Numbing Us Down

Education: The fight is against reductionism

I was sitting in a meeting behind a 13 year old girl and her baby. However, this was not your typical baby, it came with your typical car seat but not so typical computerized bracelet that kept track of when you fed it ,changed it and held it. This was a computerized rubber baby with an adolescent pretend mommy who is suppose to be learning from this experience that babies are hard work. The year is not 3010 it is 2010, this is not a science fiction story it is the story of efforts by social psychologists to discourage teenage sex or at least to encourage teenage birth control. Their message is simple “babies mean work”.
Now I admit that babies are work. I have 5 children and they brought with them sleepless nights and worries. But it was a real human being keeping me awake, a real human being causing me to worry. The computer model baby is one of the many current examples of applied human reductionism. Current scientific reductionism pervades education as well as psychology. In fact reductionism’s greatest danger may lie in its applied methodology within public schools .
“Teaching to the lowest common denominator”, or “dumbing us down” are just two of the terms used by non-reductionist educationalists describing constructivist/progressive education. For constructivists to apply their theories they need a group of guinea pigs and those guinea pigs are located within the prison looking buildings of the public school. Convenient as this location may be a “means not ends” view of the human is still required to give the constructivists permission to use the imprisoned students to develop and test educational theory. There have always been groups that attempt an ideological broad stroke of applied universal values, currently this broad stroke is a broad stroke of dehumanization and with it comes the loss of individual “thouness”.
For education to come to terms with the immense scope and dimension of each student it will have to give up that education is capable of disseminating universality and elevate the free will and responsibility of each student.