The medicalization of current educational research and its effects on education policy and school reforms

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.