Paradigm Wars
May 11th, 2008 by John Connell
I picked up a copy this afternoon of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in San Francisco Airport, before a flight to Newark and then onto Edinburgh overnight. I managed to read quite a bit of it in the five hours or so I had on the flight to New Jersey, picking out sections that caught my eye and skipping bits once I thought I had got the point of a chapter. I will go back and read it more carefully in the next few weeks.
Given that we live in interesting times, as they say, Kuhn’s take on how paradigm shifts happen in science, I think, has some resonance for what is going on in education at the moment. His description of how a new and revolutionary paradigm is often resisted by those still wedded to the older paradigm offers a fair analogy for what is going on around us in education.
He writes, for example, that:
“…resistance, particularly from those whose productive careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science, is not a violation of scientific standards, but an index to the nature of scientific research itself.”
The analogy with education - and it can only be an analogy - is that even where a new paradigm is accepted by some or many, it is an intrinsic component of the scientific process that continued resistance from some quarters, for whatever reason, has, in the longer run, a beneficial effect on the clarification and refinement of the newer paradigm. He mentions early in the book that science does not proceed ‘by accretion’ - neither, of course, does educational theory and practice.
Where the analogy breaks down is in the difference between developments in scientific thinking and developments in the humanities - the latter can rarely, if ever, offer a breakthrough in thinking that is eventually accepted as the received wisdom by the vast majority working in the field. Despite what some would have us believe, education is not a science - it is a messy combination of art, craft, philosophy, hope, and a few other categories besides.
In education at the present time, therefore, the resistance, whether active or passive, to the various strands of thinking around Learning 2.0 and all its variants, might - and only might - in the long run, make whatever changes that do occur over time all the more resilient and lasting. However, when we are not dealing with a ‘provable truth’ such as might be expected in science, the resistance to a new paradigm might well still win in the end - the current resistence to the kinds of educational thinking around Learning 2.0 is strong and deeply embedded in longstanding practice.
Perhaps Kuhn’s quote from Max Planck is all we have to look forward to:
“….a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather that its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Is this what will happen in education? Whatever proves to be the case, the older paradigm in education undoubtedly retains a powerful grip on how we currently ‘do’ education in most parts of the world. As Kuhn also says:
“The source of resistence is the assurance that the older paradigm will ulimately solve all its problems…”
There are many in education who still believe, and are working to prove, that the old industrial models of schooling can deal successfully with all the issues of disengagement and relevance in education, given time, resources, ‘new’ thinking and faith in the efficacy of what has been built up over the past hundred and fifty years and more.
We have to work all the harder to ensure this does not happen.
Technorati Tags: thomas kuhn, science, education, paradigm shift






