A Study On Sergiovanni's Moral Leadership

After a long period of study on the problem of educational leadership, American contemporary educational administrator Thomas J. Sergiovanni has brought forward Moral Leadership in Schools. This dissertation aims to provide a reference for the theory and practice of educational administration in our country through a systematic review and criticism on Sergiovanni's Moral Leadership.Sergiovanni is the representative scholar of contemporary non-mainstream subjectivism in educational administration. Although he was strictly trained under the western traditional paradigm of logical positivism, he finally turned to be a subjectivist and his academic thought was closely related with his early experiences, current practice and the development of contemporary social science. In the discussion of the origins of his thoughts, this dissertation points out that the social-historical and theoretical background of Sergiovanni's thought lies in the development of contemporary American society, the reformation of education, the dissemination of the tendency of contemporary western humanistic philosophic thoughts and the evolvement of the study of leadership problem in the development of administration. Among all these, the masterpieces of some contemporary philosophic social scientists and critical theorists of educational administration gave the most direct revelation to the formation of Moral Leadership.Sergiovanni gave up logical positivism in the late 1970s and formed critical theoretical style. The possibility for Moral Leadership to be the base of educational leadership theory has been indicated in his early works about the instrumentalism criticism of educational leadership and the study on the subjective consciousness of educational administration. What runs through in his early works is the change from the traditional scientific leadership theory to the direction of value theory, and what accompanies with this change is his reflection on traditional leadership theory, the establishment of subjective epistemology and a full statement about "excellent" school leadership strategy, leadership principles and leadership steps. His early thoughts show that he has turned to the way of a subjectivist from a positivist.In 1990s, Sergiovanni gradually made out the thought of Moral Leadership. Symbolized by 《Moral Leadership: Getting to the Heart of School Improvement》, he began to demonstrate systematically to place moral leadership to the core of school leadership. He points out that at present the practice of leadership depends too much...