Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

9 The Persuasive Power of Figures and the Aesthetics of the Dirty Backyards 141
This struggle concerning politics, education and power (as regards the ‘right’
knowledge) is also embedded in and directed towards organisational structures such
as the school or university, which, according to organisational complexity theory,
can be described as a loosely coupled system. In organisational sociology, Weick,
March and Olsen apply this concept to education systems. They maintain that loose
coupling characterises these systems.
Theory of coupling, used in computing, states very clearly, ‘Coupling refers to
the degree of direct knowledge that one class has of another. ... Strong coupling
occurs when a dependent class contains a pointer directly to a concrete class which
provides the required behavior. Loose coupling occurs when the dependent class
contains a pointer only to an interface, which can then be implemented by one or
many concrete classes’ (Loose Coupling, Wikipedia 2010).
Seen against this background we find loose coupling in education between input
and output, promises and redemption, the ceremonial level of self-description and
the operative level of daily work. There are contradictions and paradoxes everywhere
you look. Loose coupling shows a picture of an efficient, fluent, organic
homogeneity (sometimes close to romantic images). It offers flexible, deregulated
provisions for transforming various, rather arbitrary information into respective
kinds of knowledge. With regard to the social dimension: selectivity and accountability
of bureaucratic-hierarchical structures and standards are replaced by social
mechanisms, collectively ascribed roles and invisible criteria of evaluation and
assessment. Loose coupling prefers open structures that can turn into a greenhouse
of the future or a ‘cold’ structured organisation of qualification.
Statistics, then, function as an interface to which a dependent class is able to point
to with the expectation that one or many other classes will react by implementing
the expected behaviour. What is at stake relates to who constructs and controls the
interface and whether or not they have the ability to define the direction and structure
of transforming information into licensed/accepted knowledge. There is no actor, no
devil and no conspiracy. It is the socialised and socialising habitus (Bourdieu) that
exerts a high degree of influence on this interface.
In the middle ages, only priests and monks were able to read and understand the
subtle symbols and holy words within a differentiated system of structured meaning.
People got the myths, the canon and the subordination. Nowadays the MANY are
flooded by information and set free to use it, but the rules and tribes, techniques and
methods to combine, assemble, select and show the licensed knowledge is available
to the FEW, the modern secularised priests who promise the paradise of the knowledge
society and light the path to its entrance. Their descendents get to jump the
queue. The education system is a core element in the control of access to the road
to paradise and the reproduction of social structures. Statistics as an interface serves
to show ‘facts’ and to hide the function thereby creating transparent intransparency.
Commonly it is said – even by large-scale assessment specialists – that input, structure
and output/outcome of recent new education initiatives are hardly measurable
when using statistics. So-called qualitative research is requested for this kind of pedagogy.
A good indicator to investigate the relationship between statistics and power
and the function of statistics as interface could be the degree to which new education