Evidence-based education. Scientific dangers and political advantages

Abstract

This paper argues that one of the dangers of the new democracies, whose complexity has increased unprecedentedly in modern societies, is, according to Innerarity (2020), their simplification. One characteristic of these modern and complex democracies is what the same author calls dataism, which consists of linking quantification with truth, relating it to a false idea of objectivity and misleading certainty that prevents a thorough knowledge of reality, which would allow decisions to be made in a way that is more in line with the real problems. Faced with the constant problems and complexities of societies, this dataism produces a demand for data in order to legitimise political decision-making, linking it to a fallacious idea of science. It is in this context that evidence-based education and research have become relevant. The problem is that this perspective is based on very different assumptions from those that epistemologically constitute education as a discipline of knowledge. Therefore, this evidentialist perspective is forced, on the one hand, to assume what Wrigley (2019) calls reductionisms in order to deploy its theories and research; on the other hand, to understand education as a technical matter, an educational vision that already had its time of splendour and that seemed to have been overcome precisely because it did not offer quality answers to classroom practices. Our approach is that, far from an honest political concern for improving education, the underlying idea is the creation of political narratives that give legitimacy to their policies. Nothing better in the age of dataism than to use data and evidence-based languages to connect with mental frameworks of objectivity, truth or science, which give legitimacy to these narratives.

Keywords: evidence-based education, democracy, reductionism, science, education policy