Overview
Perspectives on Education as Educology was originally published in 1981 by the Philosophical Library in New York, making it the first major Anglophone text to argue systematically for the distinction between education as phenomenon and educology as knowledge. The 2018 revised edition updates the framework in light of the subsequent decade-long series of books while preserving the historical character of the original work.
Historical Significance
The 1981 original appeared at a moment when educational research was intensifying its engagement with the philosophy of social science — debating the relative merits of positivism and interpretivism, quantitative and qualitative methods, and the possibility of a genuine science of education. Christensen's contribution to this debate was distinctive: rather than choosing sides between positivism and interpretivism, he argued that both traditions had misidentified the fundamental problem. The problem was not which method to use but which questions to ask — and the confusion of analytic, normative, and empirical questions had made it impossible to ask any of them clearly.
Key Arguments of the Original Text
The 1981 text developed three arguments that remain central to the 2018 revision. First, that education is a natural kind — a set of phenomena with a definite logical structure that can be analyzed and described. Second, that educology — the knowledge about that natural kind — is a genuine academic discipline with its own standards of inquiry and verification. Third, that the development of educology requires a program of logical analysis that distinguishes the three kinds of educological inquiry and specifies the standards appropriate to each.
The 2018 Revision
The revised edition incorporates revisions to the taxonomy of knowing, the account of conduced learning, and the three-level architecture of education, educology, and meta-educology developed in the 2013–2018 series. It also adds a substantial new preface in which Christensen reflects on four decades of response to the original text — the criticisms it attracted, the applications it inspired, and the developments in educational research that have most clearly confirmed or challenged its central claims.