The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Leadership
Ira Bogotch2017, Wiley eBooks
If it is granted that educational leaders should lead, then the obvious question is what they should lead for-which can also be phrased as the question what they should lead towards. Although the question seems obvious, it is easily forgotten in the maelstrom educational leaders find themselves in, being caught up with administration and management rather than leadership, and often just trying to keep up with bureaucratic demands and desires. This means that the question of direction, the question what educational leadership ought to be for, is often only answered in the concrete and shortterm language of targets, outcomes, and Key Performance Indicators, with little attention and often simply just not enough time for considering the longer-term aims of education and the underlying purposes that direct, give meaning, and justify such aims. Also, in the world of targets and Key Performance Indicators it is quite likely that the answer to what educational leaders should lead for is already decided for them, with little scope for interpretation and negotiation, let alone for critique. Yet the relative absence of sustained attention to questions of purpose is not just a practical matter; it is not just a matter of lack of time, but also has to do with the presence within educational policy, practice, and its wider discourse, of powerful but nonetheless rather unhelpful ideas, theories, framings, and assumptions of what education is about, what the task of education supposedly is, of how education works, and what this means for the administration, leadership, and improvement of education. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a detailed overview of all these discussions, but-one step removed from this-raise a number of more fundamental questions about education, including questions of its discourse, its purposes, its theories, and its improvement. The intent partly is to have a perspective from which problems can be identified and can appear as problems, and partly to provide building blocks for a more informed, nuanced, and politically astute discussion about education and its leadership. The chapter is structured in the following way. I begin where many would argue education should begin, that is with the question of learning, but I will argue that learning-and specifically the language of learning-has become a problem for education rather than just its obvious starting point and frame of reference. From here, I address the question of purpose in education, suggesting that, unlike what is the case in
