Surely such knowledge and technical skill in learning and teaching was arrived at by empirical methods. However, it is not subject to peer review and the controlled experiments one can run in order to verify it are not obvious. Watching an expert do their craft, one can observe their virtuosity and yet have not a clue how to explain it in words. There's no manual for teaching that one can read in order to become a master teacher. There never will be: skill is a knowledge beneath words. Still, whatever knowledge can be put into words ought to be. The best social science is the most modest: that which seeks to clarify and observe what human beings already do.

There is a double edge to this: institutions cargo culting science and producing monstrosities like the Common Core. Prescriptive social science can be a disaster. Teaching, being the most important profession, is a weird place where the people in charge completely disrespect the expertise of the people doing the work but understand that whoever controls it controls a great deal of society's functioning. That's why systems like the Residential Schools in Canada were allowed to do so much harm and why administrators are allowed to trample all over the interests of both students and teachers.

I wring my hands a lot over the bureaucratization, corporatization, and centralization of universities and schools. The powers that be most definitely wield the apparatus of science to harmful, unscientific ends.