The Education Delusion

Recently, I read an old article by Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins titled One Side Can Be Wrong, a piece that helpfully reminded me, more than four years after it was written, that something similar should be penned for education.

Why should that be so? Well, let's talk about that.

Dawkins and Coyne's article rather tidily does away with what had then become (and remains) the "teach the controversy" argument for intelligent design creationism (IDC)--the notion that IDC should be taught in science classrooms because it offers an alternative to the theory of evolution by natural selection as an explanation for the origins of different species on Earth. As the authors point out, their stance against "teach the controversy" seems counterintuitively closed-minded, but is demanded of them by the evidence--or, rather, lack of evidence:

So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy . . .? Here's why.

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and--with great shrewdness--to the government officials they elect.

Intelligent design creationists theorize that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause," yet they have not, at least as of this writing (2009), produced any positive evidence for this intelligent cause. It is this lack of evidence--not its character as an alternative explanation--which precludes IDC from acceptance in scientific circles and from "both sides" consideration. As Dawkins and Coyne note in the article linked above, alternative explanations based on actual evidence abound within evolutionary science and are thus far more worthy of debate than is IDC.

Methodists, Particularists, and Skeptics

Yet some may argue that while it may be true that IDC is unscientific, it does not follow from that observation alone that it is wrong. And, indeed, Dawkins and Coyne make no such claim explicitly in the article. Instead (again, one may argue), the authors simply hold up IDC to certain criteria of philosophical empiricism--that knowledge is derived from sense experience in the natural world--and describe how the theory fares (not well).

Chisholm categorized empiricism of this variety as a form of what he termed "methodism"--one of three possible solutions to the problem of distinguishing what is true from what is not:

(A) What do we know? What is the extent of our knowledge? (B) How are we to decide whether we know? What are the criteria of our knowledge?

If you happen to know the answers to the first of these pairs of questions, you may have some hope of being able to answer the second. Thus, if you happen to know which are the good apples and which are the bad ones, then maybe you could explain to some other person how he could go about deciding whether or not he has a good apple or a bad one. But if you don't know the answer to the first of these pairs of questions--if you don't know what things you know or how far your knowledge extends--it is difficult to see how you could possibly figure out an answer to the second.

On the other hand, if, somehow, you already know the answers to the second of these pairs of questions, then you may have some hope of being able to answer the first. Thus, if you happen to have a good set of directions for telling whether apples are good or bad, then maybe you can go about finding a good one--assuming, of course, that there are some good apples to be found. But if you don't know the answer to the second of these pairs of questions--if you don't know how to go about deciding whether or not you know, if you don't know what the criteria of knowing are--it is difficult to see how you could possibly figure out an answer to the first.

Particularists and particularist philosophies (described in the second paragraph above) decide first which are the good and bad apples--or what is true and what is not, or what we know and what we don't--and then shop around for a sorting system that reliably turns out results consistent with those decisions. Empiricist, or "methodist," philosophies, in contrast, (described in the final paragraph above) find their answers to the first question (which are the good apples?) by first answering the second question (how are we to decide whether we have a good or bad apple?).

Thus, Dawkins and Coyne, as loyal empiricists, reject IDC as a bad apple--not, as the argument might go, because they believe it actually is a rotten apple (the authors subscribe to a philosophy which does not permit them to discern that directly) but because the method they have decided upon to sort the apples (quantity or quality of evidence, naturalism, the scientific method, etc.) leads them almost inevitably to this conclusion.

Our third choice, according to Chisholm, is skepticism. The skeptic adroitly recognizes that in order to determine whether or not we possess in each case a good or bad apple we require a method to justify our choice and that in order to select a reliable method we need to know the difference, ab initio, between good and bad apples, and she therefore concludes that there is no way to decide.

The Truth Is Out There

It is an admixture of the skeptic's and particularist's philosophies which most closely resembles the weak orthodoxy of American K-8 education--a system (if one could be so generous as to describe it as such) often characterized, certainly not thoroughly but perhaps most aptly, by its ability to not distinguish between good and bad apples (refresh page if video below does not start with roundtable):


One can see evidence for this strange orthodoxy not only in the way the "system" administers itself, but in more abstract ways as well. I highlighted in this post, for example, part of a "skeptico-particularist" argument that is, in one form or another, very popular among professional educators as a defense against the evils of generalization and standardization:

It is simply not possible to prove that an approach to teaching and learning will be effective before the fact.

Education as a scientific discipline is a young field with an active community focused on R&D--research on learning coupled with the development of new and better curriculum materials. In truth, however, much of the work is better described as D&R--informed and thoughtful development followed by careful analysis of results. It is in the nature of the enterprise that we cannot discover what works before we create the what.

Similarly, James and Dewey—two of educational psychology’s founding philosophers—though not self-identified skeptics or “particularists” in any strict or relevant sense, were not exactly warm to a “methodist” approach to discerning truth. Author and Aggie John J. McDermott said it this way:

James has a name for . . . methodological anality. He calls it "vicious intellectualism" by which we define A as that which not only is what it is but cannot be other. Proceeding this way, answers abound and clarity holds sway. Missing is surprise, novelty, the wider relational fabric, often riven with rich meanings found on the edge, behind, around, under, over the designated, prearranged conceptual placeholders. Percepts are what count, and the attendant ambiguity in all matters important, presage more and deeper meaning not less. Following John Dewey, method is subsequent and consequent to experience, to inquiry. Method can help fund and warrant experience, but it does not grasp our doings and undergoings in their natural habitat. For that, we must begin with and experimentally trust our affections--dare I say it, trust our feelings. They may cause trouble, but they never lie.

The surest evidence, however, for the antagonism between Chisholm's "methodism" and American education can be found through experience and observation. A small helping only of each of these is enough, I think, to convince most rational people that at nearly every turn, education steers itself craftily away from the advisement of all but the vaguest and easiest criteria: How shall we teach? What shall we teach? Who shall we reward? punish? What shall we value and devalue? Education will provide answers to these questions or it won't, but it never has a way to decide, a methodology, a set of criteria it refers to. Its nascent science works at the fringes, in obscurity.

To come, finally, full circle, education seems unable to help but vacillate between its skepticism, which holds every idea (or none of them) to be right, and its particularism, which holds all of its own ideas to be right. This inability, in the end, makes it nearly impossible for education to decide before the fact that something can be wrong. And that is precisely what is wrong with education.

References:
Chisholm, R.M. (1982). The problem of the criterion. In L. Pojman (Ed.), The theory of knowledge, second edition (pp. 26-35). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

McDermott, J. (2003). Hast Any Philosophy in Thee, Shepherd? Educational Psychologist, 38 (3), 133-136 DOI: 10.1207/S15326985EP3803_2

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