Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

3 Dazzling Statistics? 31
the democratization problem in higher education must be sought in secondary education,
where alongside the rigid separation between the forms of education, the
unequal distribution of the social groups across these educational forms must be
tackled’ (Groenez, 2008, p. 13).
Finally, the same conclusions are drawn in the study conducted by Verbergt,
Cantillon and Van den Bosch. In their update of Tan’s data, they observe ‘that the
link between the educational level of the parents and the participation in higher education
between 1992 and 2004 has certainly not weakened. (One might even surmise
that there has been a slight increase)’ (Verbergt et al., 2009, p. 5). This leads them to
the conclusion that educational democratization has been at ‘a stubborn “stand-still”
for already more than 40 years(!)’, which, they argue, is striking and disquieting,
‘given the great (and recently sharply increasing) attention for this problem in society
and policy making....’. Therefore, ‘The future will have to show whether the
recent efforts regarding equal educational opportunities will bring about a reversal’
(Verbergt et al., 2009, pp. 6–7).
As a historical researcher, I do not immediately have much difficulty in accepting
the plausibility of such conclusions. Books about the social-Darwinian nature of the
phenomenon of meritocracy and the competitive, casu quo selective role that education
plays in it fill several bookshelves. That the school as a social institution has
a primarily bourgeois character, that it cultivates, transmits and reinforces the language,
the norms and the values of the upper classes is a familiar theme in the history
of education. Similarly, the fact that the often intensive attempts of policy makers to
change anything often gives rise to paradoxical and ironical effects (or side effects?),
in part because of the resistance they generate from below, is equally familiar.
Still, to my mind, the conclusions of these social science studies are of a hypothetical
and/or heuristic (and therefore provisional) character. In my opinion, they
are interesting preliminary studies that, certainly as regards the problem of democratization
of higher (and more specifically of university) education, require both more
relevant (i.e. primary) source material and a more pluriform (if you will, interdisciplinary,
multidisciplinary, or pluridisciplinary) methodological approach. I maintain
that this is the case despite the fact that these buzz words have in the meantime
been so eroded that they seem to have little meaning. The issue to which it all boils
down to is whether statistics, given the generally horizontal approach to social problems,
are capable of sufficiently grasping historical questions from a longitudinal
developmental perspective.
3.3 Questions from History on the Use of Statistics
in Social Sciences
3.3.1 Too General?
Although history, (as a rather narrative or ideographic science) and sociology (as its
more theoretical, in casu, nomothetic counterpart) have come to show clear signs
of convergence since the end of the 1960s, there still remain a considerable number