Chapter 13: Local and Global Congeries Shaping Educational Administration in India

Educational administration as an applied field of study in many Western country contexts has had a long history. In the 1940s, the field’s knowledge base was grounded in the “wisdom of practice” from retired principals and supervisors teaching various programs. From 1960s and 1970s onwards, empirical revolution slowly swept the field. The core areas of study in educational administration were policy and governance; organizational structure; educational leadership; change and innovation in educational institutions; principal preparation programs; higher education and teachers’ careers. Because education and administration are two independent fields of study in their own right and education, by definition, is an eclectic interdisciplinary field of study that has applied perspectives and models from social sciences in educational settings, these studies were interdisciplinary in nature, incorporating politics, economics, sociology, and psychology of education (Oplatka, 2010).