Is Educational Research Really Useful?

What is educational research?

First, every type of research has the potential to shed light on issues in society. But, today, we are focusing on educational research. 

I have chosen to define educational research as an investigation or exploration into issues of concern in education in specific societies with a view to bringing about some kind of change in the education systems of these specific societies to benefit those who take advantage of or will take advantage of education in these specific societies. The results of this investigation or exploration may be used for cross-cultural comparisons. 

However, the overarching goal of educational research, as I see it, is to devise a system of education that reflects the ideals and realities of those to whom this education is dispensed. "The powers that be" who devise these systems hope that the recipients of the education that they have designed will exhibit certain kinds of behaviours that are advantageous to themselves and to society as a whole, considering the expectations that many societies have of education.

We see issues in education being explored by researchers such as educational attainment, bullying, social class and impact on learning, gender in education and so on. These are issues worthy of exploration in every context. But if these issues are explored in the British society, the American society or societies in Europe or Asia or Africa, should people in the Caribbean, for example, uncritically accept the findings of these researchers and use them to create educational policies for their societies? I think not.

All societies are not the same, and will not become the same no matter what globalisation "experts" believe. Cultures will borrow material things from each other – food, clothing, music, architectural designs and technology – for example. However, ideas will take much longer to be diffused than expected. And ideas are at the core of culture, ideas about what is good and right and acceptable in that society.
What is society?
In 1987, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher challenged the intellectuals and the public at large to think seriously about the notion of society. In an interview with Woman’s Own, a British magazine, in responding to a question, she said that [people] “are casting their problems on society [and asked] who is society?” She answered her question by asserting that “[t]here is no such thing! There are individual men and women and ... there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first”.  

The headlines in the news media shouted that the Prime Minister said there was no such thing as society, which she did say. However, in clarifying her statement in 1988, she made the point that when there is need for action [in society] we tend to call on society to take action. We tend to lose sight of the fact that we as individuals are society. Society, therefore,  is more than a concept. 

Society is loosely, as I learnt in school a very long time ago, a group of people who occupy a particular geographical space and share a culture. Today, the idea of society has been extended beyond the geographical. However, my focus here is on the geographical. I believe that we need to realise that it is our actions that create the successes that we enjoy in our geographical spaces and the failures that we decry in these spaces. Also, it is our actions that will create future successes and failures.

Implication for Education
We, in our geographical spaces, need to focus our attention on actions that will improve our output from our education systems. It is our duty to isolate the specific, troublesome issues relating to education in our spaces, use whatever methodologies we have at our disposal to delve deeply into these issues, identify possible solutions and use our research findings as blueprints to solve our problems. This kind of educational research is, indeed, useful, the kind that promises solutions to problems in the education systems of specific societies based on an investigation or exploration of the issues of concern to these specific societies, and with participants who inhabit the educational spaces in these specific societies. 

Borrowing policy ideas from elsewhere is not necessarily a bad thing, unless we who do the borrowing refuse to adapt the ideas that we borrow to fit the realities of our education systems. We need to understand that every society has differences that run the gamut of social life so we should not assume that once some research is done in "foreign" contexts on issues in which we have an interest, it is all good and well for us to start to reconstruct our education systems with these findings as our guide.