DOES EDUCATION FOR THE KNOWLEDGE AGE NEED A NEW SCIENCE

Abstract

The rising societal interest in innovation and knowledge creation has caught the behavioural sciences, and educational psychology in particular, unprepared. We know quite a bit about knowledge acquisition, but even such modern approaches as constructivism and situated cognition fail to address what, if anything, is distinctive about individuals and groups whose goal is the creation of new knowledge. There are theories about creativity, and strategies for fostering it, but they deal with the isolated novel idea. They have little to offer concerning the sustained, integrative creativity that produces, for instance, a mobile phone that takes and transmits pictures. A new educational science is needed, which recognizes the self–organizing character of learning and creativity and which takes as its goal the advancement of education toward higher levels of functional organization.