As educational scholars, we are – or aspire to be – ‘experts’ capable of commanding attention from policymakers and society at large, shaping public educational debate. But today there is increasing skepticism of claims to ‘expertise’ of any kind, especially when it comes to complex ethical or sociological aspects of public policy. Research into education is widely assumed to be a technocratic matter of identifying ‘what works’ in preparing individuals for a world pervaded by the ethos of competition. Enthusiasm for digital technology, AI and neuroscience, fuelled by Big Tech, government elites and multilateral organisations like the OECD, further marginalises qualitative sociological and historical analysis. Ignoring unavoidable political and ethical trade-offs, ‘science’ is hailed as promising painless societal ‘transformation’ through education. The net effect of such trends is to reinforce the dominance of fundamentally unsustainable socio-economic models, and educational approaches designed to underpin them. In response to the stresses and tensions that inevitably arise from this unsustainability, powerful corporate and policymaking elites offer as remedies schemes for promoting ‘social and emotional learning’, ‘resilience’ and ‘wellbeing’. Meanwhile, forceful and coherent critique of such trends is undermined by a fracturing of the scholarly community between depoliticised technocrats on the one hand, and radically dogmatic ‘critical’ scholars on the other. Amongst the latter, proponents of so-called ‘decolonial’ approaches are especially prominent today. Drawing especially on examples drawn from across Asia, in this talk I discuss some of the key challenges that educational scholarship faces today, and the adequacy (or inadequacy) of the analytical tools generally deployed to meet them. I argue that we need to be more sceptical both of narrowly technocratic approaches, and of opaque and convoluted theorising. Instead, empirically robust historical and sociological analysis needs to assume a far more central role in shaping the educational research agenda, across Asia and beyond.