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.