Realizing our education methods have grown out of reductionist times, gives us perspective to glimspe a deep flaw. In his automaton duck, unveiled in 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson boasted the needed duck parts were there for the contrivance to digest and defecate. As Jan Riskin describes, in his time there was “growing confidence, derived from ever-improving instruments, that experimentation could reveal nature’s actual design.”
Think, then, of this comparison: a digesting-duck curriculum for a school subject includes a set of standard parts, so that after a student works through it, she can pour forth its meaning. Online networking of the subject is a lot messier, like life. The deep rooted conviction in education that standard units of knowledge can be assembled to cause learning dates to the time of the digesting duck, when reductionism was infiltrating every intellectual field.
Like a living duck, the internet rejects dissected units of ideas, and provides instead a new matrix for knowledge that is complexly interrelated, as is knowledge itself. Melanie Mitchell begins her wonderful new book Complexity, A Guided Tour with this explanation of reductionism from Douglas Hofstadter’s classic Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid:
REDUCTIONISM is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It’s simply the belief that “a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their ’sum.’” No one in her left brain could reject reductionism.
