ABSTRACT
Education is rooted in the mixed situations that confront us in daily life and uses concepts that derive from a variety of disciplines. Each of these disciplines brings to the study of education concepts that are illuminating but may also be distorting. The economist of education must be an educationist as well as an economist, and the best are. To speak of education as an industry, or to apply notions of 'productivity' as if its purpose was to deliver a priced output to a market in relation to so many man-hours of teacher labour, is to distort thinking and policy making. This chapter looks at three ways of thinking about education, and discusses something about their nature and why alone they can rarely 'give us the answers'. These three ways are the philosophical, the pedagogical and the administrative. The individual teacher and research worker must understand the kind of thinking an educational administrator does.
