Higher Education Reconceived: A Geography of Change

Chapter Three. Changing Ideas about Consciousness

Changing Ideas about Consciousness C H A P T E R T H R E E 15 Labyrinth from Pavia, Italy. Courtesy Jeff Saward, photographer. 16 H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N R E C O N C E I V E D “The kinds of nets we know how to weave determine the kinds of nets we cast. These nets, in turn, determine the kinds of fish we catch.” Elliott Eisner (Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered, 41) “Somebody once observed to the eminent philosopher Wittgenstein how stupid medieval Europeans living before the time of Copernicus must have been that they could have looked at the sky and thought that the sun was circling the earth. Surely a modicum of astronomical good sense would have told them that the reverse was true. Wittgenstein is said to have replied: ‘I agree. But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been circling the earth.’” James Burke (The Day the Universe Changed, 11) Bedrock Ideas L ike peeling an onion, uncovering deeply held assumptions reveals layer after layer. Assumptions held in common often appear to be reality. Common assumptions are inhaled with the air people breathe so that often they seem natural and real. These assumptions can constrain us like invisible ropes and keep us making first order substitutions instead of second order transformations. Beliefs and assumptions formed by ideas that undergird a culture and/or time period are layered within larger narratives or interpretive frameworks. Periodically, a kind of earthquake erupts through the intellectual landscape that overturns these deeply held ideas. When bedrock assumptions topple, as in the Enlightenment, there is a phase shift in human history. We are currently living in the midst of such an era. Assumptions that have been invisible for generations are now being questioned. Bedrock ideas of the dominant culture are giving way, and a new story is emerging. Many such assumptions define and shape ideas about learning/teaching, constraining literally everything in higher education from definition of classical texts to how we construct and shape a syllabus, class discussion, assessment, and qualifying examinations. In a marvelous satire published in 1880, Flatland, Edwin Abbott tells the story of A. Square, a sentient geometric shape, who journeys to the land of other two- C H A P T E R T H R E E C H A N G I N G I D E A S A B O U T C O N C I O U S N E S S 17 dimensional figures. He tries to tell the points that he is a line, but no matter what he does or says, all the points can see is a point. In his frustration A. Square ventures to another land and sees a line like himself. But the line tells A. Square that he is a sphere. When a culture changes its deepest ways of understanding itself, it is as if points see others only as points, lines as lines, and spheres as spheres. A shared world is often uncomfortable or seemingly impossible when its dimensions are in transition. The Mechanical Universe Isaac Newton (1642-1727) synthesized the scientific knowledge of his day in a new narrative that laid the foundation for classical physics and ushered in a new era in science and invention. The metaphor for this period was the machine. Earth was a cog in a clockwork universe. It was assumed that discovery of the laws that govern the universe would lead to prediction and control. A complex phenomenon could be understood by breaking it down into parts from which one could understand the whole. Alvin Toffler describes this as “The notion that the world is a clockwork, the planets timelessly orbiting, all systems operating deterministically in equilibrium, all subject to universal laws that an outside observer could discover.”1 During the modern period (roughly 1860 to the 1980s or, for some, to the present) experimentation became the preferred method of science. It was assumed that we had finally found a way to force nature to give up its secrets. The twentieth century has shown this to be an illusion! William Doll summarizes the certainty and control characteristic of modernism this way: Founded on Enlightenment thought, itself based on Cartesian certainty and Newtonian stability, and particularly on the union of this thought with industrialism, modernism developed definite...