Educational research is subject to orthodoxies of old and novel kinds. On the one hand, the “foundations” approach becomes stuck in footnotes to received ideas, over-anxious about reinforcing boundaries; on the other, new-fangled disciplines seek legitimate themselves in jargon and deference to new “authorities”. The critical deficit in both tendencies stands in the way of responsible enquiry. I begin by sketching the weaknesses and the potential of the foundations approach, and go on to identify a range of threats to this potential – related to empiricism, assumptions about science, and the dominance of English. What is a good life, and how do you learn to live well? What is the good society, and how do you create it? These are matters of central importance for education, and they are there at the heart of philosophy. Such questions are unavoidable for human beings, explicitly so in a democracy. It is not that philosophy has a unique command of these matters, but such questions are not generally advanced in the manner of scientific progress, with an accumulation of knowledge and understanding. In a sense these are questions that each generation must take up for themselves, as the humanities attest to in various ways. It is a mistake to imagine that such matters are reducible to the terms of scientific method and understanding, though there is a prevailing empiricism that contends that this is not so. To condemn empiricism is emphatically not to criticise empirical research: it is to oppose the ideological belief that it is only through empirical research that education can be understood and advanced. The call for multi-disciplinarity is sometimes motivated by a reasonable suspicion of ivory-tower irrelevance. Sometimes, however, it constitutes a failure to face up to the demands of the questions themselves. It is a fallacy to suppose that the complexity of problems in education requires the convening of research teams (in the manner of science) because too often this lays the way for superficiality. But multi-disciplinarity does make sense, whereas post-disciplinarity does not. There is an internal relation between discipline, rigour, and coherence, and these, though not systematicity, are requirements of argument. The hegemony of English gives undue influence to monolingual Anglophone cultures. It promotes a language that obscures other ways of seeing the world. And, as second language, the English promoted is partly severed from ordinary usage, privileging the technical and hiding crucial requirements of educational thought.

Hodgson, N., and Standish, P. (2008) Network, Critique, Conversation: Towards a Rethinking of Educational Research Methods Training, in M. Depaepe and P. Smeyers (eds) Educational Research: Networks and Technologies, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 105-120. Kwak, D-J., and Standish, P. (eds)(2014) Cultivating Humanity and Transforming the Knowledge Society, special issue of Asia Pacific Education Review, 15.1, 1-153. Standish, P. (1995) Why we should not speak of an educational science, Studies in Philosophy and Education 14:2-3, 267-281. Standish, P. (2010) Calling Education to Account, in: Smeyers, P., and Depaepe, M. (eds) Educational research: The ethics and aesthetics of statistics, Dordrecht: Springer. Standish, P. (2013) What’s the use of philosophy of education?, in: A. Guilhelme, D. Lewin and M. White (eds) New Perspectives in Philosophy of Education (Bloomsbury). Standish, P. (2017) Making Sense of Data: Objectivity and Subjectivity, Fact and Value, Pedagogika.