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- Title
Knowledge Without Contexts? A Foucauldian Analysis of E.L. Thorndike's Positivist Educational Research.
- Authors
Saari, Antti
- Abstract
The article discusses the allegedly decontextualized and ahistorical traits in positivist educational research and curriculum by examining its emergence in early twentieth-century empirical education. Edward Lee Thorndike's educational psychology is analyzed as a case in point. It will be shown that Thorndike's positivist educational psychology stressed the need to account for the reality of schooling and to produce knowledge of the actual contexts of education. Furthermore, a historical analysis informed by Michel Foucault's history of the human sciences reveals that there are multiple historical temporalities involved in Thorndike's educational psychology. This allows a new critical angle to be taken on positivist educational research. The question concerning the contexts of empirical education turns to examining the way the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge in education involve practices of contextualization as well as paradoxical and self-defeating elements.
- Subjects
EDUCATION research; THORNDIKE, Edward L. (Edward Lee), 1874-1949; EDUCATIONAL psychology; FOUCAULT, Michel, 1926-1984; SCIENTIFIC knowledge
- Publication
Studies in Philosophy & Education, 2016, Vol 35, Issue 6, p589
- ISSN
0039-3746
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11217-016-9527-2