In a famous article, David Hargreaves argues that while educational research should learn from medicine to become more relevant to practical concerns, medicine itself is an art, in line with the practical epistemology of Donald Schön, who in turn is heavily influenced by the thoughts of John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Hargreaves, 1997; Schön, 1981). Even though this “art” aspect was partly misunderstood by some of his critics, Hargreaves’s text is a typical paper of the 1990s, when the frontiers in the evidence-based debate had not yet been drawn very sharply. It was still possible to mention art, Donald Schön, and evidence in the very same sentence. The concept of evidence seemed to be just a small, theoretically unimportant but practical supplement to the general educational research.
Uffe Juul Jensen (2007) also discusses evidence-based methodology in line with the thoughts of Wittgenstein, but in another way. He tries to prove that Archie Cochrane, one of the pioneers of evidence-based studies in medicine, is not claiming “evidence” to be statements of natural and universal data, but that Cochrane is working within a political and context-bound scheme: in other words, that evidence-based methodology is basically a political and cultural concept.
In a special 2008 issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education on evidence-based education, I simply cannot find any fundamental discussions of the relationship between education and evidence (Bridges, Smeyers, & Smith, 2008).
This was certainly surprising to me, considering the philosophical outlook of
the journal. A few years later, the Norwegian philosopher of education, Tone Kvernbekk, wrote in Educational Theory that the concept of evidence is a kind of battlefield without content – a battle of constructions (Kvernbekk, 2011, 2013).
Her response to this lack of foundation was to discuss the concept as a part of the philosophy of science, which in my view is a venerable activity in every respect, not least because the proponents of “evidence” often refer to what they call “modern science,” by which they mean, at least in a Danish context, either the sociology of Niklas Luhmann, who is sceptical about normativity and wishes to treat educational problems as a matter of technology, or they are referring to a very simple scientific methodology uncritically imported from the natural sciences. And neither approach relates to the theoretical tradition of applying the philosophy of science that has evolved since the appearance of the works of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.
Other researchers have criticised the concept of “evidence” as being too quantitatively oriented, and it is certainly true that sources of knowledge such as qualitative studies and practitioner evaluations are usually given low prior-ity in the epistemological hierarchy of the evidence movement (Moos, Kreisler, Hjort, Laursen & Braad 2005). However, at least in Denmark, the proponents of evidence-based practice actually seem quite happy with such an objection, because it enables them to reduce the whole field of criticism to an epistemological problem, that is, to a question of the relationship between quantitative or qualita-tive methods, leaving questions of educational goals and content to one side.
Kvernbekk thinks that it is possible to speak of evidence, if you keep in mind a number of reservations. She asks not only whether qualitative or quantitative methods may provide evidence, but whether evidence as a concept makes any epistemological sense. She argues that evidence “supports” instead of “bases” a practice, because a given pedagogical method is always “underdetermined” by evidence, as she describes it.1 Kvernbekk bases her argument on the philosophy of Stephen Toulmin, and in so doing she comes closer to the linguistic turn in mod-ern philosophy, taking her close to the approach of Hargreaves, mentioned above.
Leaving aside the question of the linguistic turn, by evoking this shift we end up talking less about teaching being based on evidence; instead, we might say that education may be evidence-informed. However, Kvernbekk does not question the fundamental relationship between education and evidence. She just wants to give a better epistemological justification for one of the concepts. In that sense, her research is an example of an approach that does not really deal with the questions raised here. I will return to the topics raised by Hargreaves, Jensen, and Kvernbekk at the end of this paper.
Apparently, the idea that evidence cannot “base” a practice, but can only
“support” or “inform” educational communication, leads to a less instrumental practice. This takes us to a position held by Per Fibæk Laursen, who believes that research should inform the professional practitioners with some general character-istics of the good teacher which may be taken into account in complex situations (Laursen, 2006). He talks about evidence-informed practices that relate not to spe-cific methods, but to a more general set of pedagogical guidelines. Laursen uses this correction to raise issues of the teacher’s personality as the key component of an evidence-informed practice. A similar evidence-informed approach may be found in much recent evaluation research. John Hattie and Andreas Helmke also mention an evidence-informed practice, that is, they indicate not particular methods, but rather, general approaches to teaching: for example, that teaching must be based on feedback and on clear goals (Hattie, 2009; Helmke, 2012).
In this article, I want to take the investigation of the relationship between evidence and education a step further – towards an exploration of whether the term “evidence” may be used together with the word “education” at all. I argue that the term “evidence-based education” has become a contradictory expres-sion, because one word, “evidence,” conflicts with the other, “education.” If this is correct, the conclusion should be that the more evidence-based are teaching methods, and the more evidence-informed the abstract principles of teaching, the less chance there is for education to take place. To my knowledge, the only person who makes similar claims which are also based on a conceptual analysis is the Dutch educational theorist, Gert Biesta, to whose work I will also refer in my analysis.
In what follows, I describe how evidence first arrives from another place, how it fertilises education, and how it then squeezes itself out and isolates itself from proper educational thought. In this process of isolation, it is delivered to the “inbox” of another dominion, the system of performativity. From this new location, it ungratefully attacks the original parent of knowledge and educational thinking. What was in the beginning only a small, everyday word that could func-tion in minor, practical situafunc-tions leaves both educafunc-tional theory and practice in a scattered and atomised state. Instead, “evidence” encounters researchers, consult-ants, and commercial interests, and municipalities and postmodern policy, finally entering upon a marriage with global technocratic interests that instrumentalise all normative and ontological aspects of education, looking purely for evidence of what is economically feasible in society. In this process, educational practice as such is forgotten. Finally, we even see increasingly many examples of the word
“evidence,” along with its new vocabulary, attacking education itself. Once that happens, evidence has established itself in new company, in a new discourse or a
new language game, which I call ”pure” education. And unfortunately, this new company is what Kvernbekk, Fibæk Laursen and many others forget to look for.