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Abstract
This article has two purposes. The first is to bring current developments in neuroscience, including educational neuroscience, to the attention of historians of education. The second is to demonstrate how historians of education, in common with philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, can contribute to this new field. Education has replaced natural selection in human evolution. Symbolic representations, speech, memory, writing, printing, screen-based communications and various mood-changing activities have shaped and are continuing to shape the human brain. It is argued here that by taking a longer historical perspective and recognising the brain as a palimpsest or kluge, historians of education can help to explain the limitations of neuroplasticity and some of the fundamental problems that beset formal educational systems. Just as education needs to be afforded a more central role in the history of human evolution, so the brain needs to be given a more central role in the history of education.
Acknowledgements
The author is most grateful to Patrick Ainley, Clyde Chitty, Peter Cunningham, Michael Fielding, Jane Martin and Michael Reiss for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Notes
1Joey Barton, ‘Thanks to Twitter I’m not just a bad boy now’, The Times, January 31, 2012.
2See for example the 425 free courses from top universities at http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses (accessed March 6, 2012), and Rhys Blakely, ‘“Wonderland” Degree for Cost of Getting On Line’, The Times, May 12, 2012.
3 Longman Dictionary of the English Language.
5Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (London: Penguin, 2007), xv.
4‘Neuro’ meaning related to the brain and nervous system, and ‘plastic’ meaning changeable.
7Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), xi.
6Tony Buzan with Barry Buzan, The Mind Map Book (London: BBC WorldWide, 2003), 249–50.
8The LHC is a 26.6 kilometre underground circular tunnel under the French–Swiss border that accelerates two beams of billions of protons (belonging to a class of particles called hadrons) to collide. The first trial run took place on 10 September 2008. See Lisa Randle, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (London: The Bodley Head, 2011).
9Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham: Acuman, 2011).
10Ibid., 335.
11Ibid., 12.
12See http://www.thersa.org/projects/social-brain (accessed March 2, 2012).
13See Gemma Calvert, ‘Brain Sells’, RSA Journal, Winter (2011): 30–3.
14‘Neuromania? The Possibilities and Pitfalls of our Fascination with Brains’. Royal Society of Arts, 8 John Adam Street, London, July 5, 2011.
15This confrontation occurred during a discussion following a paper on the application of Darwin’s theory to the intellectual development of Europe delivered by John Draper of New York University at the British Association meeting in Oxford, June 30, 1860.
16See, for example, the highly acclaimed journal Mind, Brain and Education.
17See, for example, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Uta Frith, The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); James P. Byrnes, Minds, Brains, and Learning: Understanding the Psychological and Educational Relevance of Neuroscientific Research (New York: Guilford Press, 2001); John G. Geake, The Brain at School: Educational Science in the Classroom (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2009); Paul Howard-Jones, Introducing Educational Research: Neuroscience, Education and the Brain, from Contexts to Practice (London: Routledge, 2010); James E. Zull, From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2011).
18See, for example, Usha Goswami, ‘Neuroscience and Education’, British Journal of Educational Psychology 74, no. 1 (2004): 1–14 and Michael W. O’Boyle and Harwant S. Gill, ‘On the Relevance of Research Findings in Cognitive Neuroscience to Educational Practice’, Educational Psychology Review 10, no. 4 (1998): 397–409; dedicated issues of other journals, for example ‘Educational Neuroscience’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 43, no. 1 (2011): 1–107; and the specialist journal Mind, Brain and Education.
19Barbara Strauch, The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain (London: Penguin, 2010).
20Prison population statistics, parliamentary briefing paper (2011), available at http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN04334.pdf.
21See, for example, David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), chapter 6, ‘Why Blameworthiness is the Wrong Question’.
23Ibid., 186.
22Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl, How Babies Think (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 208.
24Ibid., 105–6.
25Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself, 52.
26Tony Buzan and Terence Dixon, The Evolving Brain (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1978), 19.
27Tony Buzan with Barry Buzan, The Mind Map Book, front cover.
28Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 204–5.
29Ibid., 205.
30James P. Byrnes, Minds, Brains, and Learning, vii.
31Ibid., 185.
32Jodi Tommerdahl, ‘A Model for Bridging the Gap between Neuroscience and Education’, Oxford Review of Education 36, no. 1 (2010): 107.
33Michel Ferrari, ‘What Can Neuroscience Bring to Education?’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 43, no. 1 (2011): 31–6.
34Stanley Finger, Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
35See, for example David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
36David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 150.
37V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature, 22.
38Discovered in November 1974 by the American paleontologist Donald Johanson, and reputedly named after the Beatles’ song, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.
39In this article such terms as Homo habilis are interpreted inclusively – handy man and handy woman.
40Ian Tattersall, The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 132.
41Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 3.
42Ibid., 140.
43Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 161.
44Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2005), 35.
45Ibid., 29.
46Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 190.
47Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (London: Bantam, 2009), 197.
48See John S. Allen, The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 46–7.
49See, for example, John S. Allen, The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of the Mind; Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Douglas Palmer, Seven Million Years: The Story of Human Evolution (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2005).
50The lifestyles and reasons for the demise of the Neanderthals are currently being investigated by the Neanderthal Genome Project based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
51Susan Greenfield, You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011), 47–8.
52Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, 14, emphasis in the original.
53Ibid.
54Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 161.
55Ibid., 179.
56Ibid., 188.
57Susan Greenfield, You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity, 49.
58For an excellent account of these processes see Richard Fortey, The Earth: An Intimate History (London: HarperCollins, 2004).
59Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, 52; Christopher Potter, You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe (London: Hutchinson, 2009), 261.
60David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, 87.
61Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, History and Science (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), 223.
62Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, 192.
63David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 147.
64Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (London: Fourth Estate, 2010), 4–5.
66V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature, 19.
65Although Dean Falk and Phillip Tobias have concluded that a significant development of Broca’s area can be seen in the two-million-year-old specimen of Homo habilis from Koobi Fora, Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, 122–3.
67Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 216.
68See, for example, M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
69Dominic O’Brien, How to Pass Exams (London: Duncan Baird, 2007).
70Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, 141.
71Ibid., 138.
72John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008). See also Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998) and Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).
73Susan Greenfield, You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity, 115.
74Richard Watson, Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters, and What We Can Do About It (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2010), 11.
75Ibid., 20.
76Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), a book that was a finalist for a 2011 Pulitzer Prize and translated into more than 20 languages.
77Richard Watson, Future Minds: How the Digital Age is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters, and What We Can Do About It, 20.
78Ibid., 16.
79See, for example, Susan Greenfield, ID: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) and You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011).
80Stanley Finger, Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries, 19.
81Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself, 317.
82Susan Greenfield, You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity, 123.
83See Richard Aldrich, ‘Education for Survival: An Historical Perspective’, History of Education 39, no. 1 (2010): 1–14.