When is a profession not a profession?

I'm now "reading" Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up, edited by Jelmer Evers and René Kneyber. The book is a collection of articles by many different authors and I am here to tell you that it contains a lot of words. I did, however, find a couple of articles to be of interest. Today, I will be excerpting from "The Polite Revolution in Research and Education" by Tom Bennett.

Mr. Bennett is a long-time teacher in the UK who got fed up with the "prescribed orthodoxy" - for example, mandatory group work, Brain Gym, and much more, all backed by "the great superstructures of the teaching establishments, the universities, the training colleges, the faculties of education". Except that the prescribed orthdoxy didn't work. So then Mr. Bennet took a sabbatical and used the time "to research, among other things, the origins of the research that permeated the profession. The personal impact was enormous". Mr. Bennett "discovered very quickly indeed that a great deal of educational research was simply poorly diguised advocacy, dressed in the gown of authority".

"But one could say this of any field. What separated this research from poor research in other areas and fields was an effect that is perhaps uniquely concomitant to the social sciences, as opposed to the natural sciences. In the latter, empirical science has developed an established, uncoontroversial series of methodologies that demand the participant operate within established parameters necessary to qualify as valid research. It's far from perfect, nor does it claim to be perfect, but its efficacy is evident every time one turns on a mobile phone or boards a plane. The social sciences, however, frequently fail to meet the standard of verification or replicability that we find in chemistry or physics, due, in the main, to the inherent problems of comparable controls in human agents. Issues of unpredictability, high casual density and a host of ethical issues, make studying the human a very different practice to studying the inert and relatively malleable subject of brute matter.

"A blunt example will serve as an outline of where these magisterials diverge: were I to make a chemical claim that water will boil at 100 degrees centigrade, that claim can be assessed by a simple test - heating it to that temperature and observing the outcome. I can then check that my claim is sound by changing other variables such as position, height, air pressure, and so on, to see if they have any impact on my claim (and we find that some of them do). Verification can be fine tuned in this way. The process can be easily repeated by other parties, and their data can be compared to mine.

"In the social sciences, this doesn't follow. If I make (again, a very blunt example, for demonstration purposes) the claim that 'a threat of gunfire will make people flee', then I encounter enormous difficultoes. For a start, while many will do so, many will not; soldiers, for example. Deaf people. The suicidal. The very brave or indeed stupid. There are so many factors that we struggle to determine which ones are relevant or not....

"Which doesn't mean that social sciences are inherently useless or uninteresting. But it makes it vital to remember that the outcomes of social scientific research require far higher levels of caution and awareness of context and variables before conclusions are inexpertly or hastily drawn....

"Which is where the dysfunctional releationship between research and education emerges and how it is allowed to thrive. The situation of educational research is similar to that of medicine in the 15th century, when anyone could claim almost anything, and wonder cures, miracle pills, faith healing, and snake oil were not only available, but mainstream. In this context, Brain Gym is considered as reasonable an intervention as after-school revision classes; Thinking Hats as credible as textbooks. When research can justify anything, anything is justifiable. Teachers' roles in this are non-existent. They serve only to serve the system, slaves to whatever policy, intervention or methodology is preferred by line management and educational panjandrums."

Mr. Bennett has started a movement to reprofessionalize the teaching profession. To learn more, click here.

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