This article explores the role of political science in educating people who perform policy analysis in public bureaucracies. Policy analysts are defined as applied scientists who study the nature, causes and effects for alternative public policies, using relevant academic disciplines, theories and methodologies to choose optimal policies to achieve a given aim. Typically, analysts evaluate enacted policies but occasionally they compare hypothetical alternatives.

The education of policy analysts is similar to the education of engineers. Both draw on several basic sciences for information to solve real-world problems. However, greater consensus exists on which sciences are important for engineers. Their key science is physics although engineering education also uses insights from chemistry, geology and biology.

Some are born to computer literacy, while others have literacy thrust upon them! Students who comprise the next generation of political scientists and public administrators will, in many cases, fall into the latter category. This article concerns the role of university training programs in meeting the increasing demands for microcomputer skills.

The January, 1984 issue of Public Administration Review included five articles concerning microcomputers in local government. These articles anticipate “major changes in the way local governments organize and the means by which they carry out operations,” as a result of microcomputer technology. Predicting a significant impact of microcomputers in local government, the International City Management Association has also published a major monograph on microcomputer use (Griesemer, 1984).

During the fall 1983 semester, I experimented with a terrorism simulation that seemed to engage student interest and heighten their awareness about the nature of terrorism.

I used the simulation in Political Science 221 — Introduction to International Relations. There were two sections of this course, which met three hours weekly for approximately 15 weeks. About half the students were political science majors; most were freshmen and sophomores. For purposes of conducting the simulation, however, it makes little difference what year students are in or what majors they follow. With the exception of a two-week unit on terrorism, the course devoted about one week to each of the standard topics normally studied by students in international relations.

This article serves two purposes. It is an account of field testing two instructional units in the APSA text series “Citizenship and Change: Women and American Politics” and it is a report of original research findings produced by students who used the units. In the course of reading about the changing place of American women in the political System and then researching questions raised by their reading, students surprised themselves. They learned to evaluate their own attitudes and the socialization processes leading to them, while they found that they could tackle practical research problems successfully.

GINT 202, Policies and Functions of American Government, is a course which I have treated as an “introductory seminar” on important policy questions and the political system's response to them.

During the Spring Semester of 1984, we had the opportunity to field test Women in the Judicial Process and Men, Women, and State Violence: Government and the Military, two of the units in the American Political Science Association's project, Citizenship and Change: Women and American Politics. We greeted the experiment with great enthusiasm. Our current undergraduate curriculum includes the course “Women and Politics“; but, like many departments, we have given consideration to “mainstreaming” the contents of this class into other courses. Some of our faculty contend that “Women and Politics” perpetuates the “ghettoization” of such material and that our students would be better served by the abandonment of “Women and Politics” in favor of the integration of its content into our more traditional offerings.

The following articles come from different intellectual traditions than usually appear in NEWS for Teachers of Political Science. Previously, thoughtful NEWS pieces have ranged widely from the use of metaphors and simulations to techniques for lecturing and leading classroom discussions to reviews of current textbooks. However, two traditions have been largely missing: developments in contemporary educational thought, curriculum theory in particular, and continental philosophy. Continental philosophy has had important influence in the field of curriculum theory as well as American political science. Therefore, it seems appropriate that some of these developments explicitly be brought to the attention of teachers of political science. The articles by Whitty and Giroux deal with recent developments in pre-collegiate educational thought; Dallmayr, with developments in continental philosophy in this century; Shapiro, with implications of post-structuralist thought for teaching about politics; and I explain how developments in analytic as well as continental philosophy have shaped a graduate seminar in research methodology.

The sociology of education in Britain is generally regarded as having gone through something of a paradigm shift in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A supposed “new direction” in the sociology of education was seen to emerge from the work of Basil Bernstein and Michael F.D. Young and their colleagues and students at the Institute of Education in London. This was symbolized in the sub-title of the first major publication by this group — Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (Young 1971a). Insofar as there was anything that had a coherent claim to be termed a “new sociology of education” (Gorbutt 1972), its approach was one which sought to make problematic that which had hitherto been taken for granted in education (Young, 1971b).

The discourse of crisis has once again come into play in the field of education, and schools are once more the subject of an intense national debate. In the recent past, discussion has centered on whether schools can be the central institution for achieving racial and sexual equality; whether higher education in the traditional liberal arts curricula are still “relevant” to a changing labor market; whether the authoritarian classroom stifles the creativity of young children; or, conversely how permissiveness has resulted in a general lowering of educational achievement. All of these issues are still with us, but they have been subsumed under a much larger question: how to make the school curricula adequate to a changing economic, political and ideological environment?

Anyone attending a political science conference these days is likely to be overwhelmed by the extreme heterogeneity of viewpoints and approaches, a heterogeneity sometimes resembling a hopeless Babel of tongues. For decades there had been talk of paradigm changes and of the erosion of “mainstream” assumptions in the discipline; more recently, this ferment has been heightened by the influx of novel perspectives whose vocabulary and intellectual style bear a distinctly continental cast. Professional reaction to these perspectives has been varied: greeted by some as instant remedies they are bemoaned by others as alien intruders threatening an already fragile consensus. I perceive them as idioms in an ongoing conversation whose lines of argument are not merely whimsical and deserve the attention of political science teachers.

There are many ways to treat the implications of post-structuralist thinking for political pedagogy. Since for the most part I shall be treating its implications for someone — primarily teachers of political science — the appropriate context is a comparison between post-structuralist inquiry and what remains the prevailing approach to political inquiry, the application of the scientific code.1 We can begin with a broad juxtaposition that will establish the tone of the comparison. Modern political inquiry is increasingly oriented toward a particular model of scientific communication, one which promotes a commitment to precision and clarity in the creation of concepts and the development of measurement indices and, by implication, eschews ambiguity and uncertainty.

One promise of the behavioral revolution was that metaphysical assumptions would be minimized, if not eliminated, in political research and theorizing. Nothing would be taken for granted. It is now obvious that this is not possible. Instead, the question is which metaphysical assumptions are most felicitous and persuasive in our search for knowledge about politics. This question does not have a single, uncomplicated answer. For those of us who teach research methodology, interesting and at times disillusioning developments have influenced thinking about research methodology during the last twenty years. Developments in modern logic, continental and neo- Marxist thought, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and even literary criticism has upset previously held assumptions about behavioral political research and the nature of empirically based theory.