The International Context of Educational Research[1

Abstract

Thirty years ago, in 1952, a workshop on the role of educational research was organised jointly by the American High Commissioner's office and the German Institute for International Educational Research in Frankfurt on the subject of the bearing that educational research could have on current problems in German school education. Some twenty German professors of education from universities or Hochschulen for teacher training were invited along with a dozen researchers from the rest of Western Europe and from the United States. The purpose, I assume, was to bring Germans, who for obvious reasons had been rather isolated, into contact with colleagues from abroad, but I suspect that the organisers also regarded the workshop as a refresher course. Many of the professors had a background in the history and philosophy of education and tended-to use a favourite term of today-to apply a different 'paradigm' from their colleagues from abroad in tackling the problems we decided, after a two-week briefing period, to put on the agenda for the six-week workshop. I still vividly remember a heated discussion on whether the empirical-the word was not yet 'neo-positivist'-approach used by educational psychologists with their measuring rods was of any use in educational research. My American colleagues were rather shocked by the allegation that the methods they had learned in courses on tests, measurement and statistics were of little or no use, or even suspect. [2] Others, like myself, had more understanding, since some of us were familiar with the German philosophy providing the backbone to humanistic research, particularly the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, who in a famous paper from the 1890s programatically denied that what John Stuart Mill [3] had referred to as moral philosophy, and others later as behavioural sciences, could employ the methods of the hard sciences. The humanistic approach was the one of Verstehen, understanding, whereas the hard sciences tried to erkidren, explain. But John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte had proclaimed that all genuine endeavours had to emulate those established by the hard sciences. I shall not go further into this but simply mention that since then the pendulum, on both sides of the Atlantic, has begun to swing back. There is a strong countermovement against the positivist approach, even to the extent that it is denounced as an instrument of the capitalist system of oppression and dehumanisation. Within a short time, a group of younger German professors of education will be producing an encyclopedia of educational research [4] in which they deliberately try to advance a qualitative, understanding and interpreting or, to use another word from the jargon