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A Companion to Research in Education pp 101–115Cite as

‘Education Is the New Philosophy’, to Make a Metadisciplinary Claim for the Learning Sciences

Abstract

This chapter explores the marginal position and at times methodologically narrow focus of the discipline of education today. It suggests as a counterpoint that a much broader claim can be made for the significance and scope of education. Indeed, as the discipline which explores how humans come to know, and as the discipline deployed to initiate novices into every other discipline, education could make a claim – much as philosophy did until it slipped into practical irrelevance – that it is the discipline of disciplines, or metadiscipline. The chapter explores the implications of this move at a number of levels, from a strategic level in which education plays a pre-eminent role in the formation of ‘knowledge society’, to its implications for the pragmatics of pedagogy.

Keywords

  • Pedagogy
  • Disciplinarity
  • Epistemology
  • Knowledge Society
  • Science

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter reworks and extends ideas begun in our New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, 2008.

  2. 2.

    Our Learning by Design project is an attempt to frame these concepts in pedagogical practice. See L-by-D.com.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Mary Kalantzis

  2. Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Bill Cope

Authors
  1. Mary Kalantzis
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  2. Bill Cope
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mary Kalantzis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Alan D. Reid

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

    E. Paul Hart

  3. Hamilton Campus, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Michael A. Peters

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Kalantzis, M., Cope, B. (2014). ‘Education Is the New Philosophy’, to Make a Metadisciplinary Claim for the Learning Sciences. In: Reid, A., Hart, E., Peters, M. (eds) A Companion to Research in Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6809-3_13

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