The idea that education should be or become an evidence-based profession has been around for several decades and is still gaining in popularity in many countries around the world. The idea of evidence-based practice emerged in the field of medicine as a way to understand what clinical judgment actually is and what the resources for such judgments are or ought to be.

From a meaningful idea – namely, to take into consideration lessons from elsewhere and the past when judging about how to act in this concrete situation, with this particular patient with this particular medical and personal history, under these particular circumstances, also bearing in mind the available resources and infrastructure (it does, after all, make a difference whether medicine takes place in the high-tech environment of a well-resourced academic hospital or somewhere in the bush) – it has turned, rather quickly in my view, to the rather simplistic belief that large-scale randomised control trials can identify which medical interventions have efficacy – or in the lingo: ‘work’ – and which do not.

The logic of operation

What is simplistic and unfortunate here, is that the connection between evidence and judgment – and of evidence understood as ‘lessons from elsewhere and from the past’ – has been severed, and that the discussion has moved ‘full speed ahead’ to the very blunt logic of the testing of medicinal drugs. Now, for the testing of the efficacy of medicinal drugs, this logic is absolutely fine. After all, because we can assume that the efficacy of medicinal drugs is causal, it means that if there is a drug that claims to relieve certain kinds of headaches, we should be able to see, across a sufficiently large sample of people with the particular kind of headache, that the drug offers sufficient relief, which also means that we should ensure ourselves that it is the drug that is the cause of the relief, and not some other factor, and definitely not the patient’s belief in the efficacy of the drug (because in that case it would be a waste of money to have the drug in the first place). Such knowledge – although it is far narrower than the wide range of meaningful lessons from elsewhere and from the past that clinicians should draw upon – can be helpful in medical practice, bearing in mind Sackett’s insistence that they ask whether ‘the patients in this trial [are] sufficiently similar to the patient in front of me’ because it is only then ‘that I can safely apply the findings in this case,’ but ‘if not, piss on it’ (quoted in McKnight & Morgan 2019, p. 655).

‘Being a student is not a disease, teaching is not a drug, and education is not a cure.’

While there may be problems for medical practice itself – and these have been documented extensively – the real concern I have is that this logic has been transplanted to the domain of education, without asking whether the way in which education ‘works’ in any meaningful way resembles the way in which medicinal drugs interact with physical bodies and their chemistry. The answer to this question is of course ‘no.’ Being a student is not a disease, teaching is not a drug, and education is not a cure. The practice of education is an entirely different one where different things are at stake – our ambition is to educate students so that they can lead their own personal and professional lives in meaningful, responsible and thoughtful ways – and where the ‘logic of operation’ is not one of interventions upon objects but of communication between subjects (see also Biesta, 2023).

Students are not stimulus-response machines that need to get the right trigger in order to produce the right outcome. Students are thoughtful human beings, albeit human beings on a journey towards more, better and deeper thoughtfulness, who will respond to what teachers present reflectively rather than reactively. And for this to happen, teachers employ the tools of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment judiciously and creatively, always with the ambition to reach the student, to touch the student and, through this, encourage students towards what in German is called ‘Selbsttätigkeit’, which is perhaps best translated as thoughtful and responsible self-activity (see Benner, 2015).

False cure of an evidence-informed approach

Some think that the limitations of the ‘medical model’ for education can be overcome if we move from evidence-based to evidence-informed approaches. But this, in my view, is a serious mistake. After all, the problem with the usefulness of the medical model does not lie in how it relates to the judgment of individual teachers – if, that is, they are still allowed to exercise such judgment, which is increasingly being curtailed in many countries. The problem lies in the way in which in the available ‘evidence’ the way in which education itself operates is being understood (or actually: misunderstood). To put it simply: an enormous amount of research that generates the alleged evidence-base for education constructs education itself as a black box. It looks at what goes ‘in’ on one end and what comes ‘out’ – for example in terms of measurable student achievement or attainment – at the other end and, based on this, suggests which ‘interventions’ (itself a notion that fits the image of the black box well) are most likely to generate or produce particular ‘outcomes’.

Conclusion

It is not just that as long as the black box remains closed and research just looks at the outside without considering all the important, difficult, communicative and interactive work that goes on on the inside, that it will do very little in enhancing the thoughtfulness with which teachers engage with their students. There is the even greater danger that rather than insights from research informing judgment and decision-making in educational practice, educational practices are forced to change in such ways that the available evidence can work (sometimes referred to in rather euphemistic terms as ‘fidelity to the programme’). Research then becomes a distortion of educational practice (Biesta, 2024), rather than an avenue for enhancing the practice and supporting the practitioners. That is already an important reason why the black box of evidence needs to be opened, sooner rather than later.

References

Biesta, G. (2023). Outline of a theory of teaching: What teaching is, what it is for, how it works, and why it requires artistry. In A.-K. Praetorius & C. Y. Charalambous (Eds.), Theorizing teaching: Current status and open issues (pp. 253–280). Springer.

Biesta, G. (2024). Educational research and the distortion of educational practice. In J. Drerup, N. Goddertz, R. Mattig, W. Thole, & U. Uhlendorff (Eds.), Bildungsforschung: Erziehungswissenschaftliche Perspektiven (pp. 29–43). J.B. Metzler.

Benner, D. (2015). Allgemeine pädagogik [General theory of education] (8th edn). Juventa.

McKnight, L., & Morgan, A. (2019). A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine. Journal of Education Policy, 35(5), 648–664. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2019.1578902