On scientism
Why a medical model of education is further off than we think
I was recently skimming through my backlog of magazines published by my English Teachers’ professional org when I saw what I thought was a kind of strange editorial piece, given the audience. I feel like a bad scholar for not being able to cite it and I didn’t think much of it at the time but the piece warned about the threat of a medical model in education. You know, experimenting, seeing what works and what doesn’t, being accountable for the serious responsibility of education.
For those of you who haven’t really thought about scientism in education - I hadn’t till fairly recently - the definition is “excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques.” I wondered why this would be addressed as a threat, especially in English. Remember that until fairly recently, teachers have routinely asked students to guess instead of decode words. As I’ve written about here, education academics often don’t have a huge amount to do with the learning or reading scientists. I did wonder how and why we are getting to a point of excess. Is scientific belief a credible threat in education? And if not, where does this fear come from?
I think we are far from scientism dominating the discourse in education. It’s very hard to shift teacher beliefs and values, as Vivianne Robinson notes. There is no mention of evidence based practice in the AITSL teaching standards. Publication bias is still rife in education, meaning that the wholesale adoption of Hattie’s meta-analyses is plagued with problems. We still know very little about what we shouldn’t be doing in the classroom. Even science itself is going the way of postmodern theory, with some facilities assigning treatments on the basis of race. If anything, science and evidence are under threat.
I looked to a recent national English teaching conference program to see what the balance of priorities really was in my industry. I’m using a rough implement here, but there are 18 mentions of evidence; 63 mentions of diversity; 87 ‘multi’ prefixes - think multi/mode/media; and 155 references to the digital world. I think we can see where the emphasis lies. Diversity, newness and innovation dominate, much like the NSW Syllabus. And of course there is the usual pluralistic, relativistic use of language so common in postmodern academia - literacies, knowledges and pedagogies and the like. It’s not an industry prone to singular ideas about what works.
So I do wonder why, in an industry that spends literal months on assessing learning each year, the idea of assessing pedagogical efficacy is seen as such a threat. I would love to know what you think.