The Limits of Educational Research: Why Most Research and Grand Plans in Education Are Futile and Wasteful

ABSTRACT

For most educators today, the mounting of new educational programs without prior empirical research and rational planning is unthinkable. How else (it may be asked rhetorically) can one reliably determine the outcomes of such programs or control their development?

This approach to programming however is questionable. An analysis of some of the major programs developed in the United States and Canada over the past five decades reveals that there has always been a serious discrepancy between what is expected to happen as a result of implementing tested procedures or “rational” programs and what actually happens in practice. The most notable disaster in my view has been the development of the New Curriculum in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Similarly, programs meant to stimulate moral development, cognitive growth, good citizenship, and the like rarely produce positive results.

The question arises, “How can these limitations of educational research and planning be explained?” Drawing on my recent work The Limits of Reason (1992), I show that there is an unavoidable indeterminacy infecting all research and rational planning that makes it impossible to anticipate, let alone control, desired outcomes in society in general and in education in particular. The very method one uses, for example, cannot be considered in the research, although it affects the results of the research. Nor can the existence of institutions in which the program is present, or the way language changes social reality, be considered, yet they clearly affect research findings. Because of these and other factors engendering indeterminacy, empirical research and rational planning have limited reliability, and hence are risky at best, futile at worst.