The naturalistic method of educational and social research — A Marxist critique

Abstract

Viewed from a Marxist scientific perspective, any assessment of the naturalistic perspective associated with the work of CARE and the new sociology of education must be highly critical. In the focus of its work, the naturalistic perspective is concerned mostly with the “micro” world of the school and within-classroom interaction, neglecting to focus on the possible material determination of this phenomenological world. Naturalism accords to the social scientist the role of passive reporter of events and member accounts rather than interpreter of the world that Marxist analysis wishes the intellectual to adopt. Naturalism, as exemplified within the contemporary sociology of education, does not appear to be concerned with the validation and objectification of the knowledge that is produced. Lastly, little concern is shown for the need to use empirical insight to generate adequate theoretical constructs of the inter-relationships between different bodies of knowledge. The naturalistic perspective upon social and educational matters seems to reflect a temporary disillusionment with such conventional modes of scholastic enquiry as positivism. Yet there is no evidence that our understanding of social and educational matters has been dramatically increased by this new, unscientific, idealist, and micro-sociological paradigm. Genuine advances in our understanding of the social world are, I believe, more likely to occur if social research adopts the methodological apparatus of scientific Marxism, an apparatus that has brought considerable increments of understanding to those social science disciplines that have utilised it.