School of Educational Studies, Massey University, Palmerston North
There is a growing interest in exploring the contribution neuroscience might make to education. However, linking the two gives rise to a particularly serious philosophical problem – the ‘is-ought gap’. That is, an evaluative statement about what we ought to do (education) cannot be derived from descriptive statements about what is the case (neuroscience). Once some of the difficulties raised by this problem are understood then we might reach a better appreciation of just what sort of contribution, if any, neuroscience can make to education.
a fundamental distinction between two basic concepts – learning and education. All too often they are run together as meaning the same thing when they are altogether rather different. Here is as good an example as any. Klemm (2011) reports on a conversation with the Nobel Prize physicist Carl Wieman: “He also made the point that anybody who has gone to school tends to think they are an expert in learning. But he explained, ‘novices seldom recognise what they do not know, especially in education’”. The two concepts of learning and education must be kept well apart: they are not two terms meaning the same thing but are two expressions with very different, even if related meanings, which will have contrasting implications for the application of neuroscience.
The Is-Ought Problem The is-ought gap presents those connecting neuroscience and education with an intractable problem. Hume (1978) observed that from a set of descriptive or ‘is’ statements or premises it is not logically possible to derive a normative or ‘ought’ conclusion. Learning What is required is the addition of one or more normative Learning is what goes on in our heads or, better still, in our premises to the factual ones to enable an ought conclusion to brains. We learn all manner of things over a lifetime. Some of be drawn from the conjunction of is and ought premises. This the things we learn will be stored in our memory and recalled to the end of our days while other things is the problem that those advancing the are almost immediately forgotten. Some descriptive claims of neuroscience to be The advances in of our learning figures in our awareness able to solve prescriptive educational neuroscience can begin while other learning does not. Learning, concerns must address. a neural process, occurs in ways about to tell us more about how as Neuroscience which we have very little direct and Neuroscience, as an evolving field, is children learn, but immediate control, at least in schools. generating an increasing number of Neuroscience can tell us more and insights into the nature of the brain, how much more remains more about what happens when we especially its structures, functions and learn something, it can inform us how an open question. processes. We have already discovered and why we remember some things and much about neurons (brain cells) and how their axons and forget other things, it can advise what the consequences might dendrites connect via the synaptic gap to process information be of neural changes brought about by ageing and accident and received from our senses. We have found that the brain possesses by interventions such as surgery and medication. All of this is a degree of plasticity which facilitates the growth of new axon/ located firmly in the empirical realm of what is. dendrite connections and the pruning of old ones. It is evident The advances in neuroscience can begin to tell us more about that the brain consists of certain components which perform how children learn, but how much more remains an open particular functions related to learning and memory, amongst question. MRI scans might reveal where in the brain particular other things. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans are being cognitive functions take place and trace out the sequence of used to track changes in the brain which appear to be connected cognitive operations which occur when this task or that is to the tasks people undertake under experimental or clinical undertaken. It might some day even be able to get down to the conditions. It is likely that there will be much more yet to come. micro-level of explaining how the electro-biochemical processes Whether we will ever arrive at a complete mapping of the brain in various parts of the brain make learning possible. Geake remains to be seen but as progress is made towards achieving this (2011), for example, suggests that we might in due course be goal it seems certain that there will be those in education or with able to “answer questions about learning, memory, motivation an interest in education, whether academics, politicians, policy- and so on” (p.46), all of which will be empirical solutions to makers, practitioners or parents, who will seek to harness the empirical problems. findings of neuroscience to achieve particular educational ends. What practical implications can we draw from this body of Before they do so, however, it is important that they recognise empirical understanding? On the face of it, not much. There
t ion’ Bridge d Practice?
seems to be little that points to any teaching practices which teachers could adopt to enhance student learning. We simply have no way of connecting what we might do as a teacher to what goes on in a child’s brain. We are not able to establish a causal connection between a particular teaching activity in the classroom and the learning which might take place via a child’s neural pathways. There are some interventions applied to students, such as medications, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), surgery, digital implants and the like, which certainly could be taken up, possibly with some benefit to learning, but doing so takes us beyond the narrow confines of neuroscience and into that of neuro-ethics. This shift is captured by the ‘if p then q’ conditional: if we want to raise student achievement in high stakes assessment then give them cognitive enhancers, or whatever. Empirically, it may well be the case that if p then q but whether we ought to value achievement in high stakes assessment and whether we are ethically justified in providing students with medications and other interventions to enhance memory are matters of deep public debate. That we can do something is never a justification that we ought to do it; something more is required in the form of an ethical argument which takes us beyond what neuroscience alone can offer.
in educational activities without some learning occurring. But education cannot be reduced to learning for there is far more to education than learning alone. Education is about valuing certain things and not other things, of becoming a particular sort of person, of being able to make moral judgements, and the like, all of which go well beyond the far more limited sphere of learning. Further, not all learning has educational value. We learn many things which have no educational worth at all even though they may have value in some other areas of our lives. Learning how to cut our finger nails has no educational value but might have some value in a social sense of acceptable personal appearance. Neuroscience has a very limited role to play in education. At the level of policy, Ferrari (2011) puts the matter thus:
Education What ought to be done brings us to education. Education is a normative activity when used in such expressions as ‘education is a good thing’ or ‘she is an educated person’ or ‘this is a worthwhile educational activity’ or ‘education is to be valued for its own sake’. Education may require some learning to take place for it is hard to see how we could become educated or successfully engage
Ferrari cautions that while neuroscience can inform the aims of education it does not set them: “educational neuroscience can help fulfil the mandate of public education but only as a tool that is part of a broader conversation . . . about what schools should strive for” (Ibid., p.35). This might be good advice but it seems to be lost on those who are enthusiastic supporters of popular so-called brain-based teaching-learning approaches. Geake
We need an educational neuroscience that follows the medical model at least in this way: that pure research informs practice . . . But unlike medicine, education promotes values that reflect the kind of citizen and ultimately the kind of society we aspire to create. Although educational neuroscience necessarily involves evidence from cognitive science about the brain, it also concerns people and how they choose to live their lives, as shaped by the cultural influences they are exposed to (p.34).
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(2008) critiques four of these – multiple intelligences, split brain, 10 per cent and learning styles – although there are bound to be others: what they all appear to have in common, despite the claim of being based on neuroscience, is an almost complete disregard of what the advances in neuroscience tell us about the workings of the brain. Rather, some aspects of neuroscience are seized upon to give ‘respectable’ support to programmes, often linked to commercial purposes, which feed on parental anxieties for their children to do well at school. In such cases, the is-ought problem is brushed aside in the pursuit of financial gain by the promoters and the promise to parents of enhanced learning by their children. The financial gain is not likely to be matched by a similar gain in learning. Conclusion Can neuroscience and education bridge the is-ought gap? Bruer’s (1997) remark that “Educational applications of brain science may come eventually but as of now neuroscience has little to offer teachers in terms of informing classroom practice” (p.4) still holds now as it did then. However, given the un-closable divide between the ‘is’ of neuroscience and the ‘ought’ of education it is inconceivable that significant educational applications will emerge from neuroscience. This is not to deny that neuroscience may very well tell us more about how the brain functions in regard to explaining learning and memory but it is to deny that a better empirical understanding of neural processing can ever have any prescriptive educational implications for classroom teaching and learning.
References Bruer, J. (1997) Education and the brain: A bridge too far. Educational Researcher. 26(8), 4–16 Ferrari, M. (2011) What can neuroscience bring to education? Educational Philosophy and Theory. 43(1), 31–36. Geake, J. (2008) Neuromythologies in education. Educational Research. 50(2), 123–133. Geake, J. (2011) Position statement on motivations, methodologies, and practical implications of educational neuroscience research: fMRI studies of the neural correlates of creative intelligence. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 42(1), 42–47. Hume, D. (1978) A Treatise on Human Nature. (ed L.A. selby Bigge). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Klemm, W. (2011) Neuroscience: The hot new area in education. Psychology Today Memory Medic. 28 September.
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