The presuppositions of educational theory

This work culminates an analysis of the presuppositions inherent in educational theories, epistemology, and philosophy of science, with an exposition of the three forms of scientific inquiry postulated by Apel: (1) theories with a main interest in explanation and control, as in behavioristic models in education; (2) theories with an emphasis in communicative understanding, as in Peters' concept of education as initiation; and, (3) approaches with a principal interest in emancipation from psychological or ideological impediments to understanding, as in the ideals inspiring A. S. Neil's Summerhill school. Apel sees these three interests as at the same time mutually exclusive and supplementary, proposing--through their combination--to integrate a comprehensive theory. Apel proposes to retake from Kant the project of abandoning a notion of actual or possible knowledge that refers to things-in-themselves in favor of a knowledge of real things, insofar as they can be experienceable, only the reflection should be based on the subjective and intersubjective conditions of both our bodily practical being-in-the-world and the linguistic processes of coming understanding of being-in-the-world.

The subject of education is an anthropological self that incorporates all the cognitive, emotional and psychological functions, along with psychosomatic dispositions to act as well as the social quasi-nature, and the corresponding ideological, psychopathological, cultural, linguistic, and epistemological impediments to understanding. On the other hand, educational theory should be informed by a proper acknowledgement of the three cognitive interests of science in order to better help the creation and development of forms of access to them.

The causal explanations and the hermeneutic-emancipatory understandings of human nature and quasi-nature are often based on functionalist models, helping reveal the causes and consequences of action and making clear in this way its value-relevance, allowing for informed choices in the moral plane. This suggests a definition of authenticity as the possibility of acting in accordance to functionally and morally informed guidelines. It is not that man needs to be freed from culture to become authentic but, quite the contrary, that only through education can man develop individuality, and develop an enhanced power to act and think rationally; with an increased understanding of the moral dimension of action, and a consolidation of personal traits, etc. If man enjoys freedom of thought, education has to be conceived, in quasi-existentialist terms, as dealing with an intentionality naturally capable of the highest rationality and also akin to the purest morality.