Overview
Perspectives on Education as Educology was originally published in 1981 by University Press of America as a collection of essays which addressed the distinction between education as an object of knowledge and educology as the fund of knowledge about that object. Contributors included Wolfgang Brezinka, George Maccia, Anton Monshouwer, Elizabeth Steiner, John B. Biggs, James F. Perry, Charles M. Reigeluth, M. David Merrill, Diana Buell Hiatt, James E. Fisher, Marian Reinhart, John Walton, Edmund C. Short and David E. Denton.
Questions addressed included (1) What are the distinguishing characteristics of education as a field of phenomena? (2) What constitutes knowledge about education? (3) What is an appropriate name for knowledge about education? (4) What kinds of knowledge about education can be distinguished? (5) How is knowledge about education produced? (6) What uses can be made of knowledge about education? (7) How can knowledge about education be used to extend professional and vocational education? (8) How can knowledge about education be used to extend liberal education? Perspectives was republished in 2018 as an Amazon Kindle Edition.
Historical Significance
The 1981 original edition appeared at a moment when research about education was intensifying its engagement with the philosophy of social science — debating whether Education (spelled with a capital "E" to distinguish it from education in the sense of teaching and intentional guided studying) was a discipline in its own right or whether it borrowed from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, history and philosophy. The contributors to Perspectives offered a resolution to this debate by drawing the distinctions among:
(1) an object of knowledge — the field of phenomena denoted by the term education;
(2) the fund of knowledge about education as the object of the fund, denoted by the term educology;
(3) the categories of knowledge possible about education, including knowledge about (a) good states of affairs in education, (b) past states of affairs in education, (c) extant states of affairs in education, and (d) effective relations and practices in and for education;
(4) descriptive theory to be used in disciplined discourse about education and to make warranted knowledge claims about education;
(5) explanatory theory to be used to describe and predict controlling conditions and their resultants in education;
(6) normative theory to be used to evaluate states of affairs in education, to prescribe right, moral and/or ethical actions in education, and to justify those evaluations and prescriptions.
Key Arguments of the Original Text
The 1981 text developed three arguments that remain central to the 2018 revision.
First, for the purposes of educological research, the appropriate use of the term education is to use it to denote a field of phenomena in which someone teaches and someone studies intentionally under guidance some content in some setting to learn intentionally under guidance some prescribed range of knowing as specified by some intended learning outcome. This field is the object of knowledge for educology.
Second, educology is the systematized and organized set of recorded true statements which function descriptively about the field of phenomena denoted by the term education. Descriptive educological theory provides the set of well-defined terms for use in educological research to form factual statements about education. Explanatory educological theory provides statements which describe the implicative meaning of facts about education and thereby provide systematic organization of the facts. Normative educological theory provides evaluations of states of affairs in education, prescriptions for right and ethical actions in education, and justifications for the evaluations and prescriptions. The major subfunds of educology are philosophical educology, historical educology, jurisprudential educology, scientific educology and praxiological educology.
Third, the development of educology results from research which extends knowledge about education. This is achieved by proving (or falsifying) statements about education. At least three kinds of statements can be made about education, and each kind of statement, for it to be proven true (or falsified), requires the use of the appropriate principle of verification, the appropriate techniques for adducing evidence and the obtainment of the appropriate kind of evidence (that is both necessary and sufficient).
The 2018 Revision
The 2018 revised edition is essentially the same book as the original 1981 edition. Some typos were corrected, and remarks by George F. Kneller — Christensen's professor of philosophy of education at UCLA during his doctoral studies (1969–72) — were added at the beginning of the book.