Kuhn as esoteric teacher of secrets

I've been seeing Kuhn and his paradigm shift popping up in educational writing a lot recently. I haven't seen it this much since the business gurus got a hold of it in the mid-ninties. Both of them got Kuhn so wrong (or so simplistically a child could have professed the same conclusions) I strongly suspect these education and business experts have never actually read Kuhn.

Here are two examples:
Constructivism, Education, Science, and Technology in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, V. 29(3), Fall 2003
Bersin's essay in the San Diego Union Tribune.

In the first example, Moses A. Boudourides makes a case of special pleading for constructivism, but like so much on constructivism, really just states the commonplace and imagines it to be profound. The author invokes Kuhn in order to invoke the profound by association. Khun is rejecting the positivist view of science, but Boudourides performs a bait and switch and substitutes realism for his bogeyman. Unfortunatly, his constructivism is just a re-statement of the realist critique of positivism. Indeed, if you go to the Radical Academy (a realist archive, resource, and encyclopedia) and search the terms constructivist or constructivism, neither result gets a hit. Realists pay no attention to constructivists, because constructivists have little if anything to say that realists haven't already said. Yet, realists are attacked, though their mouthes are stuffed with positivism. Such authors and perhaps constructivists of all kinds, must attack realism because it deflects the observation that constructivists are just putting the old wine of the realist epistomology into the new ontological bottles with out improving them at all. Indeed seperation of some realist ideas from the rest of the body of realism does a harm, and the attacks on realism as a philosophy is dishonest. What is a choice irony in Boudourides' article is his favorable mentions of real positivists like Wittgenstein. Obviously the constructivists have no idea who their friends and enemies are, nor do they understand Khun. So Boudourides takes Khun's attack on the positive view of science, and re-states it, with the help of positivists, as an attack on realism, when in fact Khun is making a realist argument. A nice little piece by George Hein, the Constructivist Museum, makes a similar mistake, attacking the name of realism, but desribing the ideas of idealism. Indeed, he cites Plato. Hein goes on to confuse Lockean empiricism with a radical deviation, Watsonian behaviorism, but all of this leads me to no greater conclusion than the constructivists don't know their history of ideas. (Or more precisely, they know one fact very well, that in the middle ages there was a notion called realism which is contrasted to nominalism, which holds that when I say green I am refering to a real greenness that exists without objects, perception, or observers, that it is a Platonic Form. But finding people who will argue for Platonic Forms and will argue for medieval philosophical realism, in contrast to most other uses of the term realism to refer to Aristotle's philosphy, and those which are derived from it, expand on it, or otherwise based upon it. Bait and switch!)

The second example, Bersin's essay in the Union-Tribune, seems to suggest that it was Khun who recognized that Copernicus introduced a new way of understanding the heavens, but that would need to be reconciled with De Revolutionibus being placed on the index of forbidden books in 1616 as a result of Galileo's additional argument for the heliocentric theory. Modern science often teaches its own history only in terms of what older scientists got right, rather than what their complete work was. Modern science points to Copernicus' heliocentricism but ignores his continued reliance on epicycles (which last until Kepler can replace them with the ellipse). This is what Kuhn was talking about. The revolution of Copernicus (and how convienient that Kuhn wrote a book specifically treating this subject, beyond his more familiar Structure of Scientific Revolutions with all its talk of paradigm shifts) was not just a shift from geo-centric to helio-centric, but of aristotelian concern with the primacy of observation (does the theory describe the observations) with a neo-platonic concern with aesthetics of symmetry (is the theory elegant), with the fact that the theory overthrown was very well established, so much so that churchmen failed to distinguish Ptolemy from Christian doctrine, Ptolemy being taught to them by the Church in university. Further, the old theory made sence with the classical physics of the day. If the earth is the center of the universe because "earth" is the heaviest of the four elements and has "fallen" to its location, we can now explain why objects fall when released. If the earth is a mere planet which is in motion around a larger object, why do objects fall at all? [Summon Newton, please.] What Kuhn did, indeed the heart of his achievement was not to take notice of the fact that Copernicus had a new theory. That's not only wrong, but so simple minded that everyone knew it then, and children know it now. What Kuhn tells us is that each one of these supporting ideas which are a part of Ptolemaic geo-centricism, the growing unwieldliness of matching the theory to the observations amd the accumulation of epicylces upon epicylces upon epicycles to "save the appearances", requiring, Ockham-like a less complicated theory. He generalizes to say that when science starts having to "save the appearances" by making the theory cumbersome, you have a problem. What happened with Copernicus was that the new theory suddenly through into doubt other theories (why do things fall) which had not been otherwise in need of new theories. That's why its a revolution. No one thing is changed, a whole boat-load of things are ultimatly changed.

I'm a bit on a rail against Kuhn simplifiers and misinterpreters, so I may be a bit hard on old Bersin. As an introduction to a piece on education, Khun is fine, it is the summary of his argument that rubs me the wrong way. Of course just how applicable Kuhn is depends on just how revolutionary Bersin wants to be. Is he changing one thing that's already obvious to experts inside the profession? [Bersin was an outsider when he became superintendent.] Siegfried Engelmann certainly thinks so. (link here, scroll down past the Bersin article). My own sense is that Bersin, who was U.S. attorney of the Southern District of California until 1998, absorbed the earlier Kuhnophilia when it ran through the business world as the latest fad. As such, Bersin might well have been accustomed only to the most superficial interpretation of Kuhn.

Does Bersin call for changes not just from geo-centrism to helio-centrism, but further ground his challenge in terms of all the supporting changes in ideas do that his "revolution" isn't superficial, but creates change all over the system at many, many key points? Bersin challenges a species of superficial change, what GE's Jack Welch called "superficial congeniality." If what Bersin means by this is that education must abandon its faddishness, and focus on maximizing productivity (which I take to mean annual yearly progress) does it therefore follow that we just speak about the priority of productivity and ask of "every program [...] and every reform: does it improve student achievement?" Or does he propose (or will the logic of this thinking produce) radical changes in education which will break the many monopolies which strangle student performance and effective teaching? Will there be competing educational philosophies appealing to parents in an eviroment of real choice, in which the state and the collaition of teacher's colleges and professional organizations will give up their monopolies (or be forced to do so) in the name of student achievment?

I understand other kinds of reforms could be implimented, but his invocation of "harnessing self-interest" is so Smithian, being the formula of the invisible hand, and his mention of "flexibility, competition, incentives, effeciency, and innovation" also spells a regard for capitalism and markets that suggests at least the direction of reform I have proposed.

But so much of the essay sounds like the kind of bussiness Kuhnism which is just empty. I also find so much to disagree with in his analysis. For example, he says that faddism is the paradigm of the schools, but I would contend there is a system of competing, rival paradigms of which none has dominance, so that like some European multi-party parliament, no one can govern without the approval of other factions. This is why every school mission statement sounds like its got something for everyone. A little rigor, a dash self-esteem, a teaspoon of existential development, and sound hard discipline, except when it might injure someone's self-esteem, and so on. Bersin fails to understand that our system "is immune to harnessing self-interest" because our system matured in the 1930's when "self-interest" meant 1929 and the market crash, and technocratic solutions run by a brain trust (read: party apparchniks) would apply the princples of George Counts and his latter day incarnations like Alfie Kohn. Some of what Bersin says suggests he has too much bought into this kind of thinking to imagine he is really prepared for a genuine paradigm shift. I end up expecting what I would expect from those business reformers who spouted Kuhn a decade ago, little if anything. Certainly no revolution. We'll see what happens as Bersin takes over as California's state secretary of education.