Education: Facts with a Vengeance

At the 25th anniversary of the university’s Social Science Research Building, Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton of the University of Chicago had some words to say about the social sciences: “There are too many people who enter the field with a readymade conclusion obtained from their local household gods rather than their laboratories, and proceed to gather facts and footnotes to substantiate it … There is the sociologist who wants a better society of a certain kind . . . [the] social scientist of a minority group who gathers data about the difficulties of other minority groups … the second-generation-immigrant historian who writes of the woes of the immigrant in America . . . Now the problems that underlie these concerns are important, but I suggest that too often a value thesis becomes confused with sound theory . . .

“There has developed another school among the social scientists, and they gather facts with a vengeance. They count things and correlate things and obtain medians and means and standard deviations. This school flourishes most among, though it is not limited to, the educationalists; and though Johnny may not be able to read, he has been well counted and correlated . . . The fact-gathering becomes so elaborate and monumental that the problem which initiated it disappears along with any possible conclusion.”