Has Education Research Become Too Polarized?

In his article in this month's Educational Leadership ("The Spectrum of Education Research"), Jeffrey R. Henig claims that many people mistrust the findings of education research because special interest groups often report such findings in a politicized fashion. "On politically contentious policy questions," Henig writes, "opposing cliques are ready and able to muster their own stable of researchers and findings to buttress their claims and challenge those cited by the other side. The seeming malleability of evidence reinforces cynicism."
 
Do you think education research has become too politicized? How do you decide which research to trust?

Comments

[James E. Mac Shane]

This article is a good example of the fundamental conflict that educational research is gradually bringing into our collective educational consciousness.
There is a basic objective for educational research that needs to be more clearly understood. The scientific conflicts and multitude of directions that the present research is experiencing is beginning to be understood as an important problem. Compromise is not a scientific solution. There needs to be objective scientific insights that are related to the conflict.

When the educational research goal is the natural intellectual development of each child's natural intellectual potential there are two basic natural developmental goals that need to be understood. The two are the natural internally motivated intellectual development and the natural externally motivated development systems.

Compromising is not a scientific solution. Scientific insight into the differences of the two basic perspectives is the necessary goal. The example in this paper can be understood is in the, "What Happens", section of paragraph two. Science is not about ideology it is about how an aspect of the physical universe really works.

The second sentence is about the difference between internally motivated and externally motivated education. The educational scientific research needs to be an objective search for the natural developments of each of these perspectives in order to understand
the direction that education needs to develop related to these two natural bases.

Scientific objectivity will need to focus on the natural development of children in both of these perspectives starting at birth thur adolescence. The comparative need is to go beyond the randomness that is used in the present research.

Ideological battles are not about scientific realities. They are about adult power.

Scientifically the most powerful natural and unavoidable, unconscious to conscious, learning process for all life in the universe is survival. This survival learning process needs to be understood as basic not primitive. Humanity has developed this consciousness to the highest level that we are aware of in the universe at this point in our history.

There is another important understanding that contains important insight related to the scientific problem. The educational base for the existing education system has been evolving to serve the survival needs of agrarian survival societies with an average life span of 30 to 35 years where human physical energy was the primary survival commodity. In the past two centuries science and the related technology development have gradually changed the survival need to intellectual.

The existing externally motivated system evolved as an elimination process because intellectual energy was seen as needed only from those individuals with the highest natural ability. Testing and grading evolved as the base for that elimination process.

In 1830 the U.S. assimilated that historic elimination process and strived to make it work for the intellectual development of all children. We have been struggling with that decision ever since.