How do we know conductive education works? For that matter, how do we know anything, anyone, does in education "works"?
Serendipity this week:
- I was asked (by Andrew Brereton of Snowdrop), in a Comment to a previous posting here, the entirely reasonable question, "Can CE provide any independent evidence that it is effective?"
- Andrew Sutton posted a news item "Complementary Medicine Coup for Island" first carried in the Isle of Wight County Press of a new partnership between The Shen Clinic, which specialises in acupuncture according to the paper, and The Peto Institute, jointly to set up a new CE Centre on the island and degree-level training.
- The Times carried news of a report to the Department of Health from Professor Michael Pittilo, Vice-Chancellor of the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, recommending that therapies such as acupuncture, herbal medicine and traditional Chinese medicine should have statutory regulation run by the Health Professions Council, and that entry for practitioners should normally be through degree-level training.
To say that writer, David Colquhoun, Research Professor of Pharmacology at University College London, is sceptical of Professor Pittilo's report and recommendations is an understatement, as you may judge from the title alone of his article: "Regulating quack medicine makes me feel sick" and he asks "If alternative remedies are either untested or ineffective, why are we promoting them? [Actually, David Colquhoun blames The Times sub-editor for this title and sub-title, but it captures the gist of his article well enough].
You should read David Colquhoun's whole article for yourself when you have a moment. For now, I would like to draw your attention to another posting on his blog: "Dilemmas at the heart of alternative medicine", where he writes:
All forms of ineffective treatment, ‘alternative’ or otherwise, pose real dilemmas that are usually neglected. I use here the term ‘alternative medicine’, rather than CAM (complementary and alternative medicine), because things that don’t work are not medicine at all and can’t be ‘complementary’ to anything.
The only distinction that matters is the distinction between things that work and things that don’t work.
Things that work and things that don't work. In the medical world, of course. Because that is the world David Colquhoun is talking about. It's not quite as simple as that of course, not "work or not work", not black-and-white. Even in the medical world, it's about probabilities: this treatment, this therapy, this surgery has a likely effectiveness in most cases of so-and-so per cent. (When my daughter had her osteotomy first on one hip and then on the other, the first was 100% successful, restoring full mobility; the second was a 0% successful. Should she not have had the second operation? Should she not have had the first? In both cases, the condition being treated by surgery was much the same and the predicted outcome of 'the procedure' would have been about the same.)
Nonetheless. Things that work and things that don't. If, for the moment, we agree with David Colquhoun, it is the only distinction that matters. Might the same distinction be applied to "Education"?