Customer Reviews

The Moral Imperative of School Leadership

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Fullan does an excellent job of organizing school leadership into achievable levels of success. He starts with making a difference within individuals, then the school/district, followed by making a difference regionally and finally the greatest impact on school leadership and the society as a whole. Fullan discusses barriers to these accomplishments and challenges, and portrays the principalship as the key to this moral imperative.

This book serves as an outstanding resource to any leader that is trying to bring about large-scale improvement in their organization. It is the school leaders role to change the context within schools and Fullan outlines a process to do just that.

I found the book to be okay. Some of it gets a little preachy and clearly one person's opinions. At times, the author turned me off.

Michael Fullan, proposes the need for engagement of the moral imperatives in education. Typical of post enlightenment theorists, Fullan has three major shortcomings: First, he is mostly focused on process that has no end or goal; Second, he is naively positivist in his assessment of education because it is bound by the limited and dysfunctional enlightenment anthropological assumptions about the person and education; Third, this positivist assessment of the person leads to a faulty over emphasis on systems of education rather than on the proper focus of the relationship of love between the teacher and the student.

Beginning with the well worn de Tocquevillean bromide that education is the primary democratizing institution in our culture Fullan asserts that schools develop understanding of "truth, beauty, and justice". However, the overwhelming problem with this naively positivist position is that Fullan treats "truth, beauty, and justice" as self -defining when these definitions are the very essence of the conflict of democracy. "Moral", all by itself, has no content, it is merely the behavioral imperatives of one's presuppositions about life. For example, if one presupposes that being a human person is primarily about the maximization of the number of choices and potential choices and calls that "freedom" then the horror of abortion is "moral", "true" and "just". If one sees life as a sacred gift then one properly sees abortion as murder and resistance to abortion is "moral", "true" and "just". "Moral" is a human faculty that has no necessary content to it and to observe and insist that education has a moral component to it is no more revelatory than the recognition that education has a biological, psychological, or spiritual aspect to it. By definition it must because it involves human persons whom are composed of these faculties

The obvious issue is that the various "systems that make up the global village" are in competition with one another and that some are true and some are false. It is to an important degree a zero sum enterprise. For example, the assumptions about the person in enlightenment anthropology like Fullan's is largely incompatible with Muslim anthropology, which in turn is somewhat incompatible with Christian anthropology which is incompatible with atheist humanist anthropology. However, one gets the sense that Fullan feels, wrongly, that enlightenment anthropology is somehow above this conflict.

While it is true that "no other profession enables on the opportunity to provide such a positive impact on a child's overall development" it is equally true that a child is particularly vulnerable to being harmed and distorted by educational theorists like Fullan's whims. For example, in Massachusetts MCAS or business setting the education agenda has serious consequences that often overwhelm the student and the "personal vision" of teachers. In fact, these imperatives bind and constrict "personal vision". Is this good or bad? Fullan has no ability to say because these words have no content in Fullan but are indicative of nearly empty process. "Continuous learning" of itself is of no value and is no self-correcting norm if one's continuous learning is improperly oriented or committed to begin with. To broadly make the point one can be "continuously learning" to relativize what is in fact "true, beautiful, just" so that one can freely commit horrors like concentration camps, abortion or possible genetic experiments to serve an abstraction like "quality of life". Fullan's focus on process and commitment to institution is flawed. In the end, education is more determined by whether the teacher is a wise and loving person rather than on a better institutional scheme. Fullan stumbles across this but only on the way to make the point that we need to have more and better collaboration to build better systems. This is always the trap of post enlightenment theorists. The point is to better educate this or that particular boy or girl who is in front of you now, through being a wise and loving teacher, not to be focused on abstractions like systems and their improvements.