Isolating Science from the Humanities

Abstract

The demand for scientifically-based educational research has fostered a new methodological orthodoxy exemplified by documents such as the National Research Council's Scientific Research in Education and Advancing Scientific Research in Education and American Educational Research Association's Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research in AERA Journals. This article criticizes the new orthodoxy as being a throwback to positivist reductionism and the “two dogmas” of educational research: the quantitative/ qualitative incompatibility thesis and fact/value dichotomy. It then criticizes the new orthodoxy for fostering a “third dogma” of educational research cut from the same cloth as the first two: the empirical science/humanities dualism. The article advances the view that no fundamental epistemological dividing line can be drawn between the empirical sciences and the humanities and that, accordingly, empirical research in education should not be cordoned off from the humanities, particularly their focus on values. It concludes with several observations about the problems and prospects for interdisciplinary research in education across the empirical science/humanities divide.