Educational researchers in both the United States and Mainland China have been engaging in heated disputes among themselves on the legitimacy of the scientific foundation of educational studies and the efficacy of educational research since the turn of the century. In this paper,these disputes and discourses will be examined in a comparative-historical perspective. The trajectories of the development of educational studies in two educational systems will be selected and examined as typical cases. They are those of the United States and United Kingdom. The paper will examine efforts invested by generations of scholars in the two countries since the end of the ninetieth century in laying the foundations of the discipline of educational studies,in constructing the legitimate bases of the science of education,and in building the social creditability of the research enterprise of educational studies.Along this pilgrimage of reaching the status of a full-fledged academic discipline,scholars in these two countries have labored themselves in researching a variety of issues, in formulating different concepts, theories and paradigms, and in participating in heated intellectual debates or even paradigm wars. This paper attempts,in conclusion, to synthesize from the narration of these century-long discourses a conceptual-analytical framework,which may hopefully help our fellow researchers in China in apprehending the subject-matter of our own discipline.