What is the role of the School of Education?
Higher education has four main roles: teaching, scholarship (the organization of knowledge), research, and service. While other institutions teach and serve the education profession, at a university, teaching and research are inseparable. Typically, the better the research, the better the university. “Better” research is more applicable and more beneficial. Thus medical schools at many major universities have outstanding reputations because their research is applicable and beneficial.
Research provides a profession with the knowledge base upon which a profession justifies its existence, keeping itself current and viable. Service brings to the profession the results of on-going research. Scholarship organizes the knowledge base for serious criticism and new research. Teaching transmits the knowledge base to students and facilitates their growth in ways that hopefully exceed past achievements.
When research and scholarship do not inform teaching, teaching over-emphasizes the mentoring or apprenticing of the young in the “how to” skills and rules of current practice, and the status quo is not questioned. Law schools are a good example. One finds very little research in law schools—mainly training. As a result, as former Harvard President Derek Bok commented, we know much less than we should about the functioning of our legal system and the effect of laws upon society. (Bok, Derek, Higher Learning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.)
Schools of education are much like schools of agriculture. While schools of agriculture teach farming rather than teaching, faculty in both organize a repository of practical knowledge; they both are places where practical research is conducted; and they both serve the public. The difference between schools of agriculture and schools of education is that the research faculty in schools of agriculture conduct seems to make a greater positive difference than research conducted by education faculty.
Of course, “town-gown” tensions exist in every profession. With the founding of the land grant universities, farmers typically distrusted the agriculture faculty. In his history of The American College and University, Frederick Rudolph quotes one legislator in South Carolina in 1879 as saying “[I’ve never] seen a man who could write a nice essay or make a good agricultural speech who could make corn enough to feed himself and a bob-tailed mule until the first day of March.” (Rudolph, Frederick, The American College and University. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1962.)
In education, town-gown tensions have existed since Socrates. Faculty in schools of education need to develop a close relationship with practicing educators, but not pander to them. The value of a creative tension between education faculty and the profession is desirable. Education faculty should be seen a “loyal critics” of the profession. In fact, a certain detachment or academic freedom from the profession is essential, as too close a relationship would foster a kind of “groupthink” mentality that is not conducive to independent thought. As Francis Allen has said in reference to the field of law, “if ever the law schools and the practicing profession are in perfect accord, it will be because one or the other has capitulated and abdicated its proper functions.” (Allen, Francis, Law, Intellect, and Education. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1979.)
Abraham Flexner’s classic study of medical schools at the beginning of the last century is instructive. (Flexner, Abraham, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, Bulletin No. 4. New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Science, 1910.)
Medical schools of that day had grown so close to medical practice, that it was virtually impossible for faculty to initiate reform.
Schools of education should promote the “education” as opposed to the narrow “training” of educators. Training is fundamentally anti-intellectual; whereas educational leaders need broad understanding.
Schools of education within universities support the notion that their students should demonstrate a breadth of knowledge in the liberal arts and excellence in some cognate field prior to admission into a professional educational preparation program.
Student and faculty work within a school of education should include study of the philosophical, socio-cultural, political, economic, legal, ethical, psychological, and curricular foundations of education. Programs should require critical analysis and evaluation of policies, often involving research-in-practice investigations.
If the CSUB School of Education is to be excellent, it must demonstrate that it is the best place to learn to teach, counsel and administer. Faculty must conduct research which is of significant benefit to P-12 students in this region. The new School of Education building should visually signify what faculty do by providing a setting whereby faculty can demonstrate educational technology and pursue on-going research-in-practice.