The medicalization of current educational research and its effects on education policy and school reforms

Abstract

This paper starts from the assumption of the emergence of an educationalized culture over the last 200 years according to which perceived social problems are translated into educational challenges. As a result, both educational institutions and educational research grew, and educational policy resulted from negotiations between professionals, researchers, and policy makers. The paper argues that specific experiences in the Second World War triggered a fundamental shift in the social and cultural role of academia, leading up to a technocratic culture characterized by confidence in experts rather than in practicing professionals (i.e., teachers and administrators). In this technocratic shift, first a technological system of reasoning emerged, and it was then replaced by a medical “paradigm.” The new paradigm led to a medicalization of social research, in which a particular organistic understanding of the social reality is taken for granted and research is conducted under the mostly undiscussed premises of this particular understanding. The result is that despite the increased importance of research in general, this expertocratic and medical shift of social research led to a massive reduction in reform opportunities by depriving the reform stakeholders of a broad range of education research, professional experience, common sense, and political deliberation.

Keywords:

• medicalization
• evidence-based
• education research
• education policy
• expertise
• intervention studies
• democracy

Notes

1. This is a revised version of a paper presented at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York, on 1 April 2014, and at the Research Library for the History of Education in Berlin, Germany, on 11 December 2013, and at the international conference “Critical analyses of educational reforms” in Stockholm, on 18 September 2013. I thank Inès Dussel for her helpful comments on the occasion of the Stockholm conference.

2. I use “paradgim” in quotation marks because the way I use it differs to some degree from Thomas Kuhn's use. Whereas Kuhn describes paradigms as inflexible and not in mutual interdependency with the theories but as “disciplinary matrix” (Kuhn, 1977, p. 319), I emphasize their function more fundamentally as systems of reasoning. This way, it more closely resembles what Foucault would call dispositif, developed already in his inaugural lecture of 1970 (Foucault, 1970/1972).

3. The proximity of Bertalanffy's “general systems theory” to the feedback loops described in Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (Wiener, 1948), published in the same time period, is evident. Wiener developed his analysis on “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (subtitle of the book) in the intersection of biology and technology at Harvard Medical School, and summarized their collaborative research during war time with physicists, medical scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians. This research program had also been initiated by Vannevar Bush during the war.

4. The phenomenon of medicalization of society is older, of course, and can be traced back to the nineteenth century. An indicator of this transformation may be seen in the rising public and academic interest in hygiene, a movement that at least in France was congenially absorbed by the discoveries of Louis Pasteur, resulting in the process of the Pasteurization of France (Latour, 1984/1988). The popular media reacted immediately by disseminating (medical) results of research to the broad public, creating a medicalized discourse on health, nutrition, posture, and use of time heading to an effective “productivization” of the human body. In this context, school healthcare with its focus on hygiene became more and more a “normal” element of school life, but without fundamentally changing the taken-for-granted idealistic doctrines of education.

5. The ESF was founded in 1974 as an independent, non-governmental, non-profit organization. It facilitates cooperation and collaboration in European research and development, European science policy, and science strategy and has an annual budget of over 50 million €.

6. A broader discussion of Prenzel's paper is found in “Diskussion, Die Zukunft der Bildungsforschung” (Discussion: The Future of Education Research) in Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie, 2/2010, pp. 96–114.

7. There are no doubts that these negotiations were always conducted in specific power relations, too, and not in democratic paradises. But they nevertheless included more different actors than today's policy of “output steering” does, especially in those political cultures with a strong tradition of local participation.