Competing Models of Schools and Communities: The Struggle To Reframe and Reinvent Their Relationships. Publication Series No. 8.
DOCUMENT RESUME
Environmental Pressures, Management Imperatives, and Competing Paradigms in Educational Administration
Across much of the westernized world, environmental pressures have transformed the context of public education and educational administration. The changing world economy, declining confidence in the welfare state, and adverse social trends have generated strong pressures for change in education systems, and for nothing less than a paradigm shift in educational management. Together, these social forces have produced three interconnected imperatives for educational administrators: a productivity imperative, an accountability imperative, and a community imperative. Efforts to respond to these imperatives generate tensions between competing paradigms in educational management. This article discusses the environmental pressures, the resulting three imperatives, and the tensions flowing from these developments.
What is Enlightenment
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.