Cupboard

Abstract: With now over sixty years experience of finding worn-out shoes in unusual places, I believe my reactions may be typical of others thus confronted. First, wondering why anyone would place a pair of woman’s old shoes under the floorboards. Obviously they had no value, unless sentimental. So could they have been used for hiding cash or valuables? Hardly practical, no value, no use, set the puzzle aside. That was about 1950–51 when there were two finds on show in Northampton Museum, this pair of c.1800, and ten Tudor men’s, women’s and children’s shoes found in a walled-up cupboard by the chimney of a house on London Wall said to have escaped the Great Fire of 1665. These I dismissed as worn out and not worth packing when the family moved.

Abstract: Educational administration as a scholarly discipline continues to be dominated by a world view of modernity. This perspective posits that “reality” lies “out there” waiting to be discovered by the researcher using rational-logico, positivistic procedures. This tradition of scholarship denigrates alternative world views as “subjective,” and hence less rigorous and worthy of serious study. The most prized trophy of all is encapsulated in the “knowledge base,” that core of factual information which epitomizes all that is “worth knowing” in the discipline. The knowledge base represents the foundational claim of legitimacy and distinctiveness protecting the boundaries of the discipline against absorption into other organizational units in the university. The postmodern critique of positivism has called the basic premises of foundational legitimacy into question, and represents the most serious intellectual challenge confronting the definition of the field, its methods of inquiry, and its assertions regarding exclusivity since T. B. Greenfield's (1978) critique several decades earlier. This article reviews the claims and counterclaims of the current debate in educational administration and offers some promising trends for the future.