Educational Explanations. Christopher Winch

the society’s educational practices exist. They may be difficult to discern clearly if their articulation risks exposing divisions, sometimes painful, within the society.

If aims of education are to be met, then there must be some content in terms of knowledge and know-how to be imparted to young people which allows those aims to be met. This applies to any educational practice, whether formal or informal. That content is prescribed (Barrow 1976) and is what is deemed necessary to the achievement of educational aims.⁷ Where aims are implicit as they very often are, then they may be inferred from the prescribed content of education, the curriculum. Just as there must be a prescribed content in order for education to embody values and to be purposeful, so there must be methods of learning and teaching which are deemed to be the best way, both pragmatically and morally, for acquiring the prescribed knowledge and know-how. Again, these may be formal or informal, but they do need to exist. These can be called the pedagogical practices sanctioned by the society and, like the curriculum, they will not normally be allowed to contradict the aims and values of education.

      There need to be success criteria for any educational practice. We assume that such practices are purposeful and therefore that there are means of determining whether or not those purposes have been achieved, whether that be at the level of an individual session of instruction or learning, at the systemic level or at the level of completion of someone’s education. The family of such practices can be called assessment. Finally, educational practices require resources for their purposes to be achieved (Naik 1975). These include not only physical resources such as buildings and playgrounds but also intellectual resources such as textbooks, software and last, but by no means least, teachers.

A case has been made out for a categorial framework for thinking about education as set out briefly above. It is a corollary of our categorial account of the concept of education that there will be multiple realisations or conceptions of what education is. This follows from the fact that there are many different conceptions of a worthwhile life both between and within different societies. ‘X is a worthwhile life’ is in fact a concealed two-place predicate which, properly understood, amounts to ‘X is a worthwhile life for Y’ where Y is a particular person or category of people. It does not follow therefore that ‘X is a worthwhile life for Z’ where Z is not identical with Y.⁸ A conception of education is a particular instantiation of an educational practice within a society or within a particular social group within a society. A particular conception may also contain within itself views concerning whom the conception is appropriate for. It is more likely to be an exception rather than the rule that any preferred conception is considered to be universal, applying without exception to all groups at all times and places. In particular, it is often the case that an educational conception suitable for a group or individual X may be considered unsuitable for a group or individual Y, when what is considered to be worthwhile for X is not considered to be worthwhile for Y and vice versa. We may also expect to find disagreement among groups concerning what kind of education is suitable or worthwhile for them.

EDUCATION AND CONTESTABILITY

      So far we have argued that there is a categorial framework for thinking about education and educational practices. We have also argued that, within the framework, different conceptions of education will be found both between and within different societies. It is likely that there will often be disagreement about what is a suitable education and for whom. This points to a pervasive, if not universal feature, of education that particular conceptions and their suitability are contested between different groups. Sometimes these disputes will, as a matter of fact, concern which conception should be implemented and for whom. More likely though is the possibility that what is understood by rival conceptions may itself need interpretation, either because the contending parties are themselves not completely clear about what they are advocating, or because there is a misunderstanding between those contending parties concerning what they understand by those contending conceptions.

An example, which we shall further consider in Chapter 10, would be whether vocational preparation should count as education or as something else such as training Winch P. 2015.⁹ The issue can be seen as one of contesting conceptions between different societies, such as the Germanic tradition of Bildung and its related conception of Ausbildung or educative preparation for working life and the British tradition of training, which bears more relation to the classical Greek conception of vocational preparation mentioned earlier. These different conceptions come with their own conceptual frameworks, which include subtle conceptual variation in the concept of know-how between the two societies (see Brockmann et al. 2011). But the issue can also arise within a society such as Britain, where one can trace a change in the attitude to the educative role of industrial training in the post-war period and an increase in the influence of the idea of outcomes-based qualifications, which have their own conceptual peculiarities.

In this example we can see how substantive questions about educational policy and practice, for example – ‘what kind of vocational preparation should a developed country have?’ can become entwined with conceptual questions (and misunderstandings) about what exactly is vocational preparation (a conceptual question) or what should count as an acceptable form of vocational preparation and for whom (both a conceptual and a normative question). Here, as in other examples, investigation of the nature of an educational practice involves both questions about whether or not something is an educational practice and questions about what kind of educational practice it is or should be? We shall find that many empirical investigations of education involve a conceptual or hermeneutic element, both as preliminaries and as part of ongoing investigations. Failure to realise this and a lack of associated disciplinary expertise has often compromised the variety of approaches that are needed to effectively answer questions concerning education practice.

      Recognition of contestability and the pervasive fact of contestation about educational contexts and practices opens up another difficult element of the understanding of educational research. The fact that a concept or a practice is contested usually means that it is understood or viewed from different perspectives by different observers or participants. Even when there is no overt contestation, the very fact that different categories of individuals tend to have a different perspective from individuals in other involved categories introduces the fact of multiple perspectives on educational concepts and practices. In this connection we have already mentioned the importance of a hermeneutic role in considering the conceptual frameworks involved in EER, but we now need to also take account of the different perspectives that may arise on educational practice.

       Multiple Aspects and Phenomenology: Why Perspectivalism Does Not Have Relativistic Epistemological and Ontological Implications

One of the criticisms of much ‘qualitative’ educational research is that it adopts ontologically and epistemologically relativistic stands, maintaining that there are multiple realities which researchers need to take account of and that truths about one ‘reality’ do not necessarily apply to another and that each perspective is equally valid from the point of view of the researcher (an idea that seems to have been originally derived from the work of Schutz (1932, 1976) and which has been further developed and cast into more overt versions (Guba and Lincoln 1989; Schoonenboom 2018)).¹⁰ The reality of multiple, often contested, perspectives makes relativism a tempting option for the educational researcher struggling for a framework to take account of this very pervasive feature of education. However, it is a temptation which should be resisted as the price to be paid is too high to be acceptable.

      The first reason is that it seems to commit the researcher to a form of idealist ontology, where reality is perspective-dependent. This in itself threatens to compromise the possibility of providing an objective view of an educational practice, although it does seem to allow for disagreement and the making of mistakes within a perspective (von Wright 1971; Kölbel 2005). The second is that it threatens the possibility of applying the concepts of truth and falsity to beliefs about educational practices to any form of cross-perspectival judgement. The third is that it drastically limits