Saturday, September 17, 2011

Education is not science!

This piece evolved from a comment on a blog piece here 

As some one moving from a background as a computational chemist into education there has been a very significant culture change.
Within science, we are used to a solution space with one of a few optimal solutions. We believe in the concept of an objective truth which can, in priciple, for the most part, be established by a series of reproducable experimental tests.
Education is different, its like art:  There is no best picture, there are a load of different pictures, some of which need a lot of theory to make them work, some of which just look good.  No picture appeals to every one, though some of them can be condemned by just about every one as being a load of crap.  And, at the high end there's a specialized group of art critics and artists who practice in little specialized bubbles where they play glass bead games with each other. 

Its not a science, and we don't have educational engineering as a specialty yet.

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