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.
