For several years now the flavour of the month, so to speak, in education circles has been neuroscience. I tend to be rather sceptical of anything that smacks of a panacea, whether that is in the sense of a cure for all ills or, as in this case, an approach. I suppose one might call this a Marxist approach — not Karl, but Groucho, who refused to join any club that would have someone like him as a member.
This is not a new departure for me. In 2014 I was happy to publish a guest article called Neurodeterminism As An Antidote To Common Sense? I Doubt It! And, more recently, in my review of Teachers vs Tech? I wrote:
“...much of the research drawn upon lies in the field of neuroscience, and I have to say that I remain sceptical about its efficacy. That is in no small part because we keep discovering that the things we thought we knew about the workings of the brain turned out to be working assumptions. I’m afraid I can’t give you any examples, except to say that some of the psychology books I studied when I was younger are now regarded as almost akin to fiction. Ditto the biology books I used to find out how the brain works. So I can’t help thinking: will studies carried out in a few years’ time disprove, or at least call into doubt, a lot of the current revelations in that field?”
I feel somewhat vindicated by the statistic apparently cited in Science Fictions that 10% of studies in neuroscience were found to be flawed. (I say “apparently” because I haven’t read the book myself yet.) I realise that the corollary of this finding is that 90% of the studies were not flawed, but how does the average teacher know which ones they are?
Add to the problem of flawed research the fact that the research is often reported very poorly (see Read All About It: What Does The Research REALLY Say?), and it’s very difficult to know what to believe unless you go to the trouble of verifying it for yourself.
Anyway, it seems to me that this book is very timely, given all the conflicting evidence regarding Covid-19 at the moment. Its full title is Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, and it is not concerned specifically with education from what I’ve read about it, but it sounds like a useful book to consult. Also, as I said earlier, I haven’t read it yet (give me a chance: it was only published on 16 July 2020), and for all I know it may be unreadable rubbish, so caveat emptor!
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