The virtue of education

Abstract

Every educational research community is infused with the sensibilities of intellectual epochs and movements that anteceded it and that gave rise to it. In the decade approaching the end of the 20th century educational researchers are becoming increasingly aware that there are insistent humanistic, romantic and critical sensibilities that subtly pervade our present day search for a self- conscious way of thinking, which in turn supplants the performative demands of a technological rationality which emphasises a competency-based approach in education. These sensibilities are evident in that interest which is akin to a fascination with openness and indeterminateness, and revealed in educational debates about norms, values, truth and the epistemology of reflective practice