'Education is the new philosophy', to make a metadisciplinary claim for the learning sciences

Abstract

This chapter explores the marginal position and at times methodologically narrow focus of the discipline of education today. It suggests as a counterpoint that a much broader claim can be made for the significance and scope of education. Indeed, as the discipline which explores how humans come to know, and as the discipline deployed to initiate novices into every other discipline, education could make a claim - much as philosophy did until it slipped into practical irrelevance - that it is the discipline of disciplines, or metadiscipline. The chapter explores the implications of this move at a number of levels, from a strategic level in which education plays a pre-eminent role in the formation of 'knowledge society', to its implications for the pragmatics of pedagogy.