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Education: a discipline or a field?

  • Research Article
  • Published:
Frontiers of Education in China

Abstract

Historically, scholars have made unfailing efforts to position education as a standard science, but no solid success has been achieved regardless of the positivistic paradigm, quantitative approaches, or value-free neutral stances they adopted. In China, scholars have set up a so-called “three independency” standard for the scientific study of education, but it has been finally proved invalid in practice. As interdisciplines permeate the field of education, education experiences a crisis of being colonized. After serious rethinking, interdisciplines were widely believed to do more good than harm to education. Therefore, education is beginning to transform from a “colony” to an “empire”. In this transformation, education finds it necessary to break the traditional disciplinary boundaries and make it a field in which interdisciplinary communication is contributory to the enrichment of scholarship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Education, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, China

    Wang Hongcai

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  1. Wang Hongcai
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Correspondence to Wang Hongcai.

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Translated from Xiamen Daxue Xuebao (Zhexue Shehui Kexue Ban) 厦门大学学报 (哲学社会科学版) (Journal of Xiamen University (Arts & Social Sciences)), 2006, (1): 72–78

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Wang, H. Education: a discipline or a field?. Front. Educ. China 2, 63–73 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11516-007-0005-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11516-007-0005-z

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