Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

9 The Persuasive Power of Figures and the Aesthetics of the Dirty Backyards 137
as play, play with symbols, which creates meaning in the process of structuring and
creates structures in the process of constructing meaning. When we listen to an oral
education research presentation, looking at the PowerPoint Presentation of statistical
research results, we could enjoy the performance without having to comprehend
anything. But, if we want to understand the research, its methodological presuppositions
and its’ meaning we should sometimes work as literary critics in order to find
the sense behind words and symbols.
9.2 The Knowledge Society and Its Statistical
Knowledge Basements
The rhetoric about the knowledge society as well as social science research on education
to meet this goal presents a persuasive aesthetics and aims at both convincing
the audience and presenting the authors and/or organisations as experts through
‘impression management’. However, there are often deep gaps between the rhetorically
claimed and visualised informative value and the complex types of knowledge
the mass of information is framed and contextualised by. Therefore, the second part
of this chapter, that takes a macro-level perspective, looks at OECD statistics, especially
at the relationship between the figures displayed and the appendices. This
combination of factors serves to inform its audience about the limits of validity
(based on the strong desire for comparison). Just like in a scholarly oral speech the
figures presented are deeply attractive. They are used to augment power, competition
and governance not only in research contexts, but also in economics, policy
and administration. Less attention, however, is paid to the appendix, the condition
of possibility to form a justified opinion and a sound interpretation of the figures,
in order to not distract the focus from the main goal we are challenged to meet
in the future: the knowledge society. Enchantment and disenchantment, magic and
enlightenment serve as two sides of the same coin.
The information or knowledge society has not, as yet, become a reality. At
present we find a mainly rhetorical focus directed to this future, a future that depends
on lifelong learning, competition and cooperation, constructions of the expected
self, etc. Against this rhetoric we would claim that the terms: ‘Knowledge’ society
and ‘information’ society – are (self-) descriptions of a society by social factions
within that society. ‘Knowledge’ is their ‘modern’ ideology, a universal expectation
addressed to individuals to learn, to cooperate, to compete and, finally, to
feel responsible for constructing their vita without having the markers of a successful
life at their disposal. Educational institutions serve as career regimes, even
regimes of life courses attributing markers to their clients and collecting masses of
standardised data to assure their (institutions and clients) success. This combination
of universal expectations and organisational power of assessing, ascribing and
labelling the level and degree to which people meet these expectations is based on
large-scale administrative and research machinery. This machinery is put to the service
of negotiating and agreeing upon commonalities, of defining categories and