Abstract
Through its own traditions, research programs, and collaborations with other human sciences, education is a discipline displaying an unbounded potency for advancing human understanding and achievement. Education is a humanistic discipline about culture rather than a scientific field about nature, so it can get classified as a nonscientific discipline because of its inherently historical and social orientation. Narratives about what children should be becoming and how they should be developing are normatively prescriptive, not just naturalistically descriptive. Why then would science serve education? Disciplines such as psychology, social theory, and anthropology are relevant to pedagogy because they bridge humanistic disciplines and naturalistic sciences: they are able to be human sciences. They themselves are hybrid blends, so their humanistic knowledge is salient to pedagogy’s understanding of the child’s learning and the practices of teaching. Although education is primarily a humanistic discipline oriented more to culture rather than nature, pedagogical practice can incorporate knowledge about childhood development, interpersonal communication, intellectual growth, and social integration. Education, while far more than scientific research, thereby joins the human sciences, contributing to scientific inquiry and cultural advancement simultaneously. Due to their similar priorities, education and science make an excellent fit. What is scientific and what is educational are unified at their root by exploratory discovery. With methods exemplifying that spirit of discovery, learners and teaching practices can be studied by the human sciences. Education’s humanistic ends are aided by knowledge about the nature of those to be educated.
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Shook, J.R. (2022). Abductive Inquiry and Education: Pragmatism Coordinating the Humanities, Human Sciences, and Sciences. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_49-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_49-1
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