Tougaloo
College
April 27,
2012
Draft #1
TEACHING AND
INVISIBLE REVOLUTIONS
One
of the more attractive chapters in Thomas S. Kuhn’s now classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is the one devoted to the function
of the textbook. For those of us who
have more than a casual interest how the world of human affairs is changing,
Chapter XI. “The Invisibility of Revolutions” offers a valuable lesson. In this chapter, Kuhn discusses with
commendable clarity why textbooks as “pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation
of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the
language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change” (137). As a
historian of science who aware of philosophical entanglements, Kuhn
painstakingly exposes a secret that was no secret for the most astute and
responsible practitioners of science in the twentieth century: the illusion
that science is logical and authoritative is secured by “a persistent tendency
to make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even
affects scientists looking back at their own research” (139). For all of us, regardless of our disciplines,
the chapter contains a valuable lesson.
In
the work of normal science, the textbook guarantees the stability of the
dominant paradigm and promotes growth of knowledge. Indeed, if natural scientists were distracted
by detailed rather than truncated histories of their disciplines, it is likely
they would be afflicted with the sense of crisis nurtured by their colleagues
in the humanities. It is probable that
social scientists adapt the behaviors of natural scientists, minimizing
detailed histories and maximizing exactness, empirical inquiry, the necessity
of duplication, and the imperatives of verification as essential standards for
legitimate experimentation. It is likely
that both natural and social scientists only feel a crisis when they are shot
by ethical questions and compelled to give account of themselves, or when they
have to grapple with whether Werner Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty
applies to more than the “fact” that quantum particles do not occupy fixed and
measurable positions.
Kuhn’s
commentary on the textbook in normal science makes it quite clear that
selective historical narrative can succeed in rendering paradigm ruptures
invisible or at lease translucent. Our
sense of reality is truly “constructed” or very dependent on our use of
language, what we say or what we refuse to say.
Not only has the digital revolution of the late twentieth century
reshaped reality or the practice of everyday life, it has also begun to modify
the physical, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions of humanity. For those of us who teach, the invisibility
of the digital revolution is not a matter about which we are totally free to be
flippant. I am using the terms
“invisible” and “invisibility” in the special sense of that which can not be
known precisely; I do not wish to imply, as did Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man (1952), that people’s
vision is impaired as “a matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those
eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” (Vintage
ed., 1980:3).
If
we ponder Kuhn’s book along with the seldom discussed Narrative
Experiments: The Discursive Authority of Science and Technology (1989) by
the philosophers Gayle Ormiston and Raphael Sassower and the rapidly expanding discussions
of everything digital on the Internet, it might be possible to have a moment of
enlightenment about what is most troubling for teachers in general and
devastatingly troubling for people who have taught for more than thirty
years. I do not refer to the so-called
millennial student who has the courtesy of tuning out a serious lecture and engaging
in the life-sustaining magic rituals of the i-Phone. Nor do I refer specifically to the multiple
reasons that forms of globalization determine radical and painful reshaping of
high education in frantic efforts to achieve sustainability. What is most troubling to many teachers is
the sheer inevitability of the digital revolution, the hegemony of that
revolution, and the irreversible impact on person and public life. The
unquestioned optimism that Voltaire ruthlessly satirized in Candide ( 1759 ) now champions the
digital revolution in this best of all possible worlds and champions, perhaps
unwittingly, the gradual dehumanization slithering in the motions of swiftly
changing technologies.
Change
is inevitable. Efforts to resist are as
effective as sitting on the banks of a river and asking the water to stop
running. We shall only be inundated by
more data that is endlessly produced by hardware and the bottomless well of
software. Thus, we are obligated to respond to an ancient question: How shall we manage change?
Scholars in all
disciplines do acknowledge that change, both as a concept and as a practice, is
inevitable. Many of them welcome the dazzling promises of emerging
technologies, for they are convinced that the creation and transmission of
knowledge in a future must be digital. They
are right. Nevertheless, digital technology can function as does the textbook
about which Kuhn writes. It can limit memory. The change it promotes can have a
profound, irreversible impact on methods of research, on our choices of what is
valuable and what is trivial, and on our understanding of how “revolutionary “
paradigms and epistemes operate in disciplines and in interdisciplinary work,
on how we frame questions. Such change
can diminish the capacity of the human mind to deal with hard questions. In the
context of invisible revolutions, we should do for our students what our
teachers did for us. We should challenge them with hard questions for which
neither Google nor any other search engine will provide an answer.
It encourages
older, traditional scholars to be cautious and skeptical. To be blunt, a few of
us honestly want to know what is at present only a matter of speculation in
cognitive sciences: the consequences of long-term exposure to electronic forms
on the brain. Will it be the case half a century from now that man’s higher
order cognitive operations have been so altered that independent critical
thinking will be minimal?
Some of us who
have not been figuratively in “arranged marriages since birth” with emerging
technologies are more willing than our younger colleagues to question just how
progressive are swift changes in our disciplines and in the purposes of
education. We want to know how the romance with digital technology is related
to globalization. We want to know how the “love affair” with technology and
everything digital is increasing or diminishing thoughtful, historical
reflection on the formal (structural) and cultural (discursive) changes. One
colleague has warned me that expressing concern about history is a mark of my
own antiquity. So be it.
Occasionally, real virtue can be found
in being antiquated and morally responsible in nascent, amoral environments. I
would claim that the real virtue possessed by those who have taught for many
years is wisdom.
In the ancient
days before the 1970s and the ascent of the theoretical turn, we spoke and
wrote in the humanities and a few other disciplines of sound, perception, ambiguity and
skeptism, great issues, discrimination
and sense. Now we find ourselves in conversation with problematizing sound,
topical concerns, ideologies incapable of naming their boundaries, sensations,
and spectacle. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) have sought to persuade us
to embrace “Create Change,” an initiative which “advocates changes that
recognize the potential of the networked digital environment” (see http://www.createchange.org/about/index.shtml).
If we fail to subject that potential to scrutiny, we may discover digital
scholarship blindly imitating social networking. Representations “speaking to”
representations might obscure the awareness that knowing the history of one’s
discipline as well as one’s own historicity is endlessly significant. Common sense and the value of one human being
talking face-to-face with another are not yet dead. They can co-exist with digital adventures and
technology-bound instruction.[1]
Change is
inevitable. Nevertheless, passive acceptance should be balanced with active
resistance. Scholars in all disciplines, especially those in the human
sciences, ought to think deeply about a central question that can be
articulated in disturbingly plain language: is the ultimate outcome of digital
scholarship the liberation or the enslavement of the human mind? That question
is one bit of wisdom that those who have taught for many years can offer to
higher education, to the always changing world.
[1]
It is sobering to read Paul Fyfe’s “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged” – http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/000106/000106.html and to think about his claim that “Q &A
and in-person discussion” in a classroom might restore what overmuch dependence
on computers has “senselessly displaced” (paragraph 8).
