Overview
Education, Knowledge and Educology (2013) is the opening volume of Christensen's decade-long project to reconstruct educology on rigorous analytic foundations. Its central method is ordinary language analysis — the careful examination of how terms are actually used in educological discourse, and what that use implies about the logical structure of the phenomena they describe.
The book proceeds in three parts. First, it distinguishes the phenomena of education (the field of phenomena in which someone teaches and someone studies intentionally under guidance) from the knowledge (recorded true statements) about those phenomena (educology). Second, it identifies the kinds of knowledge that constitute educology — analytic, normative, and empirical — and the logical structure of each. Third, it uses these distinctions to identify the conceptual confusion that pervades educological discourse and to propose standards of conceptual clarity for educological inquiry.
Ordinary Language Analysis as Method
Christensen's use of ordinary language analysis is deliberately non-technical. He does not import a formal logical apparatus from philosophy of science and impose it on educological discourse from the outside. Instead, he examines the way terms — "teaching," "learning," "curriculum," "education" itself — are used by practitioners, researchers, and policymakers, and asks what the logical implications are of the ambiguous use of those terms in educological discourse.
This approach yields several important results. It argues that the most appropriate use of the term "education" in educological discourse is to use it to denote the field of phenomena in which someone teaches and someone studies intentionally under guidance — a set of activities, not a process. Conduced learning (intentional guided learning) is the process (a change in cognitive state over time) that results when education is effective. It shows that "teaching" implies the existence of a student but not the occurrence of learning — teaching can fail, but the failure does not mean that teaching did not occur. And it shows that many apparent empirical disputes about education are actually conceptual disputes about the meaning of terms, which cannot be resolved by collecting more data.
The Fund of Knowledge About Education
Christensen's characterization of educology as a "fund of knowledge" is precise and consequential. A fund of knowledge is not a collection of opinions or perspectives but a body of recorded true statements — statements that are warranted to be true because the necessary and sufficient evidence has been adduced by the appropriate kind of inquiry (analytic inquiry for analytic statements, normative inquiry for normative statements, empirical inquiry for empirical statements). The development of educology requires a match between the kind of statement that is being presented for verification and the kind of inquiry that is appropriate for verification of that statement.
This conceptual framework for the conduct of educological inquiry (or research) has direct implications for how educological research should be conducted, organized and evaluated. If educological researchers fail to correctly ascertain that their research questions are about some aspect of education, then they fail in their endeavors to produce knowledge about education. If they fail to correctly identify the kind of statement that they are seeking to verify, they run the risk of misguided research — conducting empirical research when analytic research or normative research is indicated — and arriving at mistaken and/or unfounded conclusions. Both types of mistakes lead to failure in extending educology.