Doing No Harm? How 100 Years of "Progress" in Medicine Does and Does Not Make It an Exemplar for Education

• In Event: 63.020 - Surveilling Toward Disembodiment: Technologies of Humanity

Abstract

In popular culture and dominant scholarly discourse, medicine has been praised for a century of impressive progress. Scholars and policy makers hold out medicine as an exemplar for education researchers to improve their work as AERA begins its second century; however they tend to focus on the current state of medical practice and research, ignoring its history of questionable ethics and bias against minority races and genders. I leverage scholarship in the history of medicine to develop the analogy between medicine and education in a less deceptive way – examining three parallels between the development of knowledge and practice in medicine and education which advocates of clinical trials and “precision education” should be chastened by.

Author

• Kevin D O'Neill, Simon Fraser University