A Genealogy of Transformation

Transformations’ history can be traced back to documents like Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. To follow Pico’s lead by acknowledging our groundless situation is to recognize that as “human beings,” we become only what we have made ourselves, and that we have the capacity to make ourselves absolutely anything at all—devils or angels, monsters or gods. Knowing this, we can clearly see that teaching and learning have never been about goals or standards. If we were endowed—as many people believe—with a fixed “human nature,” then research could indeed quantify educational “outcomes” in ways that are “measurably measurable,” as the statisticians say. But measurement can’t assess an artifact of measurement itself: our measurements create what they claim to find. Transformation is our telos and our fate.