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Sunday, February 04, 2007

As my flatmate and my down-stairs neighbor are both recovering teachers, I tend to hear about things going on in education in general. One of the things that has struck me most about this talk is the problem of empirical research in education. It seems that way back in the mists of time education researchers decided that they were a "social science" (I put it in scare quotes for a reason which I will talk about another time) and thus must use a quantitative method to arrive at the best way to educate people. Now, I have to tell you that I have a very hard time believing that you can have reproducible results out of children.

What seems to me to have happened is that parents, seeing that they are using "scientific method" (or basically misunderstanding that not all numbers are science), thought that if they put their children in school, they will come out of that school perfectly educated. This, of course, will never happen. So, I think, in a way, educational researchers or politicians (the educational researchers' pay masters) have misrepresented what they do to the public. No wonder parents become so angry at schools.


posted by Chris  #4:51 PM | 0 comments |