democratic point of view, since the most important questions of an educational
system are not to be solved by science, but are to be‘voted’for by the people. That
is, what do we want the educational system for? What is, as Biesta ( 2010 ) for-
mulates it, good education? What kind of society do we want to live in—through
our educational systems? All these kinds of questions are political questions that
need to be on the table for democratic considerations. To leave them to‘science’is
deeply troublesome for democratic reasons. But it is also troublesome for thefield
of pedagogik(k)—since it deprives thefield from its insights based on traditions and
research outside the ideology of‘scientification of politics’, which ironically tend to
destroy both science and politics proper.
12.3 Towards Psychology, Away from Pedagogik(k)
One of the main arguments for establishing utbildningsvetenskap/
utdanningsvitenskap, and this is part of our second point, was that it was sup-
posed to be a‘wider’concept than‘pedagogik’and therefore could host all dis-
ciplines that had any kind of connection to‘educational systems’. The change to
utbildningsvetenskap/utdanningsvitenskap was needed, so it was argued, in order to
give teacher education a sound base in science. Somewhat ironically was that it was
suppose to happen through the different disciplines themselves and their subjects
and not by, for example, strengthen the already existing and internationally
establishedfield of teacher education research. It was claimed that pedagogik(k)
could not fulfil all the requirements for what a teacher needed. Instead of for
example philosophy of education teaching about ethics of teaching—one should
have a‘real’philosopher teaching about ethics. Instead of having a‘pedagog’
trained in history of education studying the history of schooling, one should have a
‘real’historian studying the same things, etc., and that regardless if the philosopher
or historian or any other subject specialist had any knowledge of educational tra-
ditions of thought or traditions of research in‘pedagogik(k)’. For example, tradi-
tions of pedagogik(k) can at least be traced back to the ancient Greek formulation of
paideia, and the idea that the citizen needed education in its roleascitizen in order
to form a public that could recognize itself as such.
The material basis for this somewhat new attitude of‘anything goes’in edu-
cational research as long as it is not exclusively based in pedagogik(k) can be found
in two circumstances,first The Swedish Research Council (VR) in March 2001
established a Committee for Educational Sciences ‘utbildningsvetenskapliga
kommittén’entirely dedicated to such research; that produced a need at Swedish
universities to identify research that could be considered for being funded.
Second, all universities in Sweden were by directives from the state obliged to
establish a faculty board for‘utbildningsvetenskaplig’research. These two factors
were decisive for the birth of‘utbildningsvetenskap’. It was though unclear at the
time for its birth what exactly it could be which was not already covered by
traditions of knowledge within‘pedagogik’. Largely this unclearness remains being
182 C.A. Säfström and H. Saeverot