ABSTRACT
As we have seen, one obvious reason why educational planning tends to be a non-starter, or quickly finds itself bogged down when a start is attempted, arises from the fact that there is no clear-cut, agreed way of relating inputs to outputs. At every turn, whether it is a question of assessing the individual teacher's performance or of studying the cost-effectiveness of a service, the problems seem to defy any exact formulation. The objectives are so indeterminate, the criteria so vague and elusive, that the most patient analysis has to admit defeat in the end. If economics has yet to develop as an exact science, the prospects of education's ever doing so may be reckoned even more remote. Plausible as it is, however, the argument which holds that mathematized strategies are no more likely to succeed than those based on verbal reasoning is too facile. The same kind of argument was once used to prove that the quantitative and qualitative measurement of heat was impossible. The attitude of mind which insists that qualitative appraisals can never be reduced to quantitative measurements has been too often and too thoroughly debunked by physicists for any reliance to be placed upon it.
Some fifty years ago, colour was one of those esoteric qualities that could not be measured, and the reason was this: people stated the attributes of colour, defined colour, in terms of two observables, or ‘quantities’ if you please. One was hue - wavelength; and the other was intensity. Now it is true that an artist could paint two canvases in blue, both having the same intensity and hue; and yet the two blues would look different to the eye of the observer.
Here then arose the claim that colour was a quality, something that escapes the net of the scientist; something that is esoteric, that is really not tractable by the methods of science. Now what has happened is this: someone discovered that there is a further quantity, a third observable involved in this business, an observable called saturation. Now if you paint two canvases in blue in such a way that they agree with respect to hue, intensity, and saturation, they also look alike. And so you have here the conversion of what was at one time called a quality, not tractable by the methods of science, into a scientific quantity capable of numerical quantification. And it seems to me that this process is going on forever. We cannot say that everything in the world that we regard as a quality will some day be converted into a quantity. This is a question of faith – not one of the maxims, metaphysical or otherwise, of science. I myself believe that this process of conversion of qualities into quantities is going on as long as the human mind inquires [1].
