The Unspoken Side of Academic Textbooks on School Management

Every year, numerous academic textbooks on school management are published in Iran, yet only a small number of them are well received by academics. A common research method to analyze the content of these popular textbooks is content analysis which identify only the overt messages of the textbooks. However, every textbooks have also a covert massages that may attract such a wide audiences too. Therefore, the unspoken side of the textbooks is as important as the spoken side. Thus, two most popular and frequently published textbooks in the field of school management, namely, ‘An Introduction to Educational Management’, which has been republished 45 times, and ‘Theoretical Foundations and Principles of Educational Management’, which has been republished 25 times, were selected and analyzed through symptomatic reading. The results showed that the narration of these two books is based on a rational paradigm which views schools as an integrated and coordinated entities but neglects the game of power that always accompanied by contradiction and tension. Because to preserve of rational rhetoric, the textbooks rely on logic-based principles and only some theories are discussed in the books that are silent about power dynamics. Alagheband’s narration (the author of the books) tends to leave everything, related to ‘power dynamics’, unspoken. This narration would attract two groups of audiences; the first group is schools actors and other practitioners of educational system that are tired of school contradictions and its unfair world. Therefore, rational paradigm which remain unspoken on the game of power acts like as a remedy to tiredness and perceived unfairness. The second group is some educators concerned with the educability of educational management knowledge. They need to simplify the concepts of and detoxify educational management complexities and inconveniences accordingly.