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06/16/2006: "Education Reform by the Uneducated"

Think it's bad living in a country run by a Bush? Try living under two of them. That's the distinguished honor that we Floridians have. And so too do they share an askew view of reality. Jeb Bush recently signed HB 7087, the Florida's Education Omnibus Bill, colloquially known as A++. Amongst the guidelines and requirements under FL 1003.42 which Florida public schools must now educate *ehem* students includes that:

American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

The intent of the clause was given by an earlier Senate amendment (that did not make it into the final bill), which immediately before the above clause read, "the history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth." [Emphasis mine]

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at NYU, wrote an interesting rebuttal to the new regulatory changes in the LA Times last week. He wrote:

Ironically, the Florida law is itself revisionist history. Once upon a time, it theorizes, history — especially about the founding of the country — was based on facts. But sometime during the 1960s, all that changed. American historians supposedly started embracing newfangled theories of moral relativism and French postmodernism, abandoning their traditional quest for facts, truth and certainty.

The result was a flurry of new interpretations, casting doubt on the entire past as we had previously understood it. Because one theory was as good as another, then nothing could be true or false. God, nation, family and school: It was all up for grabs.

There's just one problem with this history-of-our-history: It's wrong.

Ah, the illusion of objectivity. I run across this in my discipline, too. The temptation to model all knowledge on the methods of science on one hand, or literature on the other. According to this disjunctive and disfunctional view of knowledge, if a discipline is not modelled on one, then it must be modelled on the other. Either a discipline deals with "knowable, teachable, and testable" facts like physics, or it's all interpretation, or adopts a "revisionist or postmodernist" standpoint and merely interprets, without ever attaining any degree of truth like literary studies. The sad fact is that this popular way to look at things is patently false.

As Thomas Kuhn points out (as do also Lakatos, Feyerabend and Duhem) to say that science has any objective validity independent of the historical paradigm is incorrect. Science is never an accurate portrayal of reality, but always subject to amendment and fine tuning. Moreso, the history of science is subject to periodic revolutions, wherein the conceptual map by which we use to understand the world is overturned. The Newtonian model of the universe works well for mid-sized objects (like tables, cars, dogs and those things we are used to in our everyday lives) but does not apply to very large objects (like planets) or very small objects (like electrons). The language of twentieth century physics--of relativity and quantum mechanics--is not merely an expansion of Newtonian mechanics, but rather an undermining of it. The two paradigms are, strictly speaking untranslatable, or "incommensurable" as Kuhn put it. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, our view of the universe has shifted and with it the "truths" of the Nineteenth century. So too will our current "truths" of science be jettisoned with time.

Likewise, to say that humanities disciplines merely interpret and therefore have only subjective or emotive truth is also false. It is a common sophomoric understanding of my discipline that "philosophy is all interpretation" and so one's opinion on the state of things is just as good as any other. This comes from not merely an ignorance of philosophy, but rather a general ignorance of the nature and character of knowledge in general. As Wittgenstein reminds us, "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences", but rather "limits the disputable sphere of natural science" (TLP 4.111, 4.113). Philosophy is neither a sum of doctrines--nor more egregiously a sum of interpretations which have equal (or no) truth--but rather an activity. "The word 'philosophy,'" that is, "must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences." (TLP 4.111)

Is it any wonder then that getting outside of the hermeneutic flow of knowledge is impossible? The legislators of Florida must think that one can take a "God's eye perspective" and get to the "facts" of history in an "objective" way. This is not only false, but embarrassingly so. History is developed and chronicled by people. And further, to arrive at what is significant in the flow of history is not subject to an objective method; it is relative to our epistemic character since relevance means relevance for us, not for the Universe or for quarks.

For this reason, it's a good thing the appointed government officials are doing something useless like making laws, rather than spinning their fairy tales of objectivist history outside of Tallahassee. To amend the old adage: if those who cannot do teach, then those who cannot do anything get elected to public office.