The administrator as a transformative intellectual

Abstract

While the reformist agenda of the recent past has been a welcome addition to our discourse on the nature of education, it has failed in many respects to address some essential aspects of educational reform. The rhetoric is in many instances laudatory; the California Commission on Public School Administration and Leadership (Association of California School Administrators, 1988), for example, found that are times when evolutionary change is appropriate, but these are not those times. If our society is to succeed, nothing short of a revolution is needed in our schools (p. 51). Such sentiments are indeed accurate and they are appropriate for all levels of education; they display a concern with the way educational systems generally have responded to the needs of their clientele and they issue strong statements about the need for educational reform. But the need is not fully met by those reforms which fail to address the underlying assumptions and worldviews held by American educators and which govern the direction in which education proceeds. This is to say that competing moral philosophies undergird our approaches to practice, and each philosophy is a struggle for mind: a struggle to control the shape and structure of those social agendas we engage in. From Aristotle to Kant, from Sidgwick to Dewey, there is a contested analysis of the right way for resolving dilemmas, making decisions, and governing ourselves. These moral philosophies-from pragmatism to behaviorism-are the keystone of the relationships that bind individuals together in organization.