The Social Institutional Normality of Resistance against the Educational Reform Cover Image
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Социално-институционалната нормалност на съпротивите срещу образователната реформа
The Social Institutional Normality of Resistance against the Educational Reform

Author(s): Valentin Danchev
Subject(s): Social Sciences
Published by: Институт по философия и социология при БАН

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this paper is to expose the social grounds and typological coherence of the institutional resistances against the Modernization of Education project, prepared as an organizational tool for implementing a comprehensive reform in the sphere of education. When the project was started It seemed that the necessary prerequisites for initiating an educational reform were in place. In the process of its implementation, however, the Ministry of Science and Education carried out unrelated procedures, which did not result in any structural transformation of the sphere of education. The question is why, i.e. how after three years of implementing a series of procedures under the reform project it now fails in a legitimate manner? The thesis advanced is that resistance against the project, in spite of its interrelatedness and large-scale scope, arises in a natural, spontaneous manner, and is not the result of a rationally designed institutional plan or secret conspiracy of a group of interested persons. The coherence of the resistance practices has its historical regularity in the inherited institutional environment, which determines the administrative standpoints, the institutional interests and the cultural perceptions, which take shape in the matrix of values, interpretative keys and peculiar habitus, which are the grounds and the resource for the formation of the spectrum of institutional resistances. Through an analysis of the constellation of institutional, budget, legislative and cultural mechanisms, the analysis exposes the hidden code of the resistance – the substitution of the goals of the projects and its natural incorporation into the logic of the environment that is to be reformed. Contrary to the classical perception that the social problem expects its resolution – passive but in good faith, the main conclusion of this research is that the education problem is no malleable material that can easily be reformatted using logically agreed technological means. The social problem is a special form of habitual social life and is thus internally prone to active and natural resistance against attempts to resolve it using various instruments. Hence resolving a social problem must involve specific efforts – research and institutional – for reconstructing and taming the immanent resistances – not those of individual persons, but those of the social reality itself.

  • Issue Year: 37/2005
  • Issue No: 3-4
  • Page Range: 26-50
  • Page Count: 25
  • Language: Bulgarian