Chapter 1: THE QUEST


1.1. In Quest of the Science of Education: Introduction
1.2. In Quest of the Study of Educational Universals
1.3. In Quest of Freedom from the Confines of Educational Particulars
1.4. In Quest of Relevance and Method in the Science of Education
1.5. Summary & Articulation of the Quest

Our main question, for now, will be: Is there any justification for education as a science? While in natural sciences there are basic coherent assumptions and presuppositions about physical reality that the generality of the scientific community agrees upon, there are virtually no ontological assumptions about human reality that would be accepted by the majority of scholars in human sciences. For instance, almost all natural scientists would agree with the assumption that the same natural laws are applicable everywhere in the universe; human scientists, on the other hand, can agree on no universal assumption about the essential character of human reality (and its education).

What are, then, the qualifications of a science? There are two ways of looking into this: first, defining science through the method of the acquisition of knowledge; second, defining science through its purpose and ultimate goal. While both modes of definition are, in the end, arbitrary and based on human agreement, one can justifiably argue that method is secondary to purpose -- i.e. defining science through its purpose is primary to definition through its method. Of course, it is possible that science shares some of its goals and purposes with other modes of accumulating human knowledge (e.g. culture, religion, politics etc.), and therefore, it could be argued that it is the method that makes the difference. This is true as such but, should the purpose shift or become obscured, and should the pursuit of science divert from its goal, it is not qualified as science even if it would use the methods of science.

What, then, is the purpose of science? Works on the philosophy of science are varied and numerous. There are, however, certain generic aspirations that are, one way or another, always associated with science. Although it may not be usually articulated in this particular manner, perhaps one of the strongest generic aspirations is that of essentiality: science is a form of search after truth -- scientific knowledge, while studying the workings of particular phenomena, seeks in the last analysis to understand the essence of things in a credible and verifiable manner. This statement refers, thus, to both the purpose and the method, in a very general manner. For instance, the science of physics seeks not only to explain isolated physical events and observations but also to decode the essential principles of the material reality, to find core explanations on the whole physical universe -- the whole phenomenon that we call the physical universe, if you like. While this goal is highly difficult to achieve (even unachievable), it is yet the highest aspiration of the science of physics. It is not sought because it would be easily done or readily accessible, but because it gives a direction, a vision -- a compass for scientific progress.

Such aspirations focus the overall direction of science on the universal qualities of reality (or a certain domain of reality), not on the particular cases and isolated phenomena within that vaster phenomenon. These particulars must certainly remain the actual target and material for most of the research but, even then, the goal is to attain theorems that can be generalized, statements on the universals of the reality being studied -- this is the focus of basic research. It should be noted here that by focussing on universals is not meant that the conclusions themselves are universal; each scientific statement or statement is only an approximation of reality and is, thus, true only conditionally (cf. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem; see: Hofstadter 1979). It is the target of inquiry that is universal, not the drawn conclusions.

Moreover, as stated in the Prologue, a science must axiomatize itself in order to define its purpose and its field of interest -- and axioms are, by definition, universal within the field of reality that they address. Now, given these criteria, does educational research in its present form qualify as a science? Firstly, the science of education has certainly not yet been axiomatized. While the methods and approaches used in educational research, for the most part, fulfil the requirements for scientific methods of investigation, the overall development of pedagogical theory seems largely unconcerned with the universals of education, the phenomenon of education as such.

The investigation of the universals of educating human reality and, thus, the refinement of the art of education, appear to be of little interest to mainstream of educational research. This has narrowed the scope of scholarly exploration and has deprived the field of pedagogical science from the breadth and universality it would deserve as a science. Should a paradigm shift take place and the science of education come one step forward in the path of scientific exploration, the work hitherto done by the educationalist community would not be lost. On the contrary, that work would find a broader rationale, a coherent context and a more appropriate platform to evolve and thrive. It is, therefore, to the task of addressing the universals of education that this study is hoped to contribute. Of course, no presumptuous claim is made for completing such a task or even a major part of it -- that must emerge as a result of a long process of contemplation, research, and interaction by numerous contributors.

Let us return to the notion that science must axiomatize itself to define its purpose and field of interest, and that axioms are universal by definition. This would indicate that at least one of the goals (if not the goal) of the science of education should be the holistic and coherent study of the phenomenon of education or, in other words, the study of educational universals. This means forming an holistic philosophical framework for addressing the theory of education per se, i.e. the ontology of education. Such a titanic task can hardly be undertaken by an individual, much less by a single dissertation. It would entail a long process of ongoing dialogue, of argumentation and counter-argumentation in pursuit of coherent educational thinking and theory -- placing the science of education in a broader theoretical or philosophical framework. Short of such a longstanding process, nothing conclusive can be achieved in this quest nor any definite claims be advanced. Therefore, the aim here is to make a modest but firm start for this discourse -- a beginning that, while certainly not conclusive, is at least coherent.

What, then, are universals? The dictionary gives us the obscure definition that they are generic existences that are not physically limited to a particular event or physical object -- they can be characterized as "something that may be applied throughout the universe to many things" or, philosophically, as "a general term or concept or the generic nature that such a term signifies" (Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary 1989, p. 1555). But this is, at best, a vague description for our purpose. A more definite discussion on the nature of universals is needed.

An extensive study made by Langendoen & Postal (1984) on the 'vastness of natural languages' is relevant. While initially interested in linguistic universals, this study involves a profound discussion of the ontology of universals in general. I came across this issue when my wife, Anne Izadi, was finishing her Master's thesis. There are three generally acknowledged, distinct and mutually exclusive views on the ontological status of universals according to Langendoen & Postal (1984, pp. 104-112; see also: A. Izadi 1996, pp. 19-23). Let us, briefly, examine each of the three approaches:

The limitations of nominalism are not hard to recognize. Its strict reliance on the explanatory power of only those aspects of universals that can be perceived through sensible elements, and those elements alone, makes it vulnerable to demands of those universals that are abstract but are, at least to the human mind, very real (e.g. meanings of words). Thus, the nominalist view provides very few tools for even addressing universals, much less to disprove them. In the case of linguistic theory (which was the domain of reality under scrutiny by Langendoen & Postal), the nominalist view is, today, rejected by the vast majority of linguists and philosophers. Langendoen & Postal (1984, p. 108) write:

"... maintenance of a nominalist interpretation of linguistic reality is out of question. The most obvious and basic feature of sentences and NLs [natural languages] cannot even be discussed, still less explained, in such terms. If the position is taken literally, it makes no sense to talk about sentential properties like syntactic well-formedness, synonymy, phonotactic well-formedness, ambiguity, etc. For none of these is definable in terms of physical structures. Under a nominalist view, linguistics must reduce to the physics of human utterances, to the neurophysiology of the human vocal apparatus, or to some sort of neurophysics of brains."

The problematique and viability of the realist, nominalist, and conceptualist approaches to universals will be discussed in many of the sections of this work and its implications constitute one of the major themes of this study. However, our general notion is that universals can be assumed as objective realities of which our knowledge is always relatively subjective. While we can always attain relatively more objective understanding of universals, their ultimate or essential nature must remain disclosed to us. This is the basic point of departure when discussing universals as objects of scientific exploration.

This is, in fact, also the paradigm of natural scientific epistemology. In natural sciences, the quest for universals requires scientists to make approximations of what they assume could be universally true, i.e. approximations of natural laws. This does not mean that such approximations are claimed to be objectively true, or that natural scientists would imagine that they would know for a fact what those laws are as objective entities. Rather, they make such approximation in order to be able to estimate the plausibility of a certain generalistic notions or theorems about such possible laws; in other words, they put forward proposed universals. Then they set out to evaluate the credibility of these approximations by sampling the observable reality, i.e. known facts -- they explore the empirical consequences that should logically follow from those approximations and see whether these conform to what was expected.

It is important to realize that this notion of the 'scientific method' is quite different from the positivistic pursuit of knowledge which seeks to establish the 'truth' of a general statement in a rather black-and-white manner: a positivistic approach sees knowledge as either true or false, assuming that empirical evidence would give exact information about the validity of a statement, including statements on universals. Thus, the positivistic approach does not view such statements as mere approximations but as 'on/off' claims about reality; for it, a notion becomes a fact if it conforms to the observed phenomena. Natural sciences, today, do not subscribe to such a notion of scientific exploration nor claim to be 'exact sciences'. Based on natural scientific epistemology, a theory's good correspondence with known facts indicates that the proposed universal (i.e. the theory) is a reasonable approximation and has, thus, relative objectivity. Therefore, the perception that natural sciences would be, or even consider themselves as, 'exact sciences' is an illusion.

Hence, the idea of studying ontological realities through empirical research is intrinsic to natural sciences, without endorsing any positivistic notion. Indeed, the field of theoretical physics, for instance, is simultaneously very ontological and very empirical, in that it seeks to formulate extremely abstract generalizations (approximations) regarding natural laws (cf. General Relativity Theory), which are ontological universals in the sense meant here, and yet evaluates their plausibility by examining meticulously their consistency with the observable reality (measurable phenomena).

If, indeed, the goal of the science of education should be "the holistic and coherent study of the phenomenon of education" meaning "the study of educational universals", then the kind of realism represented by the epistemological paradigm of natural sciences may well be applicable. Thus, by endorsing a realist view on universals is not meant that our understanding of them would ever go beyond a conceptualistic perception, but that a "universal", while not something absolute, can be an approximation of assumed absolutes (call it "ontological approximation"). This approximation itself is not a Platonically real object but a conceptualistic one that has a certain universal plausibility and authenticity. That is to say, our understanding of universals is, by definition, conceptualistic -- the absolute or objective nature of universals remains unknown to us. Then, our 'realist' view of universals is not absolute in the sense meant by Platonistic realism, because our understanding will anyway remain conceptualistic. However, this conceptualism should be attributed to the approximations we have made about universals, not to the ontological quality of the universals themselves. Insistence on such an ontological assumption would impose an unnecessary and arbitrary confinement to the study of universals, whether natural or human.

If the ideal goal of the science of education would be "the holistic and coherent study of the phenomenon of education", the first task at hand is to remove the obstacles presently in the way of this goal. The greatest obstacle is the fact noted earlier: the investigation of the universals of educating human reality appears, indeed, to be of little interest to the mainstream of educational research (cf.: Noddings 1998, pp. 121-133). Why might this be? My claim is that this is due to the fixated focus on the particulars of education.

This focus on educational particulars has created an orientation toward sectarian ideologies and dogmatic mentality, alien to the ideal of scientific exploration. It was mentioned in the Prologue that the ethical responsibility of a scientist cannot be based on arbitrary or ideological claims or personal preferences, but on sound theory -- a vision that has a more universal appeal to the human mind. As long as contrary bases persist, such visionary approaches are considered either irrelevant or impracticable. To be sure, it is not that the door to the study of educational universals would be closed; numerous efforts have been, and are presently being, made in the field of educational philosophy addressing fundamental issues. By the existence of "contrary bases" is meant that such efforts, while respected, are treated as interesting theoretical examples and sporadic philosophical insights -- not as works constituting a unified foundational paradigm that would stand at the core of the science of education.

The issue, then, is that we practitioners of educational science have not yet taken up the challenge of investigating the possibility of such a unified foundational paradigm for the science of education as a whole. This has become a habitual trend that easily goes unnoticed in the practice of our work and feeds the distraction caused by focus on less fundamental issues. What, then, prevents educational scholars and the scientific community from re-evaluating such ingrained habits of the academic mind? The simple answer could be: the power of tradition.

Two complementary social forces upholding human societies can be distinguished: (a) the power of tradition, i.e. the inclination to preserve the achievements of society; and (b) the power of progress, i.e. the aspiration to promote further development of society (see: P. Izadi 1994, p. 232). Both serve the evolution of society -- the one seeks to conserve gained advances against deterioration, the other aspires to achieve new advances. In stable times, where no dramatic change is imminent, both tradition and progress play complementary and equally significant roles. But, in tumultuous periods of possible evolutionary breakthrough, these two forms of 'social loyalty', if we may call them so, are polarized as opposite competitive forces. Tradition becomes a mainly decelerating force whereas progress becomes a chiefly accelerating force to development. If the force of progress prevails and taps tradition to its use, the evolutionary leap can be easy and smooth; if, on the other hand, the force of progress is overcome by tradition, the process will become complicated, more chaotic, and painful and can even lead to collapse.

The turbulence of our times represents just such a case of dramatic change with evolutionary potentials and threats -- and, for the first time in known history, on a global scale (cf.: E. Boulding 1988, p. 116; King & Schneider 1991; Laszlo 1989, pp. 122-124; Mesarovic & Pestel 1974; Toffler 1974; Moskowitz 1968, p. 71; P. Russell 1983, p. 55). In such a situation, a delicate challenge is to neither let tradition hinder new progressive models from emerging nor to let progress, in its aggressive drive, neglect the vital experience and achievements of the past.

This dichotomy of social forces can also be seen in the role that is conventionally assigned to education: preserving society and sustaining its continuity. But in the face of the present world paradigm, this twofold profile emerges in a sharper contrast: (a) education must ensure the transmittal of past achievements to the future and apply them to emerging global conditions; and (b) education must carry forward such new values, goals, world-views, models and skills as are essential for the reformation of human society in this uniquely global period of history (see: Capra & van Steenbergen 1985, pp. 528-536).

Now, it would be unfounded to claim that education and its scholarly investigation are all bound by tradition and that they have taken no interest in the "reformation of the human society in this uniquely global period of history". There are multitudes of groundbreaking educational approaches, experiments, policies and theories suggested and tried out by the educationalist community, exploring new avenues of education (see also Section 3.2.1.). Only posterity can evaluate the true value of this work. The issue, however, is that these attempts still fall within the boundaries of rather isolated islands of educational thought which, if not contradictory or antagonistic to each other, are quite unconnected and do not relate to the total work being done -- they do not seek to produce an holistic paradigm for the science of education as a whole. In other words, while the human being is arguably a coherent entity, the totality of research and theorizing done on educating human beings appears to be a conglomeration of relatively unrelated approaches that do not converge into educational universals and a theory of the whole phenomenon of education.

It is precisely here that the power of tradition subtly persists -- in the continuing lack of interest in attaining to generally accepted educational universals and the persistent study of isolated particulars or seclusion in unconnected philosophies. Indeed, the very notion of the human being as "a coherent entity" is considered by many scholars (if not most) as an unrealistic abstraction that serves no scientific purpose (see Sections 3.1.3. and 3.1.4.). The scientific community within the whole sphere of human sciences has given up on such universalities; the controversies in the history of education and social sciences (see Sections 2.3.3., 2.3.4. and 2.3.5.) have quieted the would-be protagonists of such aspirations. Indeed, evading focussing on a generally acceptable paradigm of educational universals appears to be the result of some elusive form of fear (see Section 2.1.).

Here, tradition becomes an informal and subtle form of dogma whose workings go unnoticed within the scholarly community. Thus, acknowledging these obstacles in the way of the goal of the science of education, we can derive the following reformulation of our quest: to empower the science of education to be free of the chronic pursuit of the particulars of education or contentment with isolated educational philosophies.

In the Prologue, vision was called for as "a compass for scientific progress", and this vision was identified as something with a "universal appeal to the human mind". It was also noted that generating such a vision cannot be the task of educationalists and scientists alone and that it requires "ongoing search and interchange of ideas by a multitude of participants representing diverse cultural mentalities and world-views". Many, I am sure, think of such thoughts as idealistic and utopian. Be that as it may, it remains a reality that we live in the first known global paradigm of humankind. No one has prior experience of such a situation and no unprejudiced spectator can seriously claim that humanity's past experiences and knowledge are sufficient for humanity to survive its new predicament and turn it, instead, into a successful evolutionary breakthrough (see: Fromm 1976, pp. 9-10; Commission on Global Governance 1995). In such a situation, the role of education as an agent of change cannot be overemphasized, nor can the task of pedagogical science to provide an holistic frame of reference be overestimated.

Is not the science of education, then, such an agent of change? Does it not provide an holistic frame of reference? Given the widespread focus on educational particulars, as discussed earlier, it would be reasonable to answer: at least not sufficiently. Why might this be? Perhaps, one major reason is that notions like "agent of change" and "holistic frame of reference" do not lend themselves to meaningful processes unless there are means systematically and methodically to study educational universals. In the absence of such means, the discussion of educational universals easily yields in philosophical vagueness and ambiguity which, at worst, may even result in absurdism. In this manner, educational universals become uninteresting or substantially 'ungraspable', leading to their unintentional and subconscious avoidance, which will then leave room only for focus on educational particulars.

This need for systematic and methodical means brings us back to the possibilities of the epistemological paradigm of natural sciences for studying educational universals. Such a proposal may arouse suspicions and, perhaps, resistance because it is easily interpreted as endorsing positivism, since it involves empirical validation of proposed theories. As discussed in Section 1.2., however, there is indeed a clear difference between endorsing empirical research and being positivistic. The use of the natural scientific approach in fact entails the simultaneous use of ontological and empirical argumentation, which at first may seem odd and even incompatible to many human scientists. There is, however, no contradiction in the mix of the two: ontological argumentation constructs approximations on universals; empirical argumentation seeks to establish the plausibility of these approximations.

One could argue that, if it would not be possible to investigate ontological universals through empirical research, many methods used by a vast number of respected scholars in the whole array of sciences would be worthless. For instance, the entire science of physics would become impossible to practice, for it would no longer be able to explore the value of ontological approximations about natural laws through empirical sampling of natural events; this, in turn, would mean that all the amazing achievements of present-day technology should not have been possible -- i.e. everything that applies these 'proved' approximations of supposed universal laws of nature. Yet, such applications do exist (e.g. skyscrapers, dams, bridges, vehicles, spacecrafts, satellites, computers, electronic devices etc.) and they utilise the generalistic approximations of natural laws with amazing accuracy. Of course, we can prove neither for nor against the objective validity of the proposed approximations against the true reality of natural laws, but since millions of people make daily use of the fantastic technology at hand with great success, we can safely assume that these approximations have reasonable correspondence with what is actually possible -- i.e. the ontological approximations show a striking correlation with the empirical sampling.

Thus, I am only arguing in favour of the idea that the scientific method of proposing ontological approximations, and confirming and applying them through empirical practice, is meaningful and beneficial also to the science of education. Indeed, I feel that celebrated figures who, by means of education, effected serious changes in the annals of their nations and peoples, must have believed in the empirical practicability of their ontological approximations. There are great examples of such people in recent history; in Finland, for instance, personages like Johan V. Snellman (1806-1881) and his contemporaries most certainly believed that a radical transformation in the society was possible; they suggested clearly idealistic goals (read: approximations of universals) and applied them through a systematic process of education (read: empirical validation); finally, they did produce very tangible changes in the society -- changes in the general direction of those goals. Such examples can be found in most every country. They saw and practised education as a proactive force.

It is, therefore, not far-fetched to claim that the natural scientific epistemological approach (or, more generally, the scientific method) would be applicable also to the science of education. Surely, the types of universals that this science needs to address, the ontological approximations that it must produce, the empirical approaches that need to be invented are all very different from those in the natural sciences and those currently in use in human sciences. Yet, there can be an epistemological monism -- and hence, a methodological monism (very broadly defined) -- among all sciences in respect to the manner in which they seek to augment our understanding of reality and, thus, in respect to scientific exploration. It is in from this point of view that the possibilities inherent in General Systems Theory are examined (see Sections 3.2.4. through 3.2.7.) -- as an overall scientific paradigm addressing the epistemological nature of reality as a whole.

1. The initial question at the point of departure of this study is: Is there justification for education as a science?

2. A generic criterion of science is the aspiration to unravel the essential reality of things; pursuit of essentiality focusses long-term interest of science on the universal qualities of reality -- this is basic research.

3. There are three mutually exclusive interpretations of what universals are: realist, nominalist, and conceptualist; the problematique and viability of these approaches is one of the main themes of this study.

4. Essentiality in the science of education includes the holistic study of the phenomenon of education; in other words, the long-term goal of the science of education should be the study of educational universals.

5. Through a commonly agreed paradigm based on educational universals, the work hitherto done by educationalists would find a broader rationale, a coherent context, and a more appropriate platform to evolve and thrive.

6. There are no generally accepted universal ontological assumptions on the nature and education of human reality; the mainstream of pedagogical theory appears largely uninterested in pursuing a core paradigm based on the universals of education, of the ontology of the phenomenon of education per se; the study of the particulars of education remains the target of the bulk of pedagogical research and theory.

7. The fixated focus on the particulars of education and contentment with isolated educational philosophies appears to be due to lack of willingness to re-evaluate ingrained habits of the scholarly mind, which in turn is attributable to the power of tradition.

8. Holding to tradition is not the characteristic of the entire length and breadth of pedagogical research; groundbreaking educational approaches, experiments, policies and theories are being worked on, exploring new avenues of education; yet, such attempts remain unintegrated islands of educational knowledge and do not contribute to the emergence of a generally accepted foundational paradigm for the science of education.

9. There is an informal and subtle form of tradition within the science of education, sustaining the lack of interest in generally acceptable educational universals; this subtle tradition is content with isolated educational philosophies, thus inclining towards atomistic dogma.