ABSTRACT
Any attempt to survey the literature of education is fraught with formidable difficulties. Education can be variously defined as (i) ‘the total processes developing human ability and behaviour’; (ii) a ‘social process in which one achieves social competence and individual growth, carried on in a selected, controlled setting which can be institutionalised as a school or college’; and (iii) ‘in the sense of theory of education or disciplines of education’ (Page and Thomas, 1977). Most definitions also embody a distinction customarily made in Britain between education and training, with the latter defined as ‘systematic practice in the performance of a skill’ as in industrial training or teacher education (Page and Thomas, 1977), but this distinction has less to do with aims and purposes (which clearly have much in common) than with a history of separate organisation and development. Furthermore, whether education is a discipline in its own right is often challenged. Storer’s argument that education is best regarded as a ‘conjunctive domain’ whose focus is ‘a socially relevant whole rather than a natural cluster of abstract phenomena’ (Storer, 1970, p. 123), reflects the uneasy status of a field of study which draws much of its strength from perspectives rooted in the so-called ‘parent disciplines’ of philosophy, history, sociology, psychology and, more recently, politics, economics and operational research. While this conceptual and methodological eclecticism alone would provide a daunting challenge for the documentalist, the diversity of professional and other interest-groups concerned (see below) adds a further dimension of complexity to an already tangled web.
