Chapter 14: Radical manifestos for evaluative research

Most methodologists are writing manifestos. Our ideas exhort, we shout for attention in a crowded political marketplace, soapboxing values and standing up for what we think is right. John Dewey (1897) opened his educational manifesto like this: “I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race,” and followed up with a statement of more than 70 ‘pedagogic’ principles commencing with the words “I believe…”…..“I believe that literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification.”