It’s important to recognize that this foundation for education is a metaphysical position itself which is not fact-based. It’s a worldview (“education must be empirically fact-based”) which does not come from science but from philosophy.
Science
is philosophy. It used to called ‘natural philosophy’.
It establishes empiricism as the only trustworthy approach to reality – thus reducing the acquisition of knowledge to the most superficial, external aspects – namely, through sensory data alone.
It depends on how one qualifies trust. If demonstrable, objective results are the measure, empirical methods pretty much embarrass anything else out there. You can wax eloquent as you like about “inner being” or something “less superficial” than physical models, but when it comes to performance, you end up mumbling, putting your hands in your pockets, and drawing in the dirt with your shoe, while empirical methods get rockets to the moon, vaccinations on the hunt to eliminate polio from the face of the earth and OC-12 switches pushing 600+ megabytes a second of digital bits down the pipes of teh interwebz.
The very act of philosophizing and reasoning about what education “should be” is not an exercise in empirical science.
There are definitely some subjective elements there, but there’s a very good empirical case to be made for educating youth in the principles and superiority in terms of performance of empirical epsitemologies and methodologies. That is, we can conclude from an evidential review that empirical principles are important for a well-rounded education.
Therefore, to impose a philosophical structure onto education which denies that the system is founded in a particular philosophy is not coherent. It’s also just as much of an imposition of a worldview on society as is that of any religion.
I think so, but only in the way our courts of law impose the “religion” of facts and evidence and secular jurisprudence. Objectivity mediated by critical analysis is the universal epistemology. We all use is it, event the hard core fundamentalist or the dreamiest mystic. It just gets abandoned when it can be abandoned by some more readily than others.
It will be claimed that empiricism “should be” the only method used because “science works”. But that is not scientific either and the following question does not get explored this way either – “works for what?”
The evidence is overwhelming that science works, that it is effective and productive in generating knowledge that is verifiable, objective, predictive and falsifiable. That’s a criterion where theology, for example, scores a pathetic 0 for 4. If you take medicine, fly on an airplane, drive a car, or use a computer, you are validating the importance and success of empirical epistemology. The more evidence we have to assess, the more science dominates the performance curve for performative human knowledge.
One needs to determine the goal that education has in shaping minds – what does it hope to produce and why is that the goal?
Natural knowledge. Natural explanations for natural phenemona. That doesn’t preclude theological conjectures, etc. But it’s a basic building block for a free, prosperous, just society.
-TS
