American Educational Theory

Abstract

Charles J. Braunler has written an important book on American educational theory. He employs a method of investigation called research, which, for him, is missing link between a logical-speculative tradition prematurely abandoned and a body of immediately useful facts without theoretical portent (p. 4). Conceptual research strives to be scholarly, but in a sense different from that in which already-prescribed subjects sometimes too narrowly limit the work of scholars; conceptual research is speculative, in the sense that it creates categories of understanding which seek to give the advantages of a panoramic view of relationships among subjects; and yet conceptual research must be factual within the scope of the conceptualization created. An essential part of Brauner's conceptual research is a historical framework, in which history is traced of the ideas involved in the existing concepts that are the subject of the research. In Brauner's work, the concepts are those relevant to the study of education as an intellectual discipline. And so his American Educational Theory is conceptual research which seeks to 'probe in the direction of standards of scholarship for education as a discipline (p. 5).