http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/752987

Teachers Versus Technocrats: An Educational Innovation inAnthropological Perspective

Too many educational researchers have been too attentive to innovations and too inattentive to how educators organize to cope with them. The use of anthropological concepts and methods in analyzing the educator subculture could improve planning and implementation of innovations. A study of the attempt to develop a variant of a planning, programming, budgeting system in Oregon by the Center for the Advanced Study of Educational Administration, using a local school district as a testing site, reveals the operation of a moiety-like social organization among educators. A moiety system involves the division of a group into two camps, each with different ways of viewing any situation. Interaction between the two subgroups involves the anthropological concepts of rivalry, reciprocity, complementarity, and conceptual antithesis. In the educator subculture this structure is seen in the distinction between the technocrats--those who seek and instigate educational innovation--and the teachers--those who must implement the new ideas. Because of communications failures and other problems, the specific project in question operated not so much to change the educational system's processes as to reveal them more clearly to the anthropologist's eye. (Author/PGD).

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