Hard Science for Soft Fields
This is a post about teachers and education, but feel free to extend these ideas to therapists and psychology!
A few months ago, I came across an Instagram post from an educator who wanted her followers to know that she wasn’t just teaching children, she was helping them increase the number of neurons in their brains. It was a well-meaning post, but it was misleading. In general, as children develop, they don’t generate more neuronal connections; they prune them. The brain eliminates the connections it doesn’t need and strengthens the ones it does. Development, in this sense, is about efficiency, not accumulation.
This post was one of a million I’ve seen recently. Neuromyths are everywhere in education right now: We constantly talk about “brain breaks,” “nervous system regulation,” and “learning styles” that supposedly map onto brain types. Educators try to frame teaching as a science rather than an art.
This tendency speaks volumes about what kinds of knowledge and expertise we’ve decided to trust. We rank explanations: Social explanations feel softer than biological ones, and harder explanations seem to carry more authority. When a finding from education has a brain image attached to it, it feels more proven and more real.
This is little more than philosophical prejudice. Explanations at the social or behavioral level are complete on their own terms, and they shouldn’t require biological confirmation to be considered valid. If we observe that children learn better when they feel safe and calm—and of course we have observed this repeatedly across decades with plenty of behavior data to back it up—that observation doesn’t become more true when we identify its neural correlates. Yet the brain scan is what’s being funded and published. And then it gets misinterpreted on Instagram by a well-meaning teacher who wants to prove that her work is important. Her many years of experience in the classroom and the careful social science research informing her teaching exist and are rigorous, but they don’t feel as hard as neuronal growth.
I think it’s worth asking why.
Education and child development more broadly have long been treated as intuitive rather than empirical. The knowledge these fields produce is frequently dismissed as simply anecdotal or common sense or just plain wrong. This is not incidental. These are fields that are majority-female in practice, and they deal with concerns that have traditionally been coded as feminine. Their primary methods do not look like hard science in the way that scanning a brain does, and so they are not treated as valid or legitimate.
This fits with a well-documented historical pattern: When women enter a professional field, its prestige tends to decline, and when men enter, or when the field adopts methods associated with traditionally masculine disciplines, prestige rises. Neuroscience, which remains dominated by men, follows this logic when it enters education. It doesn’t change what teachers do; it just changes who takes the work seriously. A finding about how children learn becomes more credible when paired with a picture of the prefrontal cortex, even if the teaching technique remains the same.
Notice, too, that the demand for harder scientific legitimization is not applied uniformly across fields. We don’t ask economists and engineers to justify their models. We only do this for women-dominated fields that we don’t really take seriously.
To be clear: this is not an argument that neuroscientists are sexist, or that neuroscience itself is the problem. Many neuroscientists are doing valuable work. But the relational and observational knowledge that teachers accumulate also gives them a genuine form of expertise that we should trust. Education has historically been women’s work, and thus, it has been undervalued and underpaid. Requiring biological confirmation before believing that teachers know what they are doing simply perpetuates this problem.
It is also worth noting, separately, that neuroscience often doesn’t deliver what we hope it will. I have already written extensively about methodological limitations in neuroimaging and the field’s replication crisis. But even when the neuroscience is solid, the pipeline from a lab to a classroom is long if it’s ever completed at all. Neuroimaging research typically does not change what teachers actually do. We already can figure out, from observation and experience and rigorous behavioral research, how children learn best. Neuroscience tends to do little more than confirm what we already can see with our own eyes.
And when biological explanations become the standard for what counts as real knowledge, other frameworks get crowded out. This is important because frameworks aren’t neutral. A brain-level explanation of a child’s academic struggles locates the problem inside the child. A social explanation locates the problem outside, in the broader environment where the child is required to learn. These framings point to different interventions, different responsibilities, and different politics. Neuroscientific framings tend to individualize or internalize structural problems. And the populations most affected by internal framings of their difficulties are often the populations whose social conditions and external environments most urgently need attention.
The demand for neuroscientific legitimacy is not a neutral scientific instinct. It reflects a judgment that runs along gendered lines about which kinds of knowledge are real, which methods count as evidence, and which people we trust to tell us the truth about our children.