Article Type : Research Article
Authors : Maury-Mena SC
Keywords : Social sciences; Education; Human evolution; Human history
The essay collects reflections on the historical and
social development of two fields inherent to the human being: Science and
Education. Science emerges as a new type of vision about perceptible reality,
which transcends other types of possible explanations, among them, mythological
or subjective ones derived from common sense, through a process that was
perfected over the centuries. Education, seen at the beginning as a mechanical,
instructional or indoctrinating activity (relegated to the abstract terrain of
Philosophy), re-emerges in the middle of the 20th century, after the debacle of
the Second World War, as a transforming process of man, for a new world.
Therefore, the essay also analyzes the claim of the Social and Human Sciences,
as a tool that enabled the construction of transformative consensus during the
post-war period, to achieve the recovery of the human sense, which is common to
peoples and nations as a social whole. Finally, the document addresses the need
for research in Education, in order to understand and improve teaching and
learning processes, being a field in which other related sciences, such as
Psychology and Neurology, converge. The conclusions reinforce the analysis,
showing the harmonious way in which knowledge and humanism are integrated
through the processes of Science and Education, as a reflection of the human
condition.
Research as a human activity: early days and consolidation
At a general level, research activity has been linked
to human development [1,2]. With the advent of Homo sapiens, the evolutionary
process initiated, in the hominid and primate ancestors, continues. Several
variants of the human being arise that, due to the effects of adaptation to the
environment, prospered or disappeared. This "wise man" was
characterized by a remarkable brain growth, walked in a bipedal form (Homo
erectus), possessed the characteristic five fingers with opposable thumb in each
hand and formed nomadic groups that spread throughout the continents, from
Eurasia and Africa, in search of food and moderate climates [3]. This
incomparable intelligence allowed him or her to use his or her hands to
manufacture hunting or building materials (Homo habilis), perfect guttural
growls to generate sounds close to language, learn to communicate by means of
signs; his or her facial features moved away from those of the primal primate
to adopt the features we now possess. Of these ancestors are dated remains so
ancient that anthropologists agree that the so-called «prehistory» is one of
the longest periods of humanity, which would comprise the appearance of
man-hominid and the emergence of the first human tribes, characterized by
sedentary activities that have been traced through cultural vestiges, such as
pictograms, pottery or writing [4]. Therefore, it is estimated that prehistory
covers between the year 500.000 and the year 4.000 a.c [5]. The prehistoric
ancestor laid the foundations of what would become the current human being, and
has been the only species on the planet that took advantage of natural
resources to improve its quality of life; a characteristic that prevails to
this day [6]. It is not surprising, then, that in this first human being, other
intrinsic qualities that accompany our species were born: curiosity, the use of
imagination and the symbolic capacity to interpret reality. In this way, the
first existential questions arose about the universe and the role of humans in
the cosmos they would look at the stars in the night sky, the infinity of the
sea or the inexhaustible horizon, wondering: what are they? and why are they
there?, to become an even more disturbing question: who am I and what is my
role in all this immensity? [7].
Exhausted mythological explanations, associated with higher divinities, a new kind of vision about perceptible reality was generated in the human being [6]. By the 5th century BC, a mode of thought based on obtaining true knowledge by cause was developed in Ancient Greece, which surpassed the archaic way of knowing exclusively by means of senses and simple empirical reasoning [doxa]-subjective and limited-, in favor of a conceptual approach to knowledge grounded in the logical structuring of cause and consequence [episteme] [8]. One of its greatest exponents was Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) who, in his Posterior Analytics, indicates (or rather teaches) that knowledge close to the truth [alêtheia] should set out its basic principles, on the basis of demonstrations, to draw concrete conclusions about them a procedure that, after being purified over the centuries, continues to this day. From Aristotle, the Greeks differentiate two types of knowledge: the ability to relate principles (episteme) and the superior ability to understand those principles, which they called "intelligence" [nous] [9]. Hence the word "science" comes from the Latin ‘scientia’: the equivalent of the Greek ‘episteme’. Aristotle based his model of knowledge acquisition on the geometric method, so widespread among the Greek sages and that would subsequently address Euclid, in which "mathematical precision" explains the universal order (cosmos), which is knowable by man through logical reason. Aristotle distanced himself from the inductive consideration of knowledge -raised by Plato- and promoted a deductive system of knowledge based on the verification of explanatory theses of reality that are general and universalist [10]. Nevertheless, not all human knowledge behaves with the precision of mathematics, and often obeys anarchic principles of conflicting forces [11]. For example, historical knowledge deals with human events that are not governed by verifiable and predictable general rules. For that reason, the Greeks considered that science could not be done with History, as well as with Biology, Chemistry and Physics, which do not allow to be generalized through postulates or axioms, but are based on a contrary -inductive- method, from which data are extracted experimentally [12]. Aristotle himself realized this, because observation and empirical experience are unique in that enable the classification of individuals in nature. Thus, since the emergence of Western philosophy in Greece -as epistemological foundation of knowledge- there has been a distinction between an experimental science (to differentiate it from experience), of an empirical nature, that intervenes and modifies the elements that it studies; and a science based on observation, which takes as object of study a part of reality, as it is given in sensitive knowledge, without any elaboration or manipulation [13]. Chemistry would be an example of experimental science, since it is based on the combination of elements or substances by the scientist and elementary astronomy, an example of «observational science», since it does not modify or originate anything, but is limited to observing the motion of the stars [14]. At the same time, both incorporate measuring and data collection elements, quantifiable and verifiable (which will later give rise to scientific positivism) [15]. The study related to human beings and their behavior was relegated to the abstract terrain of philosophy, along with ethics, politics, society... and education itself (Camacho Verdugo and Morales Paredes 2020), which originates from the Greek term paidagogós [pedagogy] which means paidos (child) and gogy ("lead" or "carry"), referring to the first pedagogues, who were slaves in charge of taking children to school [16]. This concept would remain imperturbable until the middle of the 20th century with the advent of anthropology, sociology and psychology. In this way, over the centuries, each science (experimental or observational) acquires its own status, characterized by principles and methodology that are particular to it, but still linked to a philosophical vision and sense.This is the case of the Middle Ages, in which coexisted the diversity of sciences and their methods in line with metaphysics as "first science", which gave reason to the others [17]. hat is, the Greek approach was retaken, which in Latin was defined as cognito certa per-causas [obtain certain knowledge by causes]. Faith and reason were linked and mutually validated [18]. With the Renaissance modern science began, closely linked to the rescue of the work of ancient thinkers such as Archimedes, Euclid and Pythagoras and the revitalization of Platonic philosophy as opposed to Aristotelian scholastics, worn in previous centuries [9]. Humanism will encompass all the expressions of the human being: art, philosophy and science, which will remain in force until today; in a wide period that spanned from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century A.D., a series of changes occurred in Western thought, which meant an awakening to the wonders of nature and the role of the human being in the universe [1]. At this point, a renewing mentality occurred, for Western culture that was manifested in the separation of philosophy and science, faith and reason [19]. Galileo worked on his scientific process based on simplicity - which challenges the doctrine of the church and its conception of the Cosmos- being prosecuted for it [20]. Kepler established the conditions of intelligibility of a scientific theory. Newton defined the notions of motion, space and time and their mechanical application; Leibniz offered the infinitesimal calculus attached to his theory of infinity. These and many other ideas, at the time "revolutionary", spread throughout Europe with the invention of the printing-press by Johannes Gutenberg. New inventions of measurement and calculation emerged, which gave man greater dominion over nature, overcoming mysticism which allowed, among other things, that in 1492 Christopher Columbus reached the American continent looking for an alternate route to China (the Indies). It was a period in which mathematics was conceived as a "divine language", a means of knowing the design and order of the universe, a whole [21]. The period of greatest peak for science happened between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by the search for a definitive method that would enable science to reach general results (theories and laws) that did not depend on or were attributed to verifications of philosophical postulates what would be called later as scientific method. This accumulation of contributions from thinkers and scientists (such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, William Whewell, among others), would lead to the widespread acceptance of the principles that would characterize, henceforth, science and its derivatives:
The
importance of the scientific method is such that without it science cannot develop:
it is the strategy of scientific research that is applied through the
quantitative methodology, focused on the object of study and statistical
analysis to verify hypotheses from their explanation. Which is why the
scientific method bases its results on the rigorous examination of numerical
data from the field of statistics (variables, percentages, averages), which can
be measured and quantified. Wherefore, the scientific character will be linked
to the characteristics of the quantitative methodology: be rigorous, objective,
verifiable, seeking to identify patterns and verify hypotheses, theories; with
this, the operation of universal laws can be discovered [22]. From that moment
on, it is considered that all disciplines that use the scientific method are
science, for example, Biology and Physics; but, again, the disciplines that do
not use it, such as Psychoanalysis, Geography or Anthropology, are relegated.
In the 19th century, with the rise of the industrial
revolution, the so-called theory of scientific modernization» gained momentum.
This theory synthesized the belief that, after the process of
industrialization, modern institutions would gradually develop societies in
which the economic and social progress, that science provided through the
improvement of the quality of life of individuals, would be implanted (use of
electricity, innovation of steam and petrol engines, the locomotive). A process
of development that every society would eventually reach, until achieving an
orderly and stable world system [23]. This paradigm was founded on the idea of
a rational, empirical and scientific «social science», possessed only by the
great powers of that time: Germany, the British Empire, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, imperial Russia, France and the United States; which, with the
exception of North America, were monarchical empires that conceived science as
part of their progressive effort at civilizing transformation, which would
encompass the entire world. However, this would not happen and, with the entry
into the 20th century, humanity plunged into a series of conflicts and
political instabilities that peaked with the outbreak of the so-called
"Great War" in 1914 [24]. The debacle of World War I (1914-1918) had
a catastrophic effect on the European belief system and the hegemony of
positivist science as the only valid source of knowledge. Before
industrialization, the number of deaths in battles did not exceed 15% (with few
exceptions); but, from 1914, with the mass of rifles, machine guns and cannons,
it would reach 70%. Before, the rear was shaken by invasions of enemy armies
for looting and taking prisoners; with the First World War, the rear, where
rest the wounded and displaced civilians, would be completely destroyed as war
propaganda to demoralize warring nations or cause their political and social
destabilization.
The First World War would end the romantic concept of
war; of soldiers and officers in huge plume and lace hats; of uniforms with
showy epaulets and glittering medals, to make way for the massive
industrialization of homogeneous and expendable soldiers, in favour of pyrrhic
victories; points on a map that perished by thousands, rotting in muddy and
unhealthy trenches [25]. The "Great War" launched the use of science
and machine in all its apogee: in the air, with airships and bombing planes; on
the ground, with the appearance of tank, chemical weapons, and flamethrower; at
sea, with the submarine, to equally destroy enemy ships and convoys of food or
supplies. The First World War was the midwife of the first socialist state: the
Soviet Union, and destroyed the Europe that claimed itself as
"civilized", rational and colonizing, to turn it into an example of
savagery, causing more than 38 million casualties, among dead, missing and
mutilated. This provoked waves of migrants of multiple nationalities, who fled,
in terror, to North and South America, running away from famine, disease and
death [26]. The impact and consequences of the First World War were apocalyptic
on the European continent: secular monarchies would fall, millenary empires
would disappear and consecutive periods of social and political instability
would ensue throughout the continent that would have repercussions on the rest
of the planet. Yet, devastating as it was, the First War was only the
progenitor of an even more gritty and lethal war (World War II), characterized
by the rise of totalitarian regimes, which culminated in the use of atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States (indisputable victor) in
1945. Bombs that were the result of decades of research into atom division and
electron behavior. Both wars -only twenty years apart- meant the perversion of
science, which was focused on a single purpose: kill and destroy [27]. If the
First War devastated Europe, the Second plunged it into ruin, not only material
but moral. And, after the horrors of the concentration camps, the machinery and
the numerical precision put at the service of massacre, came the questions that
plunged science into a deep darkness: How was it possible for the nations that
cradled the greatest civilizing ideals to reach such extremes of destruction?
How could their inhabitants be capable of committing such atrocities in the
name of a political party, a Fuehrer or an ideology? The answers were not found
in mathematical perfection, but in the labyrinths of the human psyche: in
psychology, sociology and the renewed Human Sciences. One of them, education.
The promises of reason and science fell into the
unbelief of a skeptical world that saw them with contempt, because they
engendered the monsters that devoured it during the first half of the twentieth
century: the incarnate nightmare of reason, which could only be reconciled with
the human species after man’s arrival on the moon in 1969. As the planet
readjusted itself to the polarization of the hegemonic socio-political blocks
of the post-war era: communism and capitalism, the Social Sciences resurfaced
as a sounding board of the human effort for reconciliation and historical
shame. The Social Sciences evoked the lesson that nations, alienated by war,
refused to attend: humanity is part of the same species, mediated only by
elements of language and culture, but with the inherent possibility of building
transformative social consensus. Therefore, human nature is constructive, not
destructive; it is communicative, not isolationist; it finds strength in
diversity and not in extermination [28]. Through Human Sciences, a call is made
for the recovery of the meaning given to a system of values mediated by the
family, the school, the city, the state. Because man becomes human in
conversation, sharing and coexistence. There is no possibility of knowing but
through communication with others, from participation in interconnected
networks of knowledge; of reconnecting thought and action, myth and reason,
mind and body. Therefore, the Social Sciences require a valid system of
knowledge that is recognized as science, like the rest of human knowledge;
bearing in mind that, from their point of view, knowledge is first and foremost
an adaptive strategy to the environment; a continuity from the biophysical to
the sociocultural, for the human being is both a biological and a social being,
mediated by language and culture [29]. Consequently, after the Second World
War, the surviving nations focused their efforts on facing the challenges in
social and economic matters, without specifying the differences that involve
the relationships between applied cognitive strategies and the social link,
according to gender and generation, social groups, and local culture; seeking
values such as universal acceptance of human rights, the rights of children,
the right to life, food and education. That is, the rights inherent in the
human condition. Terms thus emerged to distinguish this epoch of «postmodern
society», such as: post-industrial, post-capitalist, post-cold war,
post-national, among others. There was a search for the collective identity of
a planet that was slowly coming out of the shock of past world wars and the
uncertainty of falling into a third war, this time atomic and definitive [30].
The Social and Human Sciences had a common origin also in Greek philosophical
thought, which was later taken up by the enlightened thought of the eighteenth
century. Then, there was a current of social researchers who assimilated the
quantitative methodology and the positivist paradigm while others, in contrast,
used a methodology called «qualitative», derived from the data collection
system adopted by Psychology and Anthropology, to comprehensively address
social phenomena: case studies, participatory observation, in-depth interviews
[31]. Since then, the use of both paradigms has been considered valid for the
Social Sciences, since neither is intrinsically better than the other and they
are only different approaches to study a phenomenon everything will depend on
the objective of the researcher, who must approach the social reality found
[32]. Qualitative analysis is based on hermeneutics and phenomenology; it
focuses on the researcher, and uses tools such as the field journal and case
studies in order to build hypotheses from understanding. The qualitative method
will be used, as it currently is, when the aim of the research is to describe
the qualities of a given social phenomenon. However, in the development of a
research that uses qualitative methodologies, it will also be possible to make
a positivist treatment of the information.
Currently, a consensus has been reached that advocates
complementarity between qualitative and quantitative approaches to education
research. Whereby, both paradigms are used. Neither is better than the other,
everything will depend on the objective of the research study; and even, it is
possible that there are studies, called «mixed», that require the union of both
methods. Thus, educational researchers use the most appropriate methods to the
needs of their research, considering the possible combination of both from
their criterion of validity. In other words, the two methods can be combined
and add attributes, achieving the appropriate fusion to respond to the research
problem posed. Considering education as a social science, epistemology (that
is, the study of knowledge: how it is acquired, validated and what are its
limits), allows a critical and integral analysis of the educational process as
a whole, but it also serves as a foundation for science teaching; that is, from
the understanding of concepts, methods and laws of scientific knowledge,
improvements can be generated in teaching and learning processes [33].
Educational research allows to understand and improve the factors involved in
the teaching and learning processes, so it represents a field of research for
other related sciences such as psychology and neurology. Still, the educational
researcher goes beyond understanding how the human mind works and how it
processes knowledge data; he or she is also interested in the interaction and
behavior of educational actors, the functioning of educational institutions,
the effects of educational practice or how the results of educational processes
can be improved, also through innovation. With a scientific look, educators,
with their research, draw conclusions about reality, educational phenomena and
observed phenomena; analyse the relationship between the elements that make up
a given educational situation and decide how best to intervene in it to improve
it. Therefore, the need to investigate in Education arises at the moment that
you want to know better the functioning of a given educational situation -be a
subject, a group of subjects, a program, a methodology, a resource, an observed
change, an institution or an environmental context-, or you want to answer
multiple questions that appear, about how to improve educational actions. The
combination between the genesis of knowledge and its potential to transform
reality through innovation and the improvement of everyday practices means
that, sometimes, it is referred to as Research and Development (R&D):
expression that is usually used to designate research actions linked to
economic investment, either with public or private funds, to promote
improvements in industrial and technological practices and in the products
derived from them and, in short, to innovate. In the field of education this
translates, among others, into the improvement of educational practices,
learning, teaching, the dynamics of interaction within the family, classrooms,
schools; the academic performance of students and the quality of education
achieved in a given school or educational institution; or, with a policy or
specific educational programs, improvement at a local, regional, national or
international level [34].
Thanks to the benefits of research, it is necessary to
disseminate the findings obtained, looking for the maximum number of
beneficiaries. For it, after conducting research on procedures for improving
educational practices and products, a report should be published which will be
useful to other researchers in similar circumstances, taking into account that
each educational context is different and therefore, its application will
depend on the particularities of each case (adaptation). The research teacher
can be a tutor, facilitator, advisor, mentor and mediator of learning; a
learning that leads to the integral and articulated formation of students,
based on critical thinking and proposing solutions to problems in the
educational environment [27] Likewise, the actions of the research teacher
should foster a research culture, characterized by a process of social action
and transformation, based on the understanding and articulation of scientific
research with pedagogical practice [35]. Thus, this contributes to the integral
training of qualified, competitive, but also ethical, critical, purposeful,
socially committed and innovative professionals; a formative work evidenced
through research projects with scientific publication and in the generation of
new knowledge [2].
Research activity has always been linked to human
development and, with Homo sapiens, the evolutionary process initiated with the
hominid and primate ancestors continues. From this primitive being, intrinsic
qualities of the human species were born: its insatiable curiosity, the use of
imagination and its symbolic capacity to interpret reality. This raised the
first human questions about the universe and the role of human beings in the
cosmos. In the 5th century BC, a mode of thought developed in Ancient Greece,
based on "obtaining certain knowledge for causes", which surpassed
the subjective and limited way of knowing through the senses and empirical
reasoning, where a conceptual criterion of knowledge was sought, grounded in
the logical structuring of cause and consequences, called «episteme»; word that
would later be adapted to Latin as scientia. For the ancient Greeks,
mathematical precision explained the universal order that is knowable by the
human being through logical reason, which can be accessed inductively or
deductively, which originated a distinction between an "experimental"
type of science, empirical, which modifies the elements it studies (such as
chemistry); and a science based on "observation", which studies a
part of reality, without any manipulation (such as astronomy). The study of
human beings and their behavior came under the sphere of philosophy, along with
ethics, politics, and society. The Greeks took great care in cultivating thought
through the mentoring of philosophers and mathematicians, who used to describe
education as the way to acquire knowledge for practical life. The evolution of
science during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had its climax between the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by the search for a
definitive method that would enable science to reach general results (theories
and laws) that did not depend on or were attributed to tests of philosophical
postulates; which would be called «scientific method», derived from positivism.
From that moment on, all disciplines that use the scientific method are
considered to be science, for example, Biology and Physics; but, again, the
ones that do not use it, such as Psychoanalysis, Anthropology or... Education,
are relegated. The horrors of the two world wars plunged Europe into material
and moral ruin. Explanations were sought to understand how the nations that
cradled the highest civilizing ideals reached such extremes of destruction,
yet, the answers were not found in mathematical perfection, but in the
labyrinths of the human psyche: in Psychology, Sociology and the renewed «Human
Sciences» such as Education, where there is no possibility of knowing but
through communication with others, from participation in interconnected
networks of knowledge. For which, the Social Sciences require a valid system of
knowledge that is recognized as science, like the rest of human knowledge;
bearing in mind that, from their point of view, knowledge is, above all, an
adaptive strategy to the environment [36-42]. Hence, there was a current of
social researchers who assimilated the quantitative methodology and the
positivist paradigm against others, who used a methodology called qualitative,
derived from the data collection system adopted by Psychology and Anthropology,
to comprehensively address social phenomena through case studies, participatory
observation, in-depth interviews, among others. Education, as part of the
Social Sciences, uses both paradigms (quantitative and qualitative), depending
on the object of research and according to the studied social reality.
Currently a consensus, called mixed, has been reached that advocates
complementarity between qualitative and quantitative approaches, for research
in education. Science applied to education allows a critical and integral
analysis of the educational process as a whole, but also serves as a basis for
science teaching; that is, based on the understanding of concepts, methods and
laws of scientific knowledge, improvements can be made in teaching and learning
processes. Educational research allows us to understand and improve the factors
involved in teaching and learning processes; therefore, the educational
researcher is interested in the interaction and behavior of educational actors,
the functioning of educational institutions, the effects of educational
practice, or how the results of pedagogical processes can be improved, also
through innovation. Thanks to the benefits of research, it is necessary to
disseminate the findings obtained, looking for the maximum possible number of
beneficiaries to improve educational practices and products, taking into
account that each educational context is different and, thus, their application
will depend on the particular characteristics of each case (adaptation). The
actions of the research teacher should promote the research culture of the
students, characterized by a process of social action and transformation based
on the understanding and articulation of scientific research with pedagogical
practice, so as to contribute to the integral training of qualified,
competitive, but also ethical, critical, proactive, socially committed and
innovative professionals. Actions that are, in short, the contribution of
Education to the sustainable social development of peoples and all humanity,
through the reunion of Science, Research and Education.