Читать книгу Education in a Postfactual World - Patrick M. Whitehead - Страница 9

Author Foreword

During the Democratic National Convention for the 2016 United States Presidential election, former US Representative Newt Gingrich was interviewed by CNN political news reporter Alisyn Camerota. The two were arguing whether or not crime had been rising or falling over the last decade. Camerota quoted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) facts that crime had been on a steady decline in the last decade while Gingrich tried to convey the subjective felt-sense of the people—namely, that they were feeling less and less safe.

I was at once intrigued and horrified by the position Gingrich had taken. My intrigue was for the epistemological position he was unflappably taking—a position marginalized in scientific and academic communities. He was arguing that subjective awareness is more important for understanding people than is deductive reasoning. As a phenomenological psychologist, I am sympathetic to this position. In many ways, I have sat where Gingrich has sat, being ridiculed for trusting the words of my participants and trying to understand their experience instead of reducing them to an anonymous number in a clinical trial. Gingrich’s public statement of position signified the importance of a scientific inquiry and education that validates a qualitative approach. He was hoisting the flag of feelings over facts.

My horror was in how short he had stopped with trying to understand these feelings of unsafety. Rejecting the unquestionability of deductive reasoning as the sole progenitor of truth does not mean that we yield to opinions, feelings, and perspective. Just like there are rules in logic and deduction, there are rules for understanding subjective experience. If ten people report feeling less safe, the analysis is not over! Were the alleged reports true, then there is something important that needs to be learned: despite a decline in crime, people report feeling less safe. Evidently there is a dimension of safety that is not directly related to crime. However, we cannot know what this dimension is unless we listen to those who describe it and subsequently apply a rigorous method to it.

Gingrich, perhaps inadvertently, gives the nod to the chief importance of qualitative research. However, what he describes is a straw man argument: “qualitative research means feelings over facts.” Watching this interview left me feeling deeply despondent. As educators, we have failed our students by training them in a very lopsided manner: namely, facts over feelings. Whenever a student wishes to better understand feelings, or is faced with a problem that cannot be easily resolved with a fact, they have no methods for doing so. Indeed, they have a severely impoverished sense of what this might even mean.

If nothing else, the 2016 US Presidential election has demonstrated an important shift in social validity. Instead of naïve capitulation to the sovereignty of facts, we are beginning to see people, uneducated and educated alike, push back, arguing that the facts do not do justice to their feelings. Instead of relying on credible resources for news about current events, there has been a massive proliferation of fabricated news by which people educate themselves about current events. We must bear witness to the demise of facts as unquestionable statements about reality. In this book, I argue that this is not a bad thing.

Fake news is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. The popular social media website “Facebook” has taken steps to make fake news stories less profitable. This is not the solution. If anything, legislating against the fabricated news stories is just a way of ignoring the problem. The problem is that we have been subjecting students and adults to a terribly lop-sided education for decades. Had the education provided been more balanced, then the fake news epidemic would never have materialized.

The problem is fact-mindedness. Facts are the relics of enlightenment thinking. They represent unbiased and unquestionable truth about our universe. The more you collect, the more you know; the more you know, the more powerful you are; the more powerful you are …. You get the picture.

Facts aren’t the bad guys. Blaming them would be as misguided as blaming the Middle-Eastern entrepreneurs for the result of the 2016 US Presidential Election. These were the entrepreneurs who fabricated the stories that became so popular on conservative websites in the United States that demonstrated how terrible Hillary Clinton would be as a Presidential Candidate. Facts are not bad, but they do not alone constitute an education.

Facts are not hidden in the universe. You don’t start digging a hole in your backyard hoping to discover some new fact about nature. Facts are placeholders: they allow us to say something about the relationships between things. That ten times ten is one-hundred is a fact. But for Pedro, the ten stacks of ten pennies that he has collected adds up to one-hundred pennies. Even though he may know that “10x10=100,” he may still have to count them to be sure that it applies to him as well. Until he has done so a few times, he won’t understand what that facts means for him. For Pedro, the fact that 10x10=100 isn’t understood until he experiences this directly.

In this book, I argue that judgment must always be applied to matters of fact. That is to say, the fact is not the end of the story. For many years now I have been averse to the kind of education that privileges fact-finding and answer-giving. The idea that gravity compels bodies does not substantiate itself; it is a way of describing the relationships between bodies. Gravity helps us better understand physical relationships, but by itself, and outside of any meaningful context, that fact of gravity is useless.

Matters of fact are little medieval superstitions masquerading around as scientific currency. It is not simply that facts are over and done with. Facts have made it possible for us to relinquish the bit about ourselves that makes each of us unique. Facts take the place of individuality, critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and personal meaning. As a result, we lose trust in ourselves and in others, and become alienated from anything even remotely personal. This has been known in contemporary philosophy for over a century, and scientists—at least the earnest ones—have known this for a little bit longer.

I’m not arguing for the end of facts but for a release of the compelling hold that facts have on us. Any belief in a fact is way of shifting responsibility for understanding from yourself and onto somebody else—an expert, a textbook, a scientist, or a for-profit fake news website. It relieves you from having to invest yourself in the importance of whatever detail to which the fact pertains. That schizophrenia has a hereditary component is interesting by itself. It allows us to speculate as to why a given person may develop the disorder. But any psychologist who has studied this phenomenon (or student who has taken the time to better understand it) will explain that the hereditary component is more complicated than the fact suggests. To believe in the fact is to ignore all of the decision-making, judgment calls, research design, and explanations that the researchers were responsible for. Such a fact requires the scrutiny of hundreds of cases—real people and recorded files. This work cannot be easily summarized into an eighteen-word sentence. A great deal of significant information will be left out.

We do not need to be more careful stewards of the news. Reputable and non-reputable news-sources will still print articles that have been carefully shaped into attractive stories that protect the way that they interpret the world. What we need to do instead is to teach our students how to think for themselves. In addition to the creativity, curiosity, and insight that this encourages, it also empowers students to realize their own responsibility in their educations. Now when Peter memorizes the fact that LogbMN=LogbM+LogbN for use on his next math exam, he can admit that he is blindly taking his instructor’s word for it because it would take too long to test it himself. If it doesn’t work out for him on the exam or in life, then it was his own poor judgment that got him there (and not the fault of the instructor or textbook or political figure). I’m talking about solving logarithmic proofs, but I’m really talking about important stuff like well-being, happiness, and life-satisfaction.

In this book, my aim is to convince you of the shortcomings of fact-mindedness. This is going to challenge how you understand yourself and the world around you. It’s also going to challenge the methods that you have learned are the best at understanding yourself and the world around you. This means that I’m also going to suggest that you change these things too. The entire foundation of science, the institution of formal schooling, and even popular culture seem to be opposed to this project. Everywhere there are roadblocks to being (human or otherwise); instead we find instances of what “is in fact.”

“Is” is an ontological signifier; it amounts to the assumption that something exists in fact, and that this something can be placed neatly into a box. The boxes demarcate one thing from the next. Our world, we have learned, is full of such things. When combined by the verb “is,” we understand that the complicated networks of experience that make up “college professors” and “fisheries biologists” are nothing but the particular box in which they can be found. Facts are profoundly limiting.

To be sure, something like this has been done before. There has been a century and a half (or more) of men and women like me, every one more ambitious, audacious, insightful, and well-spoken than I. They have argued against the dominant ideology that sought to codify the complicated universe into systems of predictability and manipulability. Moreover, they have done so at times when it was decidedly inconvenient to do so. Their insights were more timely, and in some cases, even prophetic. Unfortunately, these authors seldom trickle down into general education curricula. Instead, they are often dismissed in a de-facto manner. They say “We don’t have time to wait for people to understand the complicated interrelationships between things!”

This book will look at the problem of habitually replacing experience with facts. German mathematician-turned-philosopher, Edmund Husserl, criticized modern science for requiring that we replace experience with facts. German philosopher and economist Karl Marx criticized capitalism for making it impossible not to do so. English mathematician-turned philosopher Alfred North Whitehead explained that such an approach to science and to learning is “the most useless bore on God’s earth.” German philosopher Martin Heidegger observed that science and philosophy have “left the question of being behind.” There have even been students of these scholars who have written definitive texts on the subject. However, many of these texts have been written in a foreign language; they have seen a small readership from obscure academic presses; and they ultimately remain largely obscured from the lay public. My goal is to connect you with their insights and to beat you over the head with a theme that runs through each of them: you are capable of understanding the meaning that the world has for you—you do not need to take someone else’s word for it!

I never really decided to write this book. The book chose me. I keep sitting down to write something else and end up working on this instead. I wish I could say that this was annoying because that would make me a serious academic author, but I cannot. I began writing it while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation, continued it as I was drafting my textbook, and again while I was editing my first monograph. Now I’m supposed to be writing articles, conference presentations, book reviews, and hyper-specialized academic monographs, yet here I am punching these words out on the keyboard. This one just seemed like more fun. It is where my intrinsic motivation is directed.

Finally, I have “decided” to do this now because I’m tired of being empty handed whenever a student, friend, or family member (okay, that one never happens) expresses interest in the idea that we are more complicated than things. I hope to write it in a manner that is comprehensible—simple even. My wish is that you will read it and say to yourself, “no shit, Patrick.” I hope you read it once and that the arguments within quickly become obsolete. I hope the arguments are so obvious that you could hardly believe that you used to reject your own awareness of the personal significance that people, experiences, and knowledge had for you, preferring instead to rely on something your professor told you.