General Studies for Students in Further Education – A Critique and an Alternative |
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| Abstract: | It is surprising to see how rarely the ‘laws of reason’ or of scientific practice are examined by professional teachers. Modern education is ‘scientific’ because teachers often accept the cosmology of science as uncritically as once they accepted the cosmology of Popes and Cardinals. For them, science is a neutral structure containing positive knowledge independent of culture, ideology or prejudice. However, according to modern research in the sociology of knowledge and in the sociology, psychology, history and epistemology of science itself, there are no universal ‘standards of rationality’ and there are no value‐free or objective facts’ existing somehow ‘out there’. It is my claim that professional general educators falsely assume otherwise and that this infiltrates papers, aims, syllabuses, etc., in General Studies components of Further Education courses. General education is set within a positivist scientific rationality which determines in a taken‐for‐granted manner not only the aims and objectives of General Studies but also the methods and tools by which these may be tested and judged. |
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