Introduction

In this chapter we are critical of over-reliance on statistics and measurement in social science and, by implication, in education as a branch of social science. Of course accurate statistics are important, but often they seem to operate, as we have argued elsewhere in this book, primarily as a powerful form of rhetoric. The expectation that they will give us – virtually on their own – the answers on which to base policy in education as in other areas of life is not always justified, and sometimes it deflects us from asking important philosophical questions, as we shall show. The extended example discussed here, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009), demonstrates that while statistics can be valuable guides to where further investigation needs to take place, such investigation needs the tools of other disciplines such as philosophy and anthropology if it is to demonstrate the correlation promised in The Spirit Level’s subtitle.

Let it be clear from the start that we are not against statistics, only over-reliance on them and unreflective faith in them. The position is much the same as it is with the more familiar case of science. The fact that science has made our lives safer and more comfortable in numberless ways, and that many areas of science are intrinsically fascinating, does not justify scientism, the colonising by science of every other form of thought and the assumption that whatever problem we have, the solution will inevitably be a scientific one.