Mathematics and Educational Administration

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the topic of how mathematics might be more efficiently used in educational administration. The position taken here is that mathematics is a branch of philosophy whose subject matter is a set of abstract entities and identified operational rules. It is a vocabulary of symbols that can be used to label objects and, more importantly, a set of grammatical rules for using the vocabulary. The paper begins with a review of some recent developments reported in the social science literature on the uses of mathematics in political science, sociology and economics, and ends with some illustrations of how these developments could lead to similar applications in both the practice and theory domains of educational administration.