Why School Systems Resist Reform: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
从理性、社会政治和精神分析三种视角解释学校系统为何抵制改革，重点分析精神分析视角下焦虑引发的防御机制，如偏执和强迫模式，并指出改革需连接学校与其他社会机构。
School reformers have proposed various innovations to improve education, but school systems have adopted few proposals. Three perspectives offer different interpretations of this resistance. The rational perspective views educators as rejecting proposals because they are not based in solid knowledge. The social-political perspective holds that conflicting interests prevent consensus about directions for change and concerted action. A psychoanalytic perspective, introduced in this article, calls attention to the ways in which inadequacy of knowledge and conflicts of interest, compounded by the psychological structure of teaching, arouse anxiety for school system members and lead them to defend themselves by resisting outsiders, new ideas, and innovative practices. The article examines paranoid and obsessive-compulsive patterns in school systems’ thinking, culture, and structure. These patterns lead systems to avoid relations with other entities and to constrain their own members from acting. Reforming schools and improving education depend on connecting schools to other social institutions to develop a realistic division of responsibility for children’s education for adulthood.