Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

3 Dazzling Statistics? 29
3.2 Problem Statement
The question that the sociologists have posed that I take as my point of departure
for historical methodological reflections concerns the social effects of what
has gradually come to be called ‘the first wave of democratization’. Has the university
expansion of, say, 1960 to 1990 led to more social equality or not? At least
four studies have attempted to provide a scientifically based answer to this question:
(1) that of Barbara Tan (1998) (of the Centre for Social Policy of the University
Faculties of St. Ignatius Antwerp published in the Tijdschrift voor Sociologie);
(2) the study based on it by Koen Pelleriaux (1999, 2001) (available on the Internet;
also published as an internal report of the Sociology Department of the Free
University of Brussels and also recycled as the first chapter of his PhD thesis);
(3) a paper by Steven Groenez (2008) (of the Higher Institute of Labour Studies
of the K.U. Leuven, presented there on the Sociology Day of 28 May 2008 and also
intended as a chapter of his doctorate); and (4) a study (published as a notice and
also available on the Internet) by Geert Verbergt, Bea Cantillon, and Karel Van den
Bosch (2009) (of the same Center for Social Policy of the University of Antwerp),
which was intended to be a kind of replication of Barbara Tan’s study.
What these studies more or less have in common is, in addition to their strikingly
similar conclusions (more about them later), the empirical numerical data they use
and the statistical techniques applied to them. These authors set out, first and foremost,
to fill the ‘empirical’ gap that the existing numerical data have left behind.
Indeed, the statistical yearbooks of education, which our research team has assembled
into diachronic data series as far as primary (Minten et al., 1991–1996) and
secondary education (D’hoker et al., 2006) is concerned, give only the numbers of
students, and these numbers do not enable one to determine the social backgrounds
of the students. In order to determine the students’ social origins, these authors used
all sorts of indirect data compiled in surveys of various populations in other sociological
research projects. All kinds of advanced statistical techniques were then
applied to this (often merged) data. The results did not conform to expected patterns.
One might have imagined that the results would reveal a connection between
greater opportunities to attend higher education with greater degree of participation
among the ‘lower’ classes. This is not what emerged in the findings.
As regards the evolution of higher education between 1981 and 1991, Barbara
Tan stated that, in sharp contrast to the disappearance of sexual inequality, social
inequalities remained virtually unchanged: ‘Only 16% of the children of lesseducated
fathers and/or mothers attend higher education. Among children of highly
educated parents, this figure is 59%’ – a picture that, in her opinion, ‘has hardly
changed in the last 20 years (1978–1998)’ (Tan, 1998, p. 200). She attributes this
mainly to the ongoing selection process in primary and secondary education, an
issue that has dominated the political agenda of the progressive and democratic
forces in Flanders in the past few decades.
As far back as the 1970s, the Socialist ministers of education, in particular,
wanted to promote democratization through the introduction of a less selective
but more ‘comprehensive’ educational model in secondary education (see Henkens,
2006). I will return to this point later on, but in the meantime, let us consider Barbara