Philosophy and the Study of Education: A Critique of the Common Sense Consensus

Abstract

That education is an interdisciplinary study, in which distinct disciplines or forms of knowledge are or should be brought together focusing on educational problems, is so widespread and apparently so intuitively plausible a view that it might be called the ‘common sense consensus’. A problem for this view is to explain how conceptually distinct elements from contributing disciplines can be brought together, or integrated. Recent discussion in the Australian Journal of Education both illuminates the problem and illustrates the misleading and unproductive features of the commonsense consensus. An alternative, pragmatist view of education as a set of competing and/or complementary theories, or ‘rationally analyzable considerations’, transcends and even discredits conventional disciplinary boundaries, especially between philosophy and empirical research, and offers a practical basis for theory and research.