2017 Volume 84 Issue 4 Pages 398-409
This study investigates the kind of schools and teachers required by the transformation of the theory of learning. The organization and management of teachers and schools, as well as relevant underlying philosophies, differ according to the attitude to the complexity of education. The modern science of learning requires teachers and schools to respond positively to the complexity of education and to actively utilize it as a source of creativity. Just as improvisation and collaboration are important in educational activities, teacher autonomy and collaboration are viewed as important in school organization and management.
However, in practice, reports reveal not so much autonomy and collaboration on the part of teachers as a decreased sense of self-efficacy, mounting stress and reduced perceived autonomy. This report analyzes the situation as a problem related to managerialism within the public educational administration. The issue is that managerialism, a private-sector approach, is institutionalized by public authorities within the education system, which is part of the public sector. The managerialism ideology proposes that societal problems are resolved exclusively through organizations and their management, and so requires the autonomy of organizations and their members. Most importantly, when managerialism is introduced into the public sector, it adopts strategies to increase the autonomy of organizations and their employees, including decentralization and relaxation of regulations. However, the influence of public authorities does not simply therefore recede. Instead, there is a change in the mechanism by which the authorities exercise influence.
This change in mechanism can be analyzed using Searle's classification of regulative rules and constitutive rules. Specifically, among recent educational policies, the analysis covers official school evaluations, academic achievement surveys, and revision of curriculum guidelines. This analysis reveals that managerialism has shifted the format of authority in public educational administration from regulative rules toward constitutive rules. This is tantamount to a change in the nature of the agency of teachers. In an environment in which regulative rules hold sway, the teacher can hold on to the idea of being autonomous by resisting those rules. In contrast, in an environment in which regulative rules have given way to constitutive rules, autonomy has already been ceded to the teacher, although paradoxically reducing his or her perception thereof. In addition, to maintain the institutional facts produced via constitutive rules, institutional vocabulary must continually be used, increasing the use of insubstantial normative discourse. Thus teachers cannot be autonomous or collaborative even though, or even because, they are told to be so.
Finally, this paper discusses the possibility of transforming the speech acts in public educational administration from declarations to directives. Not all teachers and not all schools are fully entrenched in the constitutive rules of managerialism. This allows alternatives to be found. It is possible for teachers themselves to redefine the problems by un-learning vocabularies of institution. They can acknowledge the actual situation in their own words by constructing their own relationships with children and/or parents. Thus they can restore autonomy as an ideal and look forward to collaborations based on this autonomy.
