Letters to the Editor of School Choices

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A Reader's Critique (Part 4)
With a Response from the Author

Andrew,

One more thought: I think we also disagree profoundly about the epistemological character of social science research. It's my belief after many years of studying social science research and some experience as a researcher that the vast majority of such research, and particularly research conducted in the field of education, is very limited in its ability to describe "truth."

Most education researchers who make claims about schools, curriculum, instruction, and so on conduct studies that go on for very short periods of time and ignore the historicity of human experience. For example, most studies of reading instruction follow students for weeks or months; they tend only to look at one variable. I believe that the world of human events is far more complex than this kind of research tool and process can address.

Very few studies follow children for years. Very few studies track multiple variables. This is largely why we've had at least fifty years of social science research now, and yet one can find studies to support most ideological positions.

Best wishes,
David

The Author's Reply

Season's Greetings, David

You say that the vast majority of social science research does a poor job of getting at truth, and your implication seems to be that arguments based on social science research are therefore of very modest value, if not utterly worthless.

I agree with your first point. In particular, the vast majority of education research is genuinely shocking in its idiocies, irrelevancies, non-sequiturs, defective research designs, and invalid conclusions. However, not all the research is that bad, and some of it is refreshingly good. In the five years I researched Market Education I made an effort to weed out the good from the bad. I read the abstracts, summaries, and introductions to many thousands of books and papers, seriously consulted between 3,000 and 5,000 of them, and selected citations from 550 or so of what I concluded to be the best sources. There are sophisticated multi-year studies out there, and I have used them whenever they were available.

[ Digression on absolute truth ] But, as you said, even the best social science research is limited in its ability to describe truth. The same can be said of hard science research, though admittedly to a lesser degree. I agree with Karl Popper's argument that induction, the essence of the "reproducibility" component of the scientific method, cannot establish absolute truth. The fact that something holds true ten, one hundred, or one thousand times in a row is no guarantee that it will hold true on the 1001st iteration. So, though I think it extremely likely that there is an absolute reality, I think that our understanding can only approximate that reality--we cannot know reality absolutely by any intellectual strategy yet developed.

Nevertheless, It is my view that, despite its flaws, the body of social science research on which I have relied is the best tool we have for forming conclusions about how to organize education in the service of families. I have yet to discover or to be presented with any alternative body of knowledge that has a better claim to truth detection in this field.

So, while my tools are admittedly imperfect, they are the best tools available for the job. Rather than sitting on my hands and waiting for the state of the art in social science to make a quantum epistemological leap, I have done the best I could with the tools at my disposal.

I would be delighted if better tools were to come along.

Cheers, Andrew

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