ABSTRACT
Narratives became a useful vehicle to research and capture the lived experiences of young people from particular social groups who were marginalised and excluded from higher education. The chapter discusses the privileging of the physical world as the dominant reality; the privileging of causal relations in epistemic claims; and the privileging and ethics of Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) as the gold standard for educational research. The political advocacy of RCTs as the gold standard in educational research and the related posturing of RCT researchers to claim top position on the dais, are also about the rejection of other ways of knowing the social world. Quite apart from the political and theoretical problems associated with a knowledge economy and human capital, RCTs can never deliver on this precision because they operate on a false premise: that the social world is the same as the physical world.
