Norm Friesen

Even though the 90’s was said to be the decade of the brain, education still seems to be fascinated with this wrinkled grey organ. Neurological descriptions, explanations and instructional strategies seem to be everywhere these days. But there are significant limitations to “brain-based education:”

1. Brains are not the same thing as persons. We are also our bodies, our actions, and our relations to others; and none of these are reducible to our brains or others’ brains. Bennett and Hacker (in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience; 2003) call the reduction of personal attributes to the brain the “mereological fallacy,” using attributes of a small part to characterize the whole.
2. New ways of “getting inside the brain” (MRIs etc.) provide a neurological language to explain activities for which we also have non-scientific language. But how valuable is it to learn that kindergarten-aged brains are stimulated in valuable ways from a bright, colourful environment, or that patterns in brain activity change as people gradually learn to do something new? Having recently read studies that report on these kinds of findings, I can’t help question the value of being able to restate neurologically what is already known and studied in less abstract terms.
3. It is much more productive to consider education a socio-cultural endeavour than an exercise in biological or neurological engineering. To see education as connecting neurons and shaping brains rather than developing free and responsible persons (the two are, to a degree, incompatible) raises significant ethical and political issues.
4. “Basing” education and instructional strategies on the brain take us back to Cartesian dualisms and the problems associated with them: Brain is separated from the person, thinking occurs in the skull, consciousness is located in a kind of “brain in a vat.”

The “brain in a vat” critique is articulated by Alva Noe in a chapter, “the grand illusion” from his recent book (Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain), and in the video above. I don’t agree that the answer to this critique is a new evolutionary biologism (as Noe suggests); I rather think that Noe’s references to phenomenology and other methodologies suggest more helpful alternatives. But in the video, Noe describes consciousness as being “more like a dance than digestion,” and with that I couldn’t agree more.

Mechanics of the Brain 1926 from Norm Friesen on Vimeo.

Education has always been Posthuman

The question of the “posthuman” has recently been gaining currency in discussions of educational philosophy and theory. It refers to the suspension of the “human” as a category that has (allegedly) underwritten education as a process of “becoming [fully] human.” This category of the “human” has been suspended or put into question through a focus on the ongoing blurring of boundaries separating humans, animals and technology in science and philosophy, and the ways that the animal and technical has traditionally been constructed as an “other” in educational discourse. In the context of European traditions of education as Bildung and Apprentisage, it is not difficult to argue that education, as Helen Pedersen says, is indeed a kind of enforcement of “compulsory humanity:”

Western pedagogy is firmly rooted in a ‘humanist’ tradition, where the human subject is considered both the instrument and the end product of education. Second, the church and the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose conventional interpretations include a distinct human-animal boundary, have historically had a strong grip on the school and the formal education system…(Pedersen, 2010)

But claims of this kind miss an important point. In the case of the human-animal relation, they miss the enormous contribution of comparative psychology of Pavlov (see video, above) and Thorndike that is based on the systematic transgression of human-animal differentiation. As the video, above, makes clear (through means both gross and refined), education has, in some contexts, always –or at least long—been posthuman. Much less than being an exception, the dissolution of the “human” underwrites and interpenetrates the field of educational psychology. In the inaugural edition of Educational Psychology no less, E.L. Thorndike declares that “Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man” (1910, 5). Assuming that a normative and exclusive conception of the human underpins education also misses the enormous contribution of cognitive science and cognitivist variants on constructivism. In this case, it is not so much the , again the student is seen as part machine. Recent applications of theories of self-regulated learning, as only one example, locate the student (and teacher) endogenously in a kind of self-adapting network of analysis, reporting, performance and feedback:

Data generated as learners use [specialized networked software] …can be analyzed, aggregated within and across episodes and learners, and reported back to all parties engaged in school reform with a very short delay. In the same way as my stock portfolio can be updated every 20 min[utes], learners, teachers, and researchers can have data upon which to make on-the-spot adaptations. (Winne, 2006, 14)

Equally ambitious visions are associated with developments in neurology in connection with education. In these cases, it is not the human but the neural structures and patterns of the brain that are the proper object of education. Any of these visions are profoundly posthuman. They would see a by-passing or short-circuiting of localized, social and human processes of formation and acculturation. Education is cast as a process of fine tuning neural relationships or optimizing systemic performance rather than as a shaping and realization of individual, human potential.

The discussion of the ambivalence of the posthuman in education is a great opportunity to understand the way that education has always (or at least long) been conceptualized in posthuman terms. Now sometimes critiqued for his assumption that “people were as easy to study as stones and toads” (Berliner, p.20) Thorndike can be seen as a posthumanist pioneer. Looking at his and others’ contribution to the long and influential posthuman tradition in education may allow us to study with new clarity what has in many ways been an untheorized mainstay in education discourse to the present day.

(hat tip to Shannon Lowe)