Science in service to a prescriptive ideal...

...The expert's total reliance upon the methods of science renders him incapable of learning from his forebears anyway, for they cannot provide him with the hard statistical and clinical data alone with which he can work.  He is like the raw ensign on the bridge of a ship who, mesmerized by the radar scope, refuses to consult an experienced navigator in the fog. His revision of language and his ignorance of history afford him the comfortable delusion of not having to look back to get his bearings. Sure of the all-sufficiency of his methods and blinf to many of his own primary assumptions, he rejects charts that were made--he is convinced-- by worse navigators than himself, bu which he means by navigators whose methods antedated his own...
...I fear that the modern educator's inchoate understanding of science, his naive belief in its all-sufficiency, and his unwillingness to acknowledge its methodological limitations are leading to a reaction and revulsion against it. If descriptive science is to aid our schools and flourish in them, it must remain in the service of a prescriptive ideal.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, pp.2-3