The Failure of the Cartesian Paradigm
In his pivotal book, The Courage to Teach, educator Parker Palmer wisely points out that “the way we diagnose our students’ condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer.”7 Therefore, if we want to understand why education in this country is so often dysfunctional, we must first understand the “lens” through which the numerous reform efforts have examined the problems in today’s schools in the first place. Only by so doing can we grasp why they have offered their particular remedies to education’s problems, and—accordingly—only if we understand the properties of this “lens” will we see its fundamental flaws when it comes to offering successful solutions.
To do that, though, we must start with a brief detour into the history of modern thought and recognize that most contemporary educational theory has historically rested on the same analytical system that has dominated the rest of Western thought for nearly 400 years: the Cartesian paradigm. Developed by René Descartes in the 17th Century, this outlook basically states that the objects in any system can be mapped out onto a coordinate network8 and that anyone can then use this mathematical model to manipulate and test predictions about the relationship(s) between the many parts of the system. It effectively turns our understanding of the entire universe into that of a giant “machine,” and since any real machine can be made to come apart into its pieces to see how it works, the revolutionary power of the Cartesian paradigm for so many centuries has been its ability to do the same with the universe.
For example, instead of suffering at the perceived whims of supernatural forces to explain illness, people after Descartes could learn how the “machine” we call a body gets sick and fix its “parts.” They could take apart the “machine” we call story-telling, look at the “parts” of an event, and produce a more accurate historical understanding. Or they could learn how the “machine” we call manufacturing works and create an assembly line of (literal) parts.
The key is “they could.” Any situation that could be reduced to the machine-like sum of its parts fell before the power of this paradigm, and it has consequently dominated our understanding of the world for as long as it has precisely because it has given us a level of dominion over the natural world which humans had only fantasized about during the first 6,000 years of history and beyond. The world we live in today is very much the product of the scholars, scientists, and engineers who followed in Descartes’ footsteps.
Including education. You see, from the Cartesian outlook, students are “machines.” But if they are “machines,” then thinking and learning merely involves the “parts” of this “machine” working together in a certain pattern. Education, therefore, simply becomes the systematic manipulation of a student’s “parts” until he or she works like the kind of “machine” we desire. “Truth”–the way we want the “machine” to work–just becomes a set of propositions that teaching delivers to students (“standards” anyone?), and we will know they have learned the “truth” when they can repeat these propositions back to us correctly (i.e. when they work their “machine” the way we want them to). In other words, according to the Cartesian paradigm, we can script the teaching process in such a way that it will manipulate children in a specific, ordered manner to produce someone who will then behave in a required fashion. In the field of education, we call this “teacher-proofing the curriculum.”
All the recent school reform efforts suddenly make absolute sense. Simply tinker with the children’s “parts” in one “mechanic’s” work area, shift them to another “mechanic” to tinker with a different set of “parts” in a specified fashion, and continue until we have our kids “tuned” exactly the way we want them to be. The assembly-line-like character in most schools in which children move from one class covering one isolated subject to another class covering another usually disparate subject now takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? Tire rotation, radiator flush, and lube job, anyone?
Emergent Properties and Their Implications for Education
The only problem with this approach to education is that it assumes the mind functions as a machine—that we can somehow disassemble the brain into its parts, map them out, and manipulate them accordingly. But modern biologists and neurologists are now confident that everything about how the mind works is an emergent property of the brain,9 and what they have found has profound implications for this discussion because emergent properties of any kind (weather, quantum states, water-flow in pipes, etc.) are fundamentally non-deterministic in their character—which means we can never fully understand how they work using a deterministic system such as a Cartesian one.
The simple truth is that “every brain is wired differently,”10 especially in the difference between learning rates and retrieval rates which the research in this field has revealed.11 While every brain can input new information and retrieve this information (since doing so simply involves neurons sending signals), what emerges out of this signaling between neurons can vary dramatically from one person’s brain to another. Thus, even though every human brain uses the same neural “parts” (which is why drugs such as alcohol work on both you and me), the rates at which each brain inputs new information and retrieves it later is an emergent property that varies in each of us. Some can do both rapidly; some can only do both slowly. Others can do one fast and the other slow. The key is that none of us have learning and retrieval rates that are ever exactly the same–in spite of having brains made out of the same kinds of “parts”–because what emerges out of each brain’s system of neurons is unique.12 Thus, a mechanistic understanding of teaching is incomplete because the human brain is not a machine and therefore cannot be analyzed as one. Viewing the mind as a deterministic system can never produce the “ah-ha” moment that is genuine learning. At best, such teaching produces training in a set of skills, and the dilemma for our society “is that the skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test [this way], are also the skills that are easiest to digitize, automate, and outsource.”13 Hence, the Cartesian diagnosis of education’s current problems being employed by the various school reform efforts can only lead to a remedy that will never work: it cannot explain what learning really is and thus cannot fix where learning is not happening. As Albert Einstein observed, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Light a Candle 