The Veneer of Science

Death is the end. All those life-prolonging activities you’re engaged in are meaningless, especially if they are faddish. This sounds like an old story from a Solomon-style Teacher who wrote a book called Ecclesiastes. It’s also the main story of Natural Causes, a new book by Barbara Ehrenreich (of Nickled and Dimed fame). It’s a very quick read and full of Ehrenreich’s razor-sharp humor and polemics. The stronger and more interesting parts of the book relate to medicine and biology; Ehrenreich has a strong background and is insightful in her analysis. The book is weaker as she opines outside her field; I started to skim when her prose started to sound like ranting.

One part of the book that resonated strongly with me was her discussion of changes in the field of medicine with the advance of technology. Ehrenreich’s main point: The advancement of medical technology and biochemical analysis is one cause of additional medical testing. Let’s do a CT scan on an MRI to see what’s going on inside. Perhaps a colonoscopy. Let’s check the bloodwork. The patient is poked, prodded and probed. There is an analogy to the scientific method. How do we learn about the natural world? Why, we do experiments of course! Nature is poked, prodded and probed, and our advanced scientific instruments will get us to the heart of the Matter. (Pun intended!)

Ironically, what she described is my personal experience these past few months. A cyst was discovered during a routine x-ray of something else. (I had no symptoms.) This led to CT scans. Surgery was scheduled but then cancelled during pre-op because my breathing apparently sounded abnormal. (I was feeling fine.) Then I was required to undergo a battery of tests, that consistently showed that things were ‘normal’. The upshot is that I seem to be healthy otherwise. The downside is that I had additional exposure to scanning radiation, among other things, and I was in and out of hospitals with multiple appointments. And besides being probed, I was poked and prodded multiple times. I was relatively cheerful throughout the process, and I’m glad I only read Ehrenreich’s book after all this was done – otherwise I would have been very irritated at the whole business.

Ehrenreich calls this ‘the Veneer of Science’, it’s one of the early chapter titles in her book. She briefly discusses the history of medicine, focusing on its codification and professionalization, and how the rise of science influenced this trajectory. (Why do you think doctors have white lab coats?) She couples this with an anthropological analysis of the role of ritual – our encounters with medical professionals have become increasingly ritualized. She also has some interesting comments about the latest trends in what is known as ‘evidence-based’ medicine.

It made me think about the veneer of science in my own area – education. Educators have increasingly turned to proxies to investigate whether a student is ‘learning’. We can’t see what is going through the student’s mind, but maybe if we track their behavior and their performance on multiple small ‘tests’, we might be able to nudge them in the right direction. The parallel in medicine might be doing many little tests to pinpoint what might be an issue and then providing some sort of palliative to help the body heal itself in the right direction. Doctors don’t cure you. Your body heals itself; medications and related instructions are given to the patient to aid the process. Similarly, the teacher may provide additional explanation and suggest additional exercises for you to learn something. But the learning must still take place in the mind of the student.

I am glad that I live in an era where medical technology is advanced; I certainly wouldn’t want to have lived a hundred years ago when quackery was rampant. But I agree with Ehrenreich that there needs to be a judicious use of scanning technology or medical treatments. When your body receives additional radiation, or a chemical goes into you, that’s not a neutral effect. (I discovered I was mildly allergic to the CT contrast agent for a chest scan that I thought was unnecessary when the initial x-ray suggested no problems.) There are a number of reasons why doctors may order additional tests. Ehrenreich discusses these so if you’re interested, you can read her book. Instead, I’d like to turn my attention to educational technologies.

First, let me say that in general I’m in favor of data-driven decisions. In my oxymoronic opinion, this beats sheer inexperienced opining. But expertise isn’t always reducible to data streams, nor is it always easily quantifiable. Data analytics in educational technology presents teachers with their ubiquitous dashboards. Supposedly these offer the minute data chunks for you to understand each of your students personally – their online study habits and their level of knowledge (based on tests and assignments). You can learn how much time they spent on a problem, what hints they needed, how many incorrect attempts they made, whether they clicked a link to the online text, and what time they did their homework or took a quiz.

Adaptive learning systems claim even more. Based on all that information I mentioned above, the system can generate the next question for the student that will solidify their understanding or further their learning in a particular area. The system gets better, it is claimed, as more students use it because the artificial intelligence running the software adapts as it is shaped by the data gathered.

If you’re in education, you are likely experiencing living in an education culture of Assessment. The cry for more data rings ever louder and more stringent, purportedly so we can advance the notion of ‘evidence-based’ education. No longer do we trust individual instructors to foster the learning of their students, they must provide evidence that their pedagogies ‘work’ and these must be standardized for cross-comparison. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to knock a square peg into a round hole. Just shave off the edges here and there and it will sorta fit. We need standardized rubrics! We need inter-rater compatibility on these rubrics! In fact, what we ideally need is a machine that when fed our rubric, will consistently grade the tests and spit out the numbers we need!

Will personalized education or personalized medication be increasingly robotic? That sounds terribly oxymoronic, but maybe that’s what technology does for you when fed with data streams. It categorizes. It provides averages. It helps you ‘fit’ things more ‘cleanly’. And to ensure privacy we’ll assign patients and students special ID numbers. I seriously question the data being collected and used. Teaching and learning, in my opinion as someone with expertise, is complex and not easily reducible to data streams. Even the best rubrics are simply a proxy. It’s not that the data isn’t important. It’s just not as important as the dashboard bells and whistles might suggest. The data is peripheral. Not the core. Educators should use what they find useful but not be overly enamored or distracted by it. Data analytics gives us the veneer of science, but our primary focus should be on the core business of teaching and learning where human mind meets human mind. The A.I. mind in the long run, if you rely on it exclusively, will only teach you how to be a better robot.