Educational Reform as the Organization of Ritual: Stability as Change *

Abstract

The question of the social function of educational reform is addressed. While educational reform seems to imply change, in fact it serves as a kind of ritual, providing the outward appearance of scientifically controlled change and masking the actual ways in which the status quo is reproduced. Ethnographic investigation of the implementation of the Individually Guided Education program (IGE) is used to address the ways in which such a reform program is actualized in the daily life of schools. An analysis follows of the ways in which reform serves as a legitimating ritual in those schools by focusing attention on “scientific” rules and procedures rather than the underlying institutional structures in which schools are embedded.

A final section addresses the usefulness of the theory of resistance as a theoretical construct to understand the ways in which individuals participate in and transform schools as social sites.

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