Crippling Epistemologies and Governance Failures: A Plea for Experimentalism

CONCLUSION: The difficulty of unlearning

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so. — will rogers There is a facile theory of learning that defines it as a smooth, continuous, cumulative and linear process of correcting errors in a seemingly effortless way. This view is both enlightening and perplexing. It assumes, rightly, that a great deal of learning is indeed the result of correcting errors, but it unduly simplifies the process and casts no light on the nexus of forces that determine how errors are detected, or not, and how they are corrected, or not. In learning how to swim, an error is quite obvious when it amounts to not staying afloat, but it is less clear when it is a matter of modifying one’s leg work to acquire the speed of an Olympian. In such cases, swimmers have often, over time, acquired bad habits that they are not even aware of but that cripple their performance. A coach has to identify these crippling habits, and get swimmers to unlearn their natural ways of using their feet and acquire a new modus operandi. Such crippling habits are even more toxic when it comes to matters of the mind. One can conceivably CONCLuSION The difficulty of unlearning CONCLUSION: THE DIFFICULTY 235 OF UNLEARNING develop a mindset that selectively blocks out some aspects of what is perceived and overemphasizes other aspects. Over time, this habitualized way of scanning the context may lead one to occlude certain aspects of what is going on and to select certain other aspects as being of determining importance. This use of a cultural filter becomes second nature and ceases to be perceived as a filter at all. This is what ideology entails. When such shackles develop, individuals and groups come to be crippled by reductive ways of perceiving. They are unaware of the mental prisons that prevent them from having a full perception of the assumptions they are making and therefore leave them unaware of the errors to be corrected. Consequently, they can hardly be expected to correct these errors. Some external shock is often necessary to make one aware of the errors one is making and to trigger the “unlearning” that is required before any new learning can become possible. The failures of social learning exposed in this book can often be ascribed to such blockages. Some of these blockages are externally generated by power intrusions that trump rationality. They may originate from tradition (the democracy of the dead, as G. K. Chesterton (1908: ch. IV) called it), from built-in institutional constraints or from interventions by powerful interest groups or partisan politicians , but they may also stem from the cultural milieu, or from prevailing principles that seem unchallengeable in the given context, such as egalitarianism in the era of the welfare state. These forces define what is in and out of bounds, and impose taboos. They constitute a sort of censorship that may considerably weaken the process of exploration, learning and innovation. Other blockages are more internally generated, more easily traceable to certain structures and rules that an organization or a group has chosen to work under, and that can be changed. For instance, they may stem from the perversities of an incentive–reward system in place. What is one to expect when a system rewards failure and 236 CRIPPLING EPISTEMOLOGIES AND GOVERNANCE FAILURES punishes success, other than a great deal of confusion about what is expected and, consequently, an attenuation of the drive to explore new ways and to innovate (Hubbard and Paquet 2008)? Most organizations are not only shackled by a variety of such internal blockages, but they are significantly enslaved by cultural factors that are immensely more difficult to identify and to neutralize. These factors crystallize in the form of a prevailing mindset that permeates the whole modus operandi of the organization and cripples it in a tacit way. In Part I, I have underlined the ways in which crippling epistemologies have led the post-secondary education system to fall prey to certain views — about useful knowledge and about what is a meaningful contribution to the production of new knowledge— that are so profoundly rooted in the mindsets of the institutions that they appear to be unchallengeable. The fact that such views have been incorporated into the rules of operation of post-secondary institutions has accentuated the problem, and the dual impact...