Modes of Learning: Whitehead's Metaphysics and the Stages of Education

Conclusion

Conclusion I have attempted over the course of this book to develop analogies between the three stages of education Whitehead discusses in the first two chapters of The Aims of Education and the triplets of ideas found in four of Whitehead’s metaphysical writings. I have also argued that the triplets are analogous to each other as well as to the educational stages, and that these analogies yield an insight into a consistent theme in Whitehead’s thought: that of the cosmological centrality of open systems. Events are acts of unification that reveal their inadequacy in their success. This success is transmittable to successor events only insofar as acts of unification are adaptively self-repairing efforts, efforts oriented not simply toward achievable repetition but also toward sustainable improvements on past successes. By making this open-endedness central to an adequate interpretation of Whitehead’s metaphysics, focusing on incompatibilities and their transformation into contrasts, on forms of process, unstable unities, evolving helixes, and the power of tragic beauty, my interpretation of Whitehead and of the reality he struggles to interpret is strongly temporalist. It affirms a reality for which the only literal sense in which something is real is that it becomes and perishes. John Dewey once argued that Whitehead’s metaphysics is an incoherent mix of “morphological” and “genetic-functional” generalizations, the former a “system of independent definitions and postulates,” the latter arising from “experimental observational inquiry” (“Whitehead’s Philosophy” 174–75). Unsurprisingly, he suggests that Whitehead should embrace the latter, the pragmatic, approach. I have followed Dewey’s advice in this book. I think my interpretation is truer to Whitehead than more morphological interpretations and is the way in which his thought is truer to reality. It also makes Whitehead’s metaphysics more accessible to nonspecialists, and hence more conducive to the comparisons I have developed in this book between the ways we learn and the ways the world works. 217 218 Modes of Learning The relevance of this book for teachers and professors is not as a how-to handbook of useful pedagogical strategies, lesson plans, or course templates. Teaching is an art not a technique. The value of transmitting to students a body of facts, theories, and methods, whether traditional or innovative, is not self-justifying. Nor is the more subtle task of infecting students with profound convictions, whether one’s own or those of a group. So neither transmission nor infection can be the foundation or goal of learning. They are intermediate enterprises justified by appeal to metaphysical presuppositions already in place. I have attempted to contribute some insights into these presuppositions, into what the aim of education should be and from what platform of understanding it should be launched. The conclusion that slowly emerges over the course of this book is that the aim of education—the goal and foundation of learning—should be to create conditions that will enhance the possibilities for ourselves and our teachers to become practiced in thinking approximately, to develop effective habits of rationalizing the polarities that everywhere abound. We all need to become accustomed to envisioning possibilities worth actualizing and methods for actually actualizing them, while at the same time recognizing that even our best efforts won’t quite hit the bull’s-eye, that at best they will be on target. And so we also need to become accustomed to recognizing that falling short of our goals is endemic to having them, and that this is not only a tragic truth but a beautiful one. For if approximation is the foundation of every good ever achieved, then it is itself the greatest good. The clichés of academic life offer intimations of this metaphysical insight. Discouragement is the specter haunting every class we teach or take, every idea we explicate or data set we interpret, every paper we write or exam we design. We never quite get it right, we often get it quite wrong, and yet we are soon at it again, whether from duty or inclination, fearful of the consequences of failure or confident that next time we will do better or even well. The world begins anew with each class, each paper, each semester. Anew is never de novo, however, but afresh: coming once again to an old task with the wreckage of our shortcomings a fundamental resource that emboldens us to be hopeful about the task we now face. On the impractical foundation of an insufficient good, we think it sufficiently practical to take...