You can’t do any of the other disciplines in a university or college except through the medium of education. No other discipline exists except through its learning. A novice can only enter a discipline – physics, or law, or history, or literature – through education, learning the accumulated knowledge that has become that discipline. In this sense, education is more than just interdisciplinary. It does more than just stitch together other disciplines. It is a metadiscipline, essential as the practical grounding of all disciplines. Education is the discipline of disciplines.

Education is the systematic investigation of how humans come to know. It focuses on formal, institutionalized learning at all its levels from preschool to school, college and university. Education is also concerned with the processes of informal learning – how babies learn to speak at home, or how children and adults learn to use an interface or play a game. It is concerned with how organizations and groups learn, collecting and acquiring knowledge that is applied in their communities, professions and workplaces. In fact, as knowledge is needed and used everywhere, learning happens everywhere. There is no part of our lives to where the discipline of education cannot provide a useful perspective.

Maybe, then, education is more than just an interdisciplinary place that ties together shreds and patches from other disciplines – a bit of psychology here, a bit of sociology there, a bit of management there. Education should be regarded as the metadisciplinary foundation of all disciplines. Its focus is the science of knowing, no less.

The metadiscipline of education inquires into learning, or how we come to know and be. Education-as-metadiscipline explores knowing and being. It analyzes how people and groups learn and come to be what they are. As such, it is an especially expansive exploration of knowing. It is interested to know how knowing happens and how capacities to know develop.