Researching education (Anurag Behar, South Asia Monitor)

Almost everyone agrees that we need good research to help improve education. There are two kinds of research that can be done and have been done. The first one asks research questions from within the field of education. This is informed by educational thought and epistemic issues, the aims of education and its practices, and the perspectives of the students, teachers and communities involved. The second kind takes the aims, concerns and practices of education for granted, and investigates issues in education from the perspective of other disciplines. The anchors and lenses of such research is of that discipline and other areas of social policy, not the field of education. This kind may also have relevance and is usually done by economists, political scientists, sociologists and scholars from similar intellectual backgrounds. In our present Indian context, there is too little of the former and so the second kind gets disproportionate attention of policymakers and the public. Since education is not the primary perspective of such research, it also often focuses on issues of peripheral importance to the reality of education.

http://southasiamonitor.org/detail.php?type=cult&nid=16615