ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two dominant educational reasoning of quantifications and comparisons, all of which make it possible to describe ‘expertise’ in education. It reviews expertise as conceptual personae, in that the ideas, theories and mode of thinking embodied in the text are made understandable within the historical circumstances in which they are articulated to ‘see’ and think about the world and people. The chapter highlights several ‘experts’ which are active in different periods and contexts, but are anything but incompetent and boring – perhaps to some extent self-righteous. Torsten Husen’s international work began in 19523 when he was invited by the American High Commissioner to serve as a consultant at a workshop on the role that psychological research could play in solving the problems in German education. The optical consistency translation of statistical distinctions into information appears to have a ‘communicative objectivity’.
