Top Highlights

• Being pragmatic means nothing more than that any search for answers should always begin with posing a question, particularly the question ‘What is the problem?’ Such a pragmatic way of proceeding can help to keep control over the research process, and not let it be directed by theories, particularly not by the latest theoretical ‘fashions’.
• education needs to be value based rather than evidence based because it is only on the basis of normative judgements about what good education is that the practice of education becomes possible. For precisely that reason any reference to ‘what works’ is simply not enough.
• Calling the idea of value-based education an alternative is not meant to suggest that evidence plays no role at all in value-based education but to highlight that its role is subordinate to the values that constitute practices as educational practices.
• In all three cases I will identify a deficit. In the epistemological domain there is a knowledge deficit, in the ontological domain an effectiveness or efficacy deficit and in the practice domain an application deficit. Taken together these deficits not only raise some important questions about the very idea of evidence-based practice but also high...
• my contribution is primarily meant to provide educators with insights and arguments that can help them to resist unwarranted expectations about the role of evidence in their practices and even more so of unwarranted interventions in their practices.