For an Education Epistemology

The fragmentation of the problematic object of the educational process, subsumed under the interpretative models and explanatory hypotheses of the so-called “educational sciences”, raises complex questions of a methodological and epistemological nature. The object of investigation, in fact, whether it remains circumscribed within the ahistorical epistemological horizon of classical scientific research or whether it is placed along the cultural axis of the scholastic social system, qualifies as a carving out of a territory at the crossroads of the specific sciences. On the one hand, it leads to the enlargement of pedagogical areas of intervention, and on the other hand to a change in the organizational reference frameworks of research. It is not a negligible fact that the push for the epistemological rupture of functionalist, positivist reading schemes, with accentuations of methodological privilege aimed at quantifying and measuring the educational process, derives from the crisis of the industrialization-education-economic development nexus. What is particularly questioned is precisely the “objective” and privileged explanatory character of those models of interpretation aimed at the reification of the educational process, its “naturalization” through the concepts, categories and methodologies of the physical-natural sciences and its scotomization through the a-historicization of categorical schemes extrapolated from the socio-psychological sciences as “social class”, “ability”, “intelligence”, etc. Faced with the new post-causalistic awareness of the complexity of the object of investigation of the educational process, the fundamental epistemological question is outlined around the possibility of a science of education. Of a science, that is, that is significantly connoted as a “critical” science, not content-based, devoid of characteristics of fixity or static, but in continuous metamorphosis with the methodological and conceptual segments of the educational process.