Conant on Education as a Discipline

Extract

In his The Education of American Teachers, Dr. James B. Conant rejects the idea that education is an academic discipline. The argument he develops is a logically simple one that follows a rather familiar pattern. Education, like medicine, is both a practical art where scientifically derived generalizations may helpfully guide action, and a deductive-theoretical endeavor where the “wide premises of culture,” largely unexamined, condition decision-making. And in education, since these two “modes of thought”—the practical and the theoretical—are inseparable, it is impossible to designate so “vast a field of human activity directed toward practical ends” as a separate science or a discipline. For knowledge and insight into the nature of education and medicine, the teacher and the physician cannot turn to the “educationist” or the “medicinist,” but must look to those established independent sciences and disciplines that touch upon these areas of human service. The doctor has such sciences as biology and chemistry to which to turn for truth about the healing arts; the teacher has the educational sciences which are the academic disciplines—political science, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, and sociology—from which to get understanding about the teaching arts. In this way does Conant the logician destroy the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of a separate discipline of education and, in the process, reassert the legitimacy of the claims of the scholarly sciences and disciplines over this now fractured and disposesssed academic orphan.