Purpose: Prominent at the intersections of national educational agencies, higher education, and international educational performance assessments are two reform standards: "benchmarks" determining optimal student performance, and "empirical evidence" for determining the quality of reform practices. These two notions are often…

The article discusses education from the perspectives of the different social sciences and concludes that schools should provide an environment that gives men power to open new horizons and to show new aspects of humanity from the vantage points of many different schemes and patterns. (PD)

Examines educational inquiry as a source of human understanding. Describes three intellectual traditions identified in studies of schooling and different purposes and characteristics of knowledge that emerge from each. (Author/MK)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the moral, political, and epistemological consequences of the methodology of and theoretical commitments to a behavioral research pattern and its application to education. (Author)

Examines certain assumptions about social research that guide teaching and give power and authority to curriculum. (Author/RK)

Discusses the social and intellectual history concerned with the relation of social consciousness to material conditions, especially work related to the French historiography of the Annales school. A review of five recent books in the sociology of art and aesthetics raises issues about the origin of contemporary sensitivities and values. (DWH)

Discussion of the social sciences as forms of thought that structure meanings,'' and of the value of teaching students to develop the social discipline approach.'' (Author/SP)

This essay discusses how Foucault's study of power relates to more general reexamination of the foundations of critical traditions, especially decentering of the subject as part of a broader consideration of social epistemology. The paper explores two concepts of power (sovereignty/repression and deployment/production of power) and examines the…

Three curriculum materials which draw upon the social disciplines are examined to understand the manner in which individual responsibility and authority are defined. The three include American Political Behavior, Holt Secondary Social Studies Curriculum, and Investigating Man's World. Curriculum content in each is found to contain dispositions…

To shed light on the social research perspectives which enable people to give coherence to daily events, educational researchers must continually scrutinize the social values and beliefs which underly their research. As social and cultural affairs are explained by the social sciences, so also are theories and methods influenced by social conflict.…