ABSTRACT
We prefaced our book by asking how the whole enterprise of Secondary-Education was to be understood, and we have mostly dealt with this as a substantive question to which we have tried to give empirical answers. In conclusion, however, we must now treat this as a question about methods of inquiry and discuss some of the epistemological and political difficulties that we have had to acknowledge in the course of our substantive analyses. We enumerate these difficulties in the next section of this chapter. Following that, in the third section (‘Political accountability and social-scientific accounts’), we argue that these difficulties might, in principle, be solved through the further development of a form of a political and social discourse that is implicit in the ideas of democracy and of science. In particular, we argue that improvements in the production and evaluation of social explanations, or accounts, entail the further development of forms of political accountability; and vice versa. Much in our argument at this point rests on the idea that the concept of accountability has reference simultaneously in both an epistemological and a political domain; political accountability both requires and facilitates the production of adequate scientific (descriptive and explanatory) accounts. Following that, in the fourth section (‘The current dilemma of government and academe’), we suggest that the solution which we pursue through the idea of accountability cannot be fully achieved, given the present organisation of social research by academics and others, and given also the present ambivalence of the government’s attitudes towards the implications of knowledge for its own legitimacy. This dilemma leads us to consider some of the ways in which the production of better social accounts might be pursued through attempts to change the current organisation of social research and attempts to change the way in which knowledge is currently used to legitimate or undermine the exercise of authority. We conclude in the final section (‘Education and reconstruction’) with a brief discussion of some of the problems arising from our argument and with an indication of some of its further possibilities. These possibilities include a reconceptualisation of the ideas of education and of research that have been taken for granted in much of this book. In brief, we believe that these can only be adequately realised in the context of a political community in which the concept of citizenship is expanded to include the right to be knowledgeable. Our argument is that epistemological and methodological difficulties in the production and evaluation of social knowledge derive from, and contribute to, difficulties in the political culture. Consequently, any attempt to answer substantive questions concerning the effectiveness of public systems such as the education system must acknowledge that the possibility, and also the nature or content, of any answer are limited by attitudes to knowledge that prevail within such a system. It is also appropriate, therefore, to indicate how change, and improvement, may be possible.
