Understanding the Nature of Structures in Education: Recent Developments

In this paper I would like to talk about how 21 century education researchers could, and most likely, should approach the scientific description of the various entities that they might encounter. The word “entities” in pedagogical context refers to phenomena and structures such as “an education system”, “education”, “curriculum” or “motivation”. Let us take the entity or phenomenon that we all know as “an education system”. Taken at face value, an education system consists of various elements such as schools, management structures, financing structures, support structures, curriculum and curriculum planning, physical facilities, learners, educators, community support, and many more. We could say that it is relatively easy to describe these different elements of the education system and show how they all fit together to form an education system as a total structure. I would argue, however, that such a description would be scientifically indefensible for the mere fact that, in view of current scientific approaches, the description could be seen as simplistic and reductionistic. The purpose of the remainder of this paper is to offer grounds for this claim. I structured the paper as follows. I shall begin by briefly outlining three basic epistemological approaches, and then use that outline as the basis for a further discussion of how one could conduct research into pedagogical/educational structures in a manner that would circumvent simplistic and reductionistic descriptions.