Overview
Education, Educology and Meta-Educology: A Conversation (2018) uses the literary genre of an ordinary conversation to define, explicate and exemplify the distinctions among (1) an object of knowledge (education), (2) knowledge about that object (educology) and (3) knowledge about knowledge about the object (meta-educology). The purpose of the conversation is to eliminate ambiguity and achieve clarity in (1) careful, well-disciplined discourse about education and (2) careful, well-disciplined discourse about knowledge claims about education.
Three Levels of Discourse
Three levels of discourse in relation to education can be distinguished as Level 0, Level 1 and Level 2.
Level 0 — Education: the field of phenomena itself — in which someone teaches and someone studies intentionally under guidance some content to learn some prescribed range of knowing. Level 0 is not discourse; it is what discourse is about. Level 0 is the object of knowledge for educology. At Level 0, there is discourse in education among teachers, students and interested third parties, but there is no discourse about education.
Level 1 — Educology: the fund of recorded true statements about Level 0 phenomena — recorded true analytic, normative, and empirical statements about the elements, activities, processes and products of education. Educological research produces Level 1 discourse about the Level 0 phenomena that is education.
Level 2 — Meta-Educology: statements about Level 1 statements — about the logical form, verification conditions, and epistemic status of educological claims. Meta-educology asks: what kind of statement is this? How should it be verified? What does it presuppose? This is the level at which logical auditing of educological discourse occurs.
Why the Distinctions Matter
The dialogue format allows Christensen to demonstrate — rather than merely assert — the practical importance of these distinctions. Through a series of exchanges in which interlocutors make moves across levels without realizing it, the book shows how level confusion generates the characteristic errors of educological discourse: treating conceptual questions as empirical ones, drawing normative conclusions from empirical premises without normative argument, and making meta-educological claims while appearing to make educological ones.
The conversation also addresses a common objection: that the three-level distinction is artificial or overly academic, that real educological discourse does not need such precision. Christensen's response is that the absence of such precision is not neutrality but confusion — that the errors generated by level confusion have real practical consequences for educational policy and practice, and that the effort required to maintain the distinctions is modest compared to the cost of the confusions they prevent.