Education Studies in a Different Key
Dr Karsten Kenklies explores the nature of education and of Education Studies as a discipline.
Imagine a dad, let’s call him Steve, who tries to teach his daughter Sarah how to ride a bike; now imagine Sarah sharing her new bicycle-riding insights with her best pal Dustin as he is still struggling with balancing as well; imagine Dustin going home where he meets his gran Sophia who needs his help with her new mobile phone (he always has to explain to her all the new gadgets she likes to buy – probably only because she really enjoys listening to Dustin lecturing her with great passion about the wonders of new tech); and now imagine Sophia attending one of her community evenings where she leads a class on knitting which Sarah’s dad Steve attends as he has heard that knitting would be a good remedy against stress, and he really wants to learn how to make himself a beanie (he lives in Glasgow’s West End, after all).
Although you may only imagine this scenario, it should not sound too far-fetched: we know those kind of relationships, and we all are involved in them in some way – some maybe more, some less. Looking a little closer, we realise that every person mentioned here is engaged in what we may call teaching and, hopefully, learning. Or, to use another word: everyone here is somehow involved in education. The remarkable thing is that the people described here are sometimes educating, sometimes learning; nobody is only an educator or only a learner, but everybody is an educator or a learner in different moments of their lives. Everybody is part of what we may call a pedagogical relationship in different ways, on different sides, at different moments.
You probably realise that this differs somewhat from the way people usually speak when they talk about education. More often than not when people talk about education, they really mean formal education, or schooling. They don’t think about all those instances of educating and learning that happen outside of schools (or other so-called educational institutions, like universities, or colleges) – events that are often called informal education and that are not occurring between professionals called teachers and their complementary subjects, typically known as pupils or students.
We could now ask ourselves what formal education and informal education have in common (after all, they are both called education and seem to be different kinds of something general, namely education, just like there are movies in general and there are different kinds of movies, like horror movies, rom-coms, comedies, adventures, etc.). Or, if they do not share any characteristics at all, are they therefore completely different activities?
If you ask yourself this question – the question ‘What is education?’ – and try to answer it by academic means, then you are engaging in what some would call the academic discipline of Education Studies. Why would it be viewed as an academic discipline? Because, just like biologists are interested in the phenomenon of life, psychologists in the phenomenon called the mind (or psyche), sociologists in what we often call society, or musicologists in music, the people investigating education would engage with the study of a particular phenomenon of our shared world – the phenomenon of education in which people are engaged in one or the other way for a substantial part of their lives. And just like in those other disciplines, there is a part of the discipline in which this fundamental notion – education – is discussed and reflected upon, since the scope of the whole discipline depends on an understanding of this basic definition like a harmony is built on a specific key note.
Conceived in this way, a discipline of Education Studies would stand independently next to other disciplines – like psychology or sociology, philosophy or neuroscience – but would incorporate the insights of all possible disciplines into its very own horizon, a horizon created by its particular inquisitive perspective unto the world. This perspective of interest is defined by the meaning of its central notion: education.
A possible – and, of course, debatable (and in Education Studies very much debated) suggestion for such a definition could be that the notion of education refers to all attempts to initiate, guide, or support the learning of someone: no matter where these attempts happen, between whom, for how long, to what end, or by which means. As can be seen, such a definition would contain all the events usually called formal and informal education as the location of the event. This location, whether an institution of learning or a family or somewhere else, has no bearing on whether something should be subsumed under the notion of education.
At the same time, such an understanding of education excludes everything that is accidental or involuntary learning, leaving such processes to psychologists to discuss in their generality, while the educationalists who base their work on such a definition are mainly interested in the ways of initiating, guiding, or supporting the learning of someone.
Of course, to discuss those ways appropriately, they would need to know something about the ways in which people learn – but, unlike researchers of other disciplines, they would look at those ways from the specific perspective of their possible initiation, guidance, or support. So, while psychologists, for example, look at the processes of learning in general, and sociologists study the broader societal context in which all learning takes place, educationalists (i.e. the researchers belonging to the discipline of Education Studies) look at learning processes inasmuch they can and should be initiated, guided, or supported (psychology of education), or they look at society inasmuch it frames and so influences the processes of the initiated, guided, or supported learning of someone (sociology of education). In the same way, every insight developed in other academic disciplines finds its place of relevance within the frame created by a basic definition of education and the horizon opened up by the fundamental questions for this basic notion; they all contribute to the harmony of the discipline.
In the perspective exemplified here, the intended teaching and (hopefully achieved) learning in schools or universities is as interesting as the attempted learning initiated by engaging in artistic practices (may that be the engaging in liturgy in a Scottish church or a tea ceremony in Japan or a solitary imaginative journey with the help of a book), or by educational encounters in playgrounds or prisons, between adults or children, between seniors or youths, between just about anyone, anywhere, anytime. All of those encounters have their own characteristics, but all of them share that they are education when they include the attempt to initiate, guide, and support the learning of someone – of someone else or oneself.
Being directed in this way, it maybe becomes clear that it is not a focus on a specific institution and everything that happens between its four walls that sets the tone and defines the discipline of Education Studies, but it is a specific set of research questions concerning a particular kind of human relationship (in which everyone can be and is involved in some way at some time) that constitute this academic discipline (just as any other academic discipline is defined by its specific questions, not by ever-changing answers to those questions).
Studying Education Studies, then, means to learn to ask the right questions – the question for education (‘What is education?’) and the questions about education (sometimes called the 6 W-questions: who educates whom in what and towards what, in what way, and why?). It means investigating and critically evaluating the answers that have been given throughout history up until now, here and everywhere else – and learning how to generate some new and academically acceptable answers to those old questions.
In engaging with research into these questions, the discipline also offers the opportunity for a higher reflexivity of those who are engaged in educational practice in some way, at some place, with someone. And although this might be a slightly too optimistic heritage of our Enlightenment era – the hope that heightened reflexivity inevitably leads to an improved practice, or to praxis – we still cannot usually live without this hope. But even the limitations of such hope are then insights of this very reflexivity, just as Kant states in the Preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Bxxx).
Education Studies conceived in this way is a classic social science, which includes perspectives of all the different academic styles that have emerged over the last millennia, i.e. from the humanities and their ways of research as well as approaches of the natural sciences, the structural sciences, or any other academic discipline or field of research, old and new.
This accounts for the sometimes turbulent discussions and communicative challenges and disharmonies – or even silences – between different researchers in this discipline and in any other social science – but it also explains the immense riches offered to those who are willing to engage: where else could you span the disciplinary horizon from the latest insights into the memorisation processes of the brain to the newest understandings of the command Zachor! of the Torah, from the ritual Walkabouts of the Australian Aboriginals to the contemporary economic analyses of capitalist tourism? All of those facets of human life – and many more – find their place in the colourful melody that is the scope of Education Studies; all of them somehow contribute to our ever-changing understanding of ourselves and the ways in which we organise our attempts to become who we are, who we want to be, and who we think we should be; all of them are an inextricable part of the realisation of our utopian visions for ourselves.
Karsten Kenklies
Published 28/03/2025
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