“We want to talk about science as a certain kind of ‘knowing’.
Specifically, we want to use it to name those deeper forms of knowing that are the purpose of education.
Science in this broader sense consists of things you do to know that are premeditated, things you set out to know in a carefully considered way.
It involved out-of-the ordinary knowledge-making efforts that have a peculiar intensity of focus, rather than things you get to know as an incidental consequence of doing something or being somewhere.
Science has special methods or techniques for knowing.
These methods are connected with specialized traditions of knowledge making and bodies of knowledge.
In these senses, history, language studies and mathematics are sciences, as are chemistry, physics and biology.
Education is the science of learning (and, of course, teaching).
Its subject is how people come to know.
It teaches learners the methods for making knowledge that is, in our broad sense, scientific.
It teaches what has been learned and can be learned using these methods.
In this sense, education is privileged to be the science of sciences.
As a discipline itself, the science of education develops knowledge about the processes of coming to know.”
Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., 2012. New learning: elements of a science of education, Second edition. ed. Cambridge University Press.
Image: Neurons in the brain. Bryan Jones, University of Utah