A History of Educational Management Thought with Regards to International Experiences

The main purpose of this study is to provide a historical perspective on intellectual development trends of educational administration during the 20th century. To achieve this goal, documentary method was used. A review of historical events shows that in the intellectual history of educational administration, extended efforts have been done to avoid confusion for creating knowledge base of educational administration. For the first time, the perceived confusion hesitated the past of practice-based educational administration (late 19th century) and it provided theory development in educational administration in the middle of 20th century. Despite the almost one hundred years of effort in this direction, once again, in the late 20th century, movement inadequacy in creating a strong knowledge base for practice improvement, was challenged by the emerging approaches such as critical theory, feminism and postmodernism, and the probability of theoretical unity was undermined in this field. Perhaps the main reason for uncertainty passive position against these criticism is related to the uncertainty of educational administration degree in theoretical swing between independent domains of the field with other administration disciplines that mainly appeared by positivism assumptions.