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 educational terms are actually used in discourse, and what that use implies about the logical structure of the phenomena they describe.
The book proceeds in three movements. First, it distinguishes the phenomena of education (the process of intentionally guided learning) from the knowledge 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 diagnose the conceptual confusion that pervades educational discourse and to propose standards of conceptual clarity for educational 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 educational discourse from the outside. Instead, he examines the way educational terms — "teaching," "learning," "curriculum," "education" itself — are used by practitioners, researchers, and policymakers, and asks what logical commitments those uses imply.
This approach yields several important results. It shows that "education" is systematically ambiguous between a process (the activity of intentionally guiding learning) and a product (the outcome of that activity, namely the acquisition of a prescribed range of knowing). 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
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 verified true statements — statements that have survived the scrutiny appropriate to their kind (logical scrutiny for analytic statements, normative scrutiny for normative statements, empirical scrutiny for empirical statements). The development of educology requires both the production of verified statements and the critical examination of candidate statements to determine whether they meet the relevant standards of verification.
This framework has direct implications for how educational research is evaluated and organized. It implies that research which produces statements without specifying their kind — without indicating whether they are analytic, normative, or empirical — cannot be properly evaluated, because the standards of evaluation differ across kinds. And it implies that the organization of educational knowledge requires attention to the logical relations among statements of different kinds, not merely their topical proximity.