The Connection between Neuroscience and Education: Challenges and Hopes

Where as tendency toward making bridges between neuroscience and education has increased among scientists and educators, the purpose of this study is to investigate challenges and hopes for connecting the two fields. The nature of the research is philosophical critique in which possibilities and difficulties of the connection between the two domains are investigated. Findings show that the interdisciplinary field of educational neuroscience provokes philosophical problems like mind- brain relationship, free will, and the descriptive / prescriptive role of science. Education, however, cannot be explained by the function of the brain alone, but is a field that inevitably takes multiple approaches. In this view, educationists acquire knowledge and skills from diverse scientific domains and synthesize them to develop defendable theories. In this way, neuroscience can be one of the multiple approaches which are used to justify and support educational thoughts.