Verklighetsoptimering och verklighetsprövning – om varför goda intentioner ibland får motsatt verkan inom utbildningsområdet

While medical practice and research is subject to critique from other fields such as sociology and history of ideas, the educational area is almost exclusively critiqued from the inside. As a consequence, the critique of education usually aims at optimization within a commonly accepted normative framework rather than at a radical questioning of this normative framework as such. Based on a comparison between education and medicine, I suggest that many problems that are today framed as in need of an educational solution, may be framed otherwise or not even considered to be problems at all. I conclude with an analysis of how lack of radical critique can lead to the problem mentioned in the title: that wellmeaning interventions have consequences opposite to those intended. The purpose of the article is to present a radical critique of education that can contribute to a reversal of this tendency.