The evolution of educational theory has developed and shifted correspondingly with both the philosophical and scientific advances of the twentieth century. Many schools of thought from intellectual giants Kant and Rousseau, through Montessori, Piaget, Cassirer, and Vigotsky have informed one another in the relentless search for a better understanding of the developing mind (“Influences and Trends” Chart). Our understanding of how the learning process is conducted in the mind – and correspondingly how the mind itself forms – have shifted radically from the theories that informed the works of earlier scholars and educators. In his 1982 publication Art, Mind, and Brain – A Cognitive Approach to Creativity, Howard Gardner explores this shift in perception from the constructivist theory of genetic epistemology through Ernst Cassirer’s revitalization of phenomenology, and finally with Nelson Goodman and his post-modern nominalist philosophies.
The ongoing refinement of pedagogy has been “from unique truth and the word fixed and found towards a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making” (Gardner, 1982, p. 42). At the dawn of the twentieth century, the understanding of the human mind’s development was wholly different from the modern conceptualization. Prominent thinking of the time was that a child was essentially a “‘little adult’ who perhaps knew less than an adult but reasoned in essentially the same way” (Gardner, 1982, p. 7). It was Piaget who finally demonstrated that the functionality of a child’s mind was fundamentally dissimilar that of an adult’s (Gardner, 1982, p. 7). Piaget, though unquestionably erudite, was ultimately bound by the notion that the mind functioned in essentially a clockwork fashion, and that the “vast realms of awareness” contained in unquantifiable vessels of feeling, art, and music were not important to understanding the mind (Gardner, 1982, p.14). Instead, they were “bypassed in this ‘civilized,’ streamlined, and even somewhat mechanistic view of human consciousness” (Gardner, 1982, p. 14). Thus, ultimately Piaget’s titanic efforts were stymied by his own limited concept of the mind.
It was Cassirer and his protégé, Susanne Langer, who would help the disciple move beyond that misconception. Rather than merely observing the static reality around it in an essentially passive way, Cassirer pushed forward the theory that the mind was instead an active agent in the process of generating reality (Gardner, 1982). Drawing on Kant’s theory of phenomenology, Cassirer breath new life into the idea that “Time and Space are not absolute, but are organizing schemes the human mind imposes on the chaos of sensory input” (“Language, Mind, and Community”, p. 11). The mind itself was a critical component in not only understanding reality, but also creating it in a meaningful sense. Symbols were not merely constructs and tools of humans to frame truths, but in fact were “the functioning of thought itself, vital creative forms of activity our sole ways of “making” reality and synthesizing the world” (Gardner, 1982, p. 43-44). As evidenced in the modern artworks of artists such as Picasso, O’Keefe, Monet, Pollock, and many others, observing the exterior world was an active process of generating and interpreting patterns, not of merely observing a singular frame of reference (“Language, Mind, and Community”).
Nelson Goodman applied this concept to the vehicles of human expression: art, music, and language. His system of Notationality assessed the syntactic and semantic criteria of those symbol systems, and found they almost all fell short of the “ideal” in one or more critical facets (Gardner, 1982, p. 57). Since “the status of [a given symbol] depends entirely on how one chooses to construe it,” perfect clarity is virtually impossible (Gardner, 1982, p. 55). Instead, the possibilities of multiple interpretations of even a simple squiggle or word render even the most precise attempt at objective understanding “chock-full of ambiguity, redundancy, and other necessary blurring of features” (Gardner, 1982, p. 57). Whether a wiggly line is a meaningless scribble, an important data point, or a priceless piece of art is not objectively answerable, but instead depends on the observer and the circumstance of its observation (Gardner, 1982, p. 59). And as such, any system of observation – be it scientific inquiry or artistic creativity – become a coequals in their attempts at understanding. The versions of reality we simultaneously see as we create and create as we see are constantly changing in concert with our own changing conceptions and influences (Gardner, 1982, p. 63-64). It is important to note, however, that Goodman was not a proponent of total relativism. Though he did not consider any one realm of knowledge inherently superior to another, he stressed that there were “fairer” cuts of the cloth we collective term reality (Gardner, 1982, p. 62-63). Determining what those “fair cuts” are remains an ever-shifting question.
References
Gardner, H. (1982). Art, mind, and brain -- A cognitive approach to creativity. New York: Basic Books.
“Influences and Trends in Twentieth Century Education.” Montana State University, North Plains Transition to Teaching Coursepack.
“Language, Mind, and Community – And exploration of the relationship between cultural tools and the growth of human consciousness.” Montana State University, North Plains Transition to Teaching Coursepack.
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