Science, moral authority and the implications for education

Starting back to a new term and prepping for the classroom myself and read this latest post from Frank Furedi in Spiked

• At a time when society finds it hard to provide compelling answers to the problems that people face, the realm of science is being plundered in search of moral authority.
• Evidence-based education, which is intimately linked to the ‘what works’ culture, leads to a form of processed education. Processed education is dominated by an instrumentalism that threatens to reduce education to a technique and teaching to a technical intervention.
• Not only does the quest for an evidence base distract educators from teaching and from confronting challenges - it also doesn’t work, even in its own terms. 

Two things are inter-related here: the use of science to infer moral, political authority within decision making and the implied corollary that education not embracing the presumptive process is deficient. Furedi issues an important warning against both trends but is particularly worried about the reductionist effect that a reliance upon science (especially normative science and post-normal science) invokes within education. 

Teaching should be the facilitation of discovery and personal understanding of experience, not the imposed accreditation in approved thought, paradigms or ideology.