Four Decades of Learning Science Meets the Politics of School
The neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene wants to bring four decades of findings on how the brain learns into the classroom. In Nancy Averett's account in Psyche, the obstacle is not a shortage of evidence: evidence alone can't overcome the politics in education.
That is a sharper claim than the usual complaint that schools ignore research. A finding about how learning works arrives without a coalition attached to it. It can describe what helps a brain retain something; it cannot vote, budget, or negotiate with the people who do.
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Worth separating two things the word "politics" can cover: obstruction by interested parties, and genuine disagreement about what schooling is for. The second kind doesn't dissolve when the data improve.
That distinction can become a convenient excuse. If a method reliably improves how children learn, the political difficulty of adopting it is a problem to solve, not a reason to treat the question as still open.