Education Theory and Opinion

As Ken DeRosa at D-Ed Reckoning points out, there is far too much opinion in education and not enough theory.

Because education is not yet a mature profession, no one bothers to validate these crackpot opinions via the scientific process. Educators nonetheless often label these unsubstantiated guesses or hunches as theories. They are not.

Theories are not merely someone's opinion, even though that is how the word is often used in everyday speech. Even if that person appears to be an authority figure, their opinions do not magically become theories. In education, there are precious few authority figures at the K-12 level in any event. Most educators simply do not know how to induce learning in kids who are not part of the portion of the top of the bell curve which always has managed to learn no matter how poorly or superbly the material is presented to them. Educators have been much less successful in inducing real learning in the remainder of kids. Without this success in educating, there can be no authority. This is the difference between an opinion and a theory; a difference that is not understood by most educators.

A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from or is supported by experimental evidence. In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations that is predictive, logical and testable. Most opinions given by educators have either never been tested or have failed under somewhat rigorous experimental conditions. The result is that these opinions are not reliably predictive of what works in education.

I must disagree with Ken's assertion that education is not a mature profession, because it is a mature profession, in terms of time, in terms of acknowledgement of the profession by the general public. I would argue instead that teaching is not a learned profession.

In a learned profession, new ideas are tested, retested, examined, picked apart and put back in to practice. Such processes lead to proper theories, as Ken defined. A learned profession seeks above all predictability in outcome when common factors are present. Now of course, those that read this statement will say, all students are unique and each learns in a different way. To which I say hogwash.

I firmly believe only a finite number of learning processes exist. While some students may present an amalgamation of these processes, even the combination of processes is likewise finite and therefore predictable. While psychologists and neurologists may be able to tell you how a person learns, the fact of the matter is that current educational practices appear not to be geared to that knowledge. Much of our educational "theory" is based on a small segment of the learning bell curve, whether it be on the upper end of the curve or on the lower end of the curve. Rarely do any educational theories span the curve.

But Ken points out, although he may not realize it, a reason why we don't have any unified educational theories--we are afraid to be wrong.

There is no shame in being wrong. Scientists often have hypotheses that prove to be wrong. Science progresses slowly in fits and starts and through lots of trial and error. There is no shame in saying that you don't know something or how something works. What is shameful is professing that you do know something, when in fact you don't. What is especially shameful is when you do this by circumventing or perverting the scientific process. You don't to pass off your opinion as a theory when it is not. If you try to do this in most of the legitimate hard sciences and engineering fields, you will be recognized as a fraud by your peers and discredited. In education, however, most of the theorists are frauds. What we have is a bunch of foxes guarding the hen house. There is a critical mass of frauds in education that prevents the peer review process from working as it should to discredit failed or untested hypotheses being passed off as theory.

While there may be no shame in being wrong, there are consequences in education. I don't believe that educational theorists or opinionists or researches don't have the best interests of children at heart, and that may be their downfall.

To test educational theories reliably, you have to test them on real kids, in a real learning environment. Such a proposition produces fear that any errors in an education hypothesis may do some wrong, however slight. Unlike a car you can test until it breaks, it is a fundamentally different concept to test hypotheses upon a car. This fear may not even be on the part of the researchers themselves but a fear held by the parents of kids being tested. In short it is difficult to impose a scientific method upon children in the educational field because of the fear of long-term or even short-term damage.

These fears however, while real and probably founded in some past experience, need not deter us from trying to find a solution. But part of our problem, in addition to a fear of experimenting with children, is that we still don't know what we are trying to achieve. "An educated child" is an amorphous goal at best and from a practical standpoint impossible to define, measure and examine. Without an adequate definition of a goal, we could have a fabulous line-up of theories to test, but no end outcome to test them against. We can take 100 "educated" men and women and have 100 different examples of what an adequate educated person should be and 100 different answers to that question.

The definitional problem is not a simple abstraction, for it lies at the heart of predictability and replicability. An engineering problem, like a "safer" car, "a car that better protects passengers from injuries than cars currently available" can be mathematically expressed as having fewer injuries to occupants in the same number and type of crashes. Furthermore, the lay person and the expert can generally agree on what that means.

In education, we have neither an adequate definition of an edcuated child, nor do we have any sort of consensus between "experts" and "lay persons" as to what that means. So a teaching problem, for example, a better way to teach children to do mathematics, cannot be boiled as simply. What is the measurement we should use? Proficiency in terms of passing some state test? While an easily measureable outcome, the process may not be replicable across all students?

As a profession, teaching needs to take a few examples from other professions. Spending more time in peer review and after action sessions may lead to a better understanding of what works. From most of the teachers I know, either personally or through this blogging medium, I have learned that there is little regular interaction with other teachers where methods and means are examined and "dissected" for effectiveness. There is no systematic examination of student inputs and student outcomes that could lead to teh development of a field of knowledge around which a real theory of education can be developed. Therein lies the difference between teaching and other learned professions, critical self-evaluation of practice.

Not all the blame can be laid at the feet of teachers. If administration and school leadership did a better job of not only asking for, but demanding such a self-evaluative process, you might see a better development of the practice. The educaitonal theorists and opinionists, the so-called experts, rarely take such a step themselves and if they don't why should lay persons place any faith in their words.