Luhmann, they perceive the system of science as the only place where truth is established. And as a pedagogical practice must be based on knowledge, it must therefore find its knowledge in such strangely detached versions of science. In this logical process, practice is emptied of truth and emptied of content and evidence, and knowledge is connected to a narrow conception of research (“What works?”
rather than “What is going on?”) in which practice and values are underrated.
Thus the hierarchy that prioritises research over practice is reinforced, and is then radically tilted compared to the decentralised and socially oriented relation-ship between theories of learning and educational research that characterised the 1990s and even earlier. In the light of the concept of evidence, educational practices are not a matter of culture, virtue, or politics.
Suddenly, educational practice is submissive to evidence-based research.
This kind of research is completely different from educational practice itself, and actually also something other than science understood as an activity dealing with questions of “What is going on?” Thereby, practice is reduced to the simple application of evidence-based rules, or as structural passages for enhancing test scores; and educational research becomes a neutral, second-order theory, quite different to science proper.
In order to base a practice in evidence, you have to detach the method from the content, from context, and from the educational purpose of education. Other-wise you cannot isolate the method and compare the effect in different contexts.
However, taking “method” out of the conceptual, cultural, and historical contexts in which it must function and has been developed is equivalent to taking it out of education itself. In this way, the lonely “evidence” finds itself joined in mar-riage to a very narrow understanding of research that was inspired by American health research and by distinctions based in systems theory. Thus fertilised, the evidence-based method may return to all the “impure,” swampy, and complex reality where, as a kind of hostile foreigner, it may spread, seemingly as a neutral object and as an independent cell that is capable of changing cultural processes, and atomising educational tradition itself.
systems of purpose: that is, by national and global ranking systems, the interests of global corporations, and the energetic demands of global capitalism.
Of course, from a philosophical point of view, almost everybody would argue that, in educational contexts, the relationship between content, method and goals is a mutually constitutive relationship. But such an internal and swampy con-nectedness among method, subject matter, aims and culture cannot work within the context of evidence-based methodology, as I have just shown. For, in the same way as the method necessarily must be separated from the subject matter, the method is also detached from the qualitative and philosophical purposes of education. Otherwise it will be impossible to determine how much one method or another contributes to the achievement of any given policy target. So the young system, the small and lonely system of “evidence and its application,” must attend a social dating site, to find a new educational aim. And what does this young system find? Who has aims and goals that “the method and its application” can help to achieve?
The method and its application must act in relation to something measurable, otherwise the evidence – the relationship between method and effect – cannot be established, and in these years, this “something” is the national and global rank-ings (but in ten years’ time, it may be something else). Thus evidence is enrolled in a brand new system of aims that works removed from our cultural, historical, or political memory. The concept of evidence becomes a part of an international hegemony in which rankings are supposed to provide information to the global marketplace, helping big business to decide how to move in its strategic opera-tions. Thus evidence becomes a member of a family of concepts surrounding and aiding the processes of global capitalism. It is not about giving schools a knowl-edge base, and it is not about preparation for life, or for businesses and crafts, for that matter. It is about serving the global economy. That is why Ove Kaj Pedersen, in his book The Competition State, says the following about the educational ideal of the new school laws in Denmark:
For the first time in more than 160 years of school history, the school does not have as its primary task the formation of the individual as a citizen or a member of a democracy, but instead, the instruction of the pupil as a “soldier” in the competi-tion among nacompeti-tions. The school must now primarily promote a nocompeti-tion of individual competition, and is only secondarily based on the ideals of a more democratic society. (Pedersen, 2011, p. 172, my translation)
Thus evidence has taken the final step from being a little word that can be used in the daily grind, to taking its place in a technocratic hegemony that is subject to the constant fluctuations of new global markets. I have summarised the whole
system of aims, and the roles of research and education within it, in the table below, under the heading “pure” education, which may be defined as the idea that learning, method, aim, and culture may be identified in isolation from one another, and afterwards can be reconnected with various structures of causality (Rømer, Tanggaard & Brinkmann, 2011).
On the other hand, “impure” education is the vocabulary of educational thought proper, which searches for the essence and interrelatedness of educational concepts and practice. I do not have the space to explain all these elements. I hope that, in the light of what I have just said, the overall meaning is clear.
System of educational aims
Institutional level
“Pure” education “Impure” education
Global policy Global business, using rankings strategically
World citizenship, multiculturalism Global education International rankings
(PISA)
Critique, enlightenment, and politics
National policy/educa-tion
System of operative targets and evaluations;
systems of contracts and benchmarking. National rankings
Democracy, solidarity, and scientific knowledge
University Constructing evidence –
‘what works?’
Investigating the struc-ture of reality – ‘what is going on?’
University College Communication and training
Concerning evidence based methodsreflec-tion.
Teacher education based on philosophies of civil society
Schools The learning expert
im-plements the evidence-based method
Traditions, character, virtue,
Bildung, knowledge By virtue of being a part of this divide, our normal educational vocabulary is rejected as a kind of “impurity”; it must fight for survival in small niches, trying
to pick up elements lost from various syntheses that are left scattered by the visit of “evidence,” leaving education as an “impure” education. In its place, we get a language of “pure” education that often forgets, or outright excludes, the concepts of “impure” education. Sometimes the concepts mentioned under the heading “im-pure” education are used as strategic passages for the system of ““im-pure” education.
This happens, for example, when a high score on a “democracy ranking” is used to promote national competitiveness. Such instrumentalisation of “democracy”
means, of course, that democracy will only last as long as it is effective for the system of “pure“ education.