Education: A Discipline or a Field?

Overview & Synopsis

Historically, scholars have made unfailing efforts to position education as a standard science, but no solid success has been achieved regardless of the positivistic paradigm, quantitative approaches, or value-free neutral stances they adopted. In China, scholars have set up a so-called "three independency" standard for the scientific study of education, but it has been finally proved invalid in practice. As interdisciplines permeate the field of education, education experiences a crisis of being colonized. After serious rethinking, interdisciplines were widely believed to do more good than harm to education. Therefore, education is beginning to transform from a "colony" to an "empire". In this transformation, education finds it necessary to break the traditional disciplinary boundaries and make it a field in which interdisciplinary communication is contributory to the enrichment of scholarship.