorial board of this journal felt that this topic—the what and where of education today—demanded attention and so gave us a mandate to produce this special issue. This is only the second time in the journal’s history that this has happened, that the collective editorial board thought a topic so timely, so important, that we exhibit some leadership ourselves and address the issue. The first occasion was a special issue published in 2012 entitled ‘Who Controls Our Knowledge?’ (IJLE, vol. 15, no. 4) (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13603124.2012.699639). Prompted by the far-ranging discussions at our editorial board meetings, we felt it was time to stop and examine what was happening in education today, as best we could.

The world seems more tumultuous, more dynamic, more interconnected than ever.¹ And educational reform and the reformers are extremely active, visible and vocal. These mutually interactive phenomena called for our attention. What might leadership contribute? What role might leaders play in education today?

One foundational assumption of ours, of mine, as we address these topics is that, owing to the complexity of education, indeed of all human activity, there are no ‘quick fixes’ to the ‘problems’ of education, no simple solutions. This means that we must do the work. We cannot buy something off the shelf and expect that it will be appropriate for each and every educational situation or setting, for each population and each individual. ‘What works’ in one situation is more likely than not entirely inappropriate in another.

Another of our foundational assumptions is that the process, the means, is as important as the outcome, the product, or the ends. The journey and the goal are equally important. Incidental learning, unintended outcomes or side effects, felicitous spinoffs—though by definition unpredictable—must be taken into consideration when assessing the relative success of any educational intervention, be it a lesson, a curriculum implementation, staff development or systemic reform. It is for this reason that programme evaluation designs include both formative and summative assessments.

The road we travelled getting here

Taking up the mandate given us by the editorial board, we narrowed and otherwise gave up definition to what appeared to us at first to be a wide, amorphous concept, teasing out and naming the constitutive fields and sub-fields. We did this through a modified Delphi technique—sending lists of candidate topics to the editorial board members for ranking in order of importance. We repeated the process a few times until we pared down the list of possible topics to those represented here in this special issue: higher education leadership in current contexts; technology(/ies) and leadership; a category we termed ‘shifting centres’, to try to reflect geopolitical changes occurring today; teaching, learning and leading; and a category that addressed diversity, advocacy and social justice. Though it was never our intention to be exhaustive, we meant to take a big enough bite out of such a large and dynamic topic so as to give our readers something to chew on. We think we have accomplished this, thanks to those who contributed their time, thoughts and energy to this eminently worthwhile project and to the public discourse.

Learning is not education

As you will have seen, having read the articles in this special issue or by simply glancing at their titles, education today is extremely complex and highly contested. But one thing that it is not, education is not learning. Learning and education are not synonymous. True, they are related, but not the same. Apes can learn. But can apes be educated?

We err in equating learning and education. Biesta (2014) noted how the new language of learning, which he refers to as ‘learnification’ (p. 126), is problematic in many ways, one of which is ‘that it is a language of process, but not a language of content and purpose. Yet education is never just about learning, but is always about the learning of something for particular purposes’ (p. 126). Educational leaders at the national, state, regional levels err in this way by their simple-minded accountability schemes with their severe punitive consequences. In these schemes, the simple is substituted for the complex (Kahneman, 2011) and imposed in undemocratic, sometimes despotic ways, usually with disastrous consequences (Waite, 2013; Waite, Rodríguez, & Wadende, 2015). Such reforms can be harmful, even catastrophic, in unpredictable and unimaginable ways. Cleaning up such damage can take generations, if ever.²

Education is more purposive than mere learning, though learning is constitutive of education. Education, as Biesta (2014) reminds us, is generally concerned with qualification, socialization and subjectification:

Qualification … has to do with the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions … socialization … has to do with the ways in which, through education, we become part of the existing traditions and ways of doing and being … subjectification … has to do with … the subjectivity or ‘subject-ness’ of those we educate. It has to do emancipation and freedom and with the responsibility that comes with such freedom. (p. 4, emphasis in original)

Some time ago, educational anthropologists and critical theorists opened our eyes to what they called the hidden curriculum in schools and in education (schools, schooling and education, though related, are yet distinct). These educationists called our attention to the un-seeable yet powerful processes in classrooms and in schools. They situated these phenomena within their policy contexts, and planted the seeds that would later produce revolutionary ways in which to view policy production, interpretation, and implementation as socially constructed, rather than objective, impersonal, sanitary and sterile. Similar to the wonderful ways in which the simple (and simplistic) sender–receiver model of oral communication has been problematized, deconstructed and made more complex and nuanced, so too has the now old-fashioned model of policy development and implementation been made more realistic, more accessible, more contestable. Reframing law- and policy-making as more human (i.e. fallible) processes opens them up to the possibility for greater participation, contestation and resistance.

Teaching and learning (and with them questions about epistemology), too, have travelled a similar road; though perhaps long enough ago so as to be taken for granted, to be part of our pedagogical DNA. But, in historical terms, it was not really all that long ago that knowledge and its dissemination (i.e. teaching) was canonical (Burke, 2000, 2012). Knowledge was what was legitimated by the authorities in a given field and/or by the rulers, be they church or state. ‘Teaching’ was simply the passing on of the legitimated, already known known.

So this is precisely our point, and the rationale behind this Special Issue: Education has changed. The grand project we refer to as Education is and perhaps always has been changing, evolving, morphing.

What, then, is it at this particular juncture? What has it become? In what directions is education moving? What is it likely to become? What is to become of us—students, teachers, administrators, professors and the public at-large?

And though we felt that we on the IJLE editorial board were being expansive, creative and forward-looking, we have still ignored or neglected at least one question concerning education today, and that is the why question alluded to above. Why educate? Why get an education? In the authors’ defence, however, this was never really their charge.

Though never easy, the questions we’ve asked of education today—the what and the where—are relatively easier to answer than the why question. The what and the where of education today involve description and analysis; the why begs for interpretation. Interpretation explains through reference to motives and causes—the teleological and axiological: Why do we as a society, as any society, educate? Why do I get educated? Why do you? Why does anyone? The why question is relevant for the person, for each and every person, regardless of whether that person is part of a more collectivist or a more individualistic group or society.

Why and to what extent do the powers in the world, in a country or society, support education, and for whom? The privileged have easier access to better education than the less privileged, regardless of ability. The less privileged—women and minorities, for example, must work harder, study harder and take more advanced degrees and certifications and still not obtain the privileges and perquisites that the privileged do.³ This is more than simply a Bourdieuan reproduction by and through education. This is unmitigated rank, privilege and prestige and the oppression or subjugation of the many that props up such systems. Systems matter as much or more than does individual initiative. Luck plays a part, too. The fortunate few are born into families, in countries and historical epochs where resources are plentiful and shared, to a certain relatively equal degree, across all segments of society. The unfortunate masses are born under despotic, corrupt regimes, where wealth is amassed by a few so-called ‘elite,’ who jealously guard their privileges with force of arms—the army and the police, and through laws and regulations crafted to their advantage.⁴ What is, where is education under such oppressive conditions? And for both the oppressor and the oppressed?

What of the historically large numbers of refugees and displaced persons around the globe, recently reported by the UN to be about 60,000,000 (Sengupta, 2015). Of this number, fully half, or 30,000,000 million displaced persons are children. What of their education? And what of its leadership?

What about the education of the untold numbers of juveniles showing up at the US–Mexican border, seeking refuge from gang violence in their sending countries? The sudden and dramatic increase in the number of children needing care and services put a strain on the institutions that normally respond—education and the health services. The situation is similar in kind, though much smaller in scale, to that of the displaced students from Syria in the education systems in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. What of their education? What of the teachers and leaders, both formal and informal, who seek to meet their needs? What might the future look like for those who have had a ‘disrupted education’? What might a disrupted education for these 30,000,000 young people mean for the whole of civilization, for the world?

And these are only those we know about whose education, indeed whose lives, have been disrupted. We have not yet stopped to consider the approximately 21,000,000 slave labourers worldwide (Antislavery International, n.d.), their education and that of their children. Indeed, many of these slaves are also child labourers. Childhood labour is a type of education, but is it the type of education we would wish for a child? Last year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Kailash Satyarthi—the co-recipient with Malala Yousafzai—has spent a lifetime battling child labour in India. Though it may at first seem odd to find discussion of such issues as child labour and slavery in an educational leadership journal, our individual and collective maturation as activists, as social justice leaders has taught us to look for the connections between and among the presenting social conditions, to tease out, unpack and problematize them in order to reach the child. However, we—as individuals and as a field—still seem incapable of expanding our models of leadership, of winning for ourselves the authority or space to effect wholesale positive change in the lives of the children with whom we work. Transformational leadership, distributed leadership, STEM programmes, the achievement gap, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah: At some level these are all distractions from more important work, work meant to ensure the life chances, dare we say emancipation, of all our charges, our colleagues, ourselves, our families and our communities. It’s all part of the same social fabric. It’s as they say: none of us is free if one of us is not. We cannot turn a blind eye to the plight of the children of the Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar and ethnic/religious persecution, or to the Uighurs in China, the Yazidi in Iraq, the Kurds, those risking all to cross the Mediterranean Sea, and the indigenous of the USA, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand and elsewhere. Clearly, we ought to be concerned with their welfare, their survival and even flourishing; but education must always be a part of this calculus, never can it be forgotten, overlooked, downplayed or dismissed. No one, no one’s education is expendable.

Our models of education and of leadership ought to cover the case of internally-displaced persons, including children, in, for example, Darfur in Southern Sudan (where the estimated number of displaced persons is about 2,500,000) (Sengupta, 2015) or the estimated 6,500,000 internally displaced persons in Columbia. When we ask where and what is education today, we ought to keep in mind the education of these children, and that of the adults who accompany them as well, because everyone has dreams, aspirations, both for themselves and their progeny, if any. Each and every one of us deserves a champion; it’s not simply everyone for him/herself.

The situation in Syria is so bad that the United Nations Children’s Fund’s report on the situation noted how the ‘crisis has dramatically reduced family livelihood opportunities and impoverished millions of households in the region, resulting in child labor reaching critical levels’ (Gladstone, 2015, p. A9). With the adult refugees unable to find work, children take up the slack, often becoming the main breadwinner for the family. This affects children’s education, and the family fibre; and these effects may ripple through untold numbers of generations. The UN report found that ‘inside Syria, children in more than 75 percent’ of the households surveyed ‘were working’ and ‘in neighboring countries … nearly half of the children were joint or sole breadwinners’ (p. A9). The UN report notes its authors’ fears that this will be a lost generation, ‘with children missing years of school’. The UN report noted that ‘the most vulnerable of all were those children involved in “armed conflict, commercial sexual exploitation and illicit activities involving organized begging and child trafficking”’ (p. A9).

What does education look like for these children? In their settlements? What about the teachers? In such situations as these reported 60 million find themselves, due primarily to human conflict, not natural disaster, are teachers even permitted the luxury to teach? Perhaps they feel, perhaps the community feels that they must take up the gun or the handles of a plow, tilling the fields to feed the larger group. If surplus capital is scarce in such situations, can the teacher or former teacher teach? What of the educational leader? What of education? What of educational leadership?

Much interest attends the sending nations, the refugees’ plight, the situations that precipitated their flight; less interest is given to peoples’ experiences after fleeing. Why, for instance, is it that wealthier nations are taking in fewer displaced persons than are less-wealthy nations? How are displaced persons being accommodated into the fabric of the receiving society? What of class, ethnic and language prejudices and related issues? How are these being mitigated, if acknowledged at all?

And acknowledgement, or recognition, isn’t only an issue for ‘Third World’ peoples, nations, their educational systems and their educational leaders. Acknowledgment and recognition are issues of knowledge, and as such, they affect all societies today (Burke, 2000, 2012). The mirror image of acknowledgement, recognition and knowledge, that is ignorance, likewise is reflected throughout the world, in all types of societies, in their curricula (what knowledge is most valued and, hence, taught; what is thought to be either not worthy of inclusion or even dangerous knowledge and forbidden, outlawed or made illegal) (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008; Smithson, 1989, 2008). Sad to say, ignorance is rampant today; sometimes as a result of consciously oppressive national educational policies (e.g. wherein certain people’s histories are erased from national curricula), sometimes as result of ideologically driven education policies, and sometimes done unconsciously, even unintentionally (as in the case of White privilege, wherein the elite are simply not conscious of the Other, her or his issues and welfare).

While we think about education today, and presently, when we stop to think about the education of those normally forgotten in such considerations, what of the wage slave, and his/her children or dependents? With the cost of higher education today, at least in the USA, and with a steady decrease in the state’s share of university costs, a current and dominant discourse has to do with the perception that a university education is out of reach for all but the children of the wealthy, who are courted by the ‘elite’ schools and are granted other considerations. In K-12 public schools throughout the world, including in the USA, school fees—be they the cost of a uniform, book fees, participation fees (band, athletics, various school clubs)—burden all too many. Such fees come to represent a repressive system of taxation and of social stratification, by which the poor and females are particularly negatively affected. In less affluent societies, for instance, ‘educators’ exact sexual favours from girls and their families in exchange for school and book fees; in addition to the traumas, the physical and psychological harm done to girls (and some boys), girls are at risk of getting pregnant or contracting a sexually transmitted disease. What type of an education do these ‘educators’ instil? What type of education do these children receive at the hands of such predatory ‘educators’? What type of leadership permits such evil ‘educative’ practices to persist?

What of the predatory practices of (some) for-profit schools, and (some) charter schools; those that engorge themselves at the public trough like ticks on the body public. The first example that comes to mind is the ‘University’ of Phoenix, and its predatory practices (Glantz, 2015; The Take Away, June 30, 2015). This ‘university’ has been paid billions of dollars by the US government, in the form of student loans to vulnerable, susceptible members of society (low-SES students and military veterans on the GI Bill⁵) and those who could be said to be in greatest need of an education to improve their circumstances (i.e. their cultural capital and even habitus). The ‘University’ of Phoenix has a graduation rate of somewhere around seven percent (7%!!). Most students leave the institution without a degree or certificate, but with large amassed debt, which, without the improved earning potential possible with advanced degrees and certificates, they are at risk of defaulting on, ending in bankruptcy. Such predation by the ‘University’ of Phoenix and others perpetuate for their victims a cycle of dead-end jobs, minimum wages, and worse. What and where is education today for these students? What of educational leadership?

Though it appears tangential, or perhaps obscured or papered over by the daily, lived reality and taken-for-grantedness of the mundane, these economic considerations and their consequences speak to basic issues as freedom, liberty, yes and even slavery (see Arendt, 1958/1998). What of the wage slave? What of the teachers who feel as though they must work at their jobs despite experiencing profound dissatisfaction(s)? Are they free? Are unfree teachers the best teachers? What of students? The same can be asked of them: Are unfree students the best students? (Here I’d refer the interested reader to Jacques Rancière’s (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation.)

And we ought to look outside our individual selves, as egos, to those with whom we are in relation—beyond our self, beyond our family, beyond our tribe, state and nation. The relationships in which we are situated, the relationships we form, are pedagogical, we learn from and through them. This, to my way of thinking, is the where and what of education today. The work left to do, both for yourself as an individual and for larger groups is the analysis, interpretation (and application) of these relationships—teasing out the nuance(s); seeing the commonalities and differences between and among; embracing and nourishing the Good and quashing and quelling the Evil. I believe that we have to know and recognize the Good and the Evil, to name them, and to act in order to improve education. It’s in our own best interests and those of the others with whom we are in relation (i.e. the whole world). This requires knowledge, learning, education and leadership.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duncan Waite

Duncan Waite is a professor in Educational and Community Leadership at Texas State University, 601 University Dr, Education Building, Suite 4028, San Marcos, TX 78666. Email: [email protected]. He is the editor of The International Journal of Leadership in Education. Duncan is also the co-editor of the forthcoming International Handbook of Educational Leadership published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Notes

1. A startling example of this came in today’s New York Times, where a front-page headline read ‘Education in Kenya Suffers at Hands of Shabab Extremists’ (New York Times, June 4, 2015, A1). Such news prompts numerous questions, some of which include: What is the leadership role in such a situation? Is educational leadership only felicitous? That is, are not the El Shabab leaders also now educational leaders, even as they deny women and girls their rights to an education, even as they threaten and harass them? Are they not educational leaders? There are parallels in the USA: Aren’t those who propagate (and implement) educational policies which result in the under-representation of Latinos and Blacks in gifted and talented programmes and their over-representation in special education programmes also educational leaders?

2. Think, for example, of how the concept of ‘a culture of poverty’ emerged out of the work Oscar Lewis did in Mexico City, and was picked up and perpetuated by later social scientists (e.g. Shirley Brice Heath) and repeated so often by so many reputable social scientists that it eventually affected US national policy (Varenne & McDermott, 1998). We are still today working to undo the damage done by this deficit conceptualization of people’s situations and the resources they have available.

3. In Mexico, during my time there, a common folk saying was ‘trabajo como negro para vivir como blanco.’

4. See Rancière’s (2004, 2010) discussion of the police order, of which we are all part, and are thereby complicit in its ‘distribution of the sensible’.

5. The GI Bill refers to US legislation intended to assist military veterans with college tuition. It was instituted after the Second World War to help the large number of returning men (primarily), and is widely credited with contributing to a burgeoning middle class in the USA after the war, and to the US economic fortunes.