When educationalists are asked to define their own academic discipline of Education Studies, they often struggle to reach a common understanding. From an epistemological point of view, this indeterminacy leads back to...When educationalists are asked to define their own academic discipline of Education Studies, they often struggle to reach a common understanding. From an epistemological point of view, this indeterminacy leads back to the complex considerations involved in establishing a basic concept of education. In this article, the author explores in a preliminary fashion the possibility of identifying the essence of education in its performativity as an occurrence in context that always precedes and supersedes our theoretical considerations of it. Education is not to be understood primarily as something conceptual (theory) but rather in terms of its significance as a situational event (reality). Educational reality thus informs educational theory and this relationship implies a knowledge-ethical surplus of the former as an inexhaustible source for the latter.展开更多
文摘When educationalists are asked to define their own academic discipline of Education Studies, they often struggle to reach a common understanding. From an epistemological point of view, this indeterminacy leads back to the complex considerations involved in establishing a basic concept of education. In this article, the author explores in a preliminary fashion the possibility of identifying the essence of education in its performativity as an occurrence in context that always precedes and supersedes our theoretical considerations of it. Education is not to be understood primarily as something conceptual (theory) but rather in terms of its significance as a situational event (reality). Educational reality thus informs educational theory and this relationship implies a knowledge-ethical surplus of the former as an inexhaustible source for the latter.