Soul to Mind: Conditions of Possibility for Brain-Based Learning, Neurological Foundationalism, and Problems of Human-Centrism

• In Event: The "New Eugenics" and Education

Abstract

Objectives
Within educational research across Europe and the United States, one of the most rapidly traveling discourses and highly funded pursuits of the moment is brain-based learning (BBL), also considered part of what is now termed educational neuroscience (Fischer et al., 2010; Hardiman, 2012; Jensen, 2008; OECD/ CERI, 2007; Sousa, 2010). The objective of this paper is to historicize the ways in which certain forms of educational neuroscience have come to subscribe to neurological foundationalism for curriculum and pedagogical decision-making and to provoke cautious, deeper and more philosophical discussions in regard to the ethical conundra embodied within BBL research.

Theoretical Framework and Techniques of Inquiry
The “methods” used to do so draw from post-foundationalist research approaches (postcolonial, poststructural and posthumanist literatures) that question appeals to a single origin and universal essence. Curriculum studies’ interdisciplinary range is well-placed to understand the potential for a single and universal sense of causality to be tied to strategies for cultural domination (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). Thus, instead of seeking singular origin, this paper maps the ‘messy and numberless beginnings’ of worldviews that have placed hope upon neurological foundationalism to provide a solution to the ‘problem’ of differences between students and to the achievement of educational goals (Campbell, 2009) and it examines the effects of power and philosophical flashpoints that ensue in the wake of such assumptions. This includes the currently under-theorized and sublated prospect of neugenics that is recasting ‘the ideal child’ of 21st century classrooms, allied to the “hope” of normalization (cultural domination) and rehabilitation (mimesis), and their mutually constitutive relation.

Results and Substantiated Conclusions
The paper begins with identifying some key patterns and absent presences in the contemporary BBL literature, and then traces the ‘long arcs’ and ‘short arcs’ that have helped to produce conditions for subscribing to the brain as a causal organological locus of learning. In the long arc, the analysis elaborates the relationship between technologies of self, histories and cultures of dissection, and the general shift from soul-body to mind-body relations in ‘western’ onto-epistemological frames (Carlino, 1999; Fairchild, 1991; Foucault, 2005; Krippner, 1994). In the short arc, three historic and pivotal examples of the movement from squeezing to scanning in modern mind-brain relation debates that have redefined ‘the ideal child’ each time are surveyed, drawing from primary documents of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Scientific and Scholarly Significance of the Study
The presentation will conclude by raising a range of contemporary fantasies, projections and contestations of some of the central assumptions within ‘western’ conceptions of Being that sustain the conditions of possibility for BBL research (Abraham, 2006). This includes the thorny problem of human-centrism (Baker, 2013; Calarco, 2008) even in those accounts that claim to question scientific materialist approaches to the nature of reality.

Author

• Bernadette M. Baker, University of Wisconsin