The question regarding being rigorous and systematic, the role of the non-educational disciplines in educational research, any critical re-examination of these conditions of possibility, or the proposal to substitute this frame of reference with another are all preceded, I think, by a preliminary question: what is the prevalent objective, or what are the multiple goals, of educational research? If the goal is that of providing useful empirical evidence so as to improve existing educational practice, to make what is already working work better without putting it into question, then we find ourselves with a research perspective very different from that which proposes the critical examination of educational reality so as to discover something that is not already known, or to know “what is” without posing the problem of the immediate usefulness of the results. Both lines of inquiry are required to be “rigorous” and “systematic” so as to avoid being an incoherent sum of casual actions that ignore the problem of the rational justification of their own mode of operation. But the meaning of the two terms and the nature of research conceived in these different terms cannot be the same given the different goals pursued. The paper will mainly explore the Italian tradition of research and the evolution of the economic, social and political of these past thirty years, in which, in particular as regards empirical educational research, the question of being rigorous and systematic in one’s approach and methods, tend to be resolved by adhesion to international standards and to the current paradigm. This still happens less often in the historical and theoretical educational research, which tend to develop a dialectical relation to other traditions of thought, due to their attention to questions of a philosophical nature, which is held to be secondary in the other approach. But the usual tension between these two lines of research is gradually disappearing in favour of the hegemony of purely empirical research, that rapidly furnishes repertoires descriptive of contingent and local realities and identifyies scientific work with organizational work, classifying, calculating data. The ability to grasp facts qickly replaces that of being able to penetrate intellectually the phenomena of educational experience.

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