Taking Delight in the Experience of Exploring a Mystery

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. ~Joseph Wood Krutch

The daughter of a friend, a girl with whom I used to roll down grassy hills, is in graduate school, putting the finishing touches on her studies in earth systems science (ESS). She spends much of her time in nature doing research. She does not spend her days fussing over atoms or genes. She refers to computational models, but doesn't see them as anything other than starting points or perhaps maps that may indicate reality, but are not reality. As she once told me, nature is far too complex to be "captured" by math.

ESS is a new kind of science, one that takes a huge step back from the Western tradition of attempting to understand reality by disassembling it. It's not an offshoot of physics, biology, chemistry, or social science, but rather a coming together of all of them. Instead of reducing everything to their component parts, the science of complex systems embraces complexity as its highest principle. In many ways it is a return to the science of indigenous peoples from around the world who start with the interconnectedness of life.

A few days ago, I wrote a post in which I stated that "research rarely persuades anyone of anything." I pointed out that in the world of early years research, the evidence overwhelmingly favors play-based preschools and keeping our youngest citizens away from handheld screen-based devices, yet our system continues to push academics into our preschools and parents keep handing their babies iPhones. This is science denialism.

The term "science denialism" is tossed around a great deal these days. It's used on both sides of the political divide to paint their opponents as cult-like and irrational. We accuse one another of cherry-picking data to suit our pre-conceived narratives about the world. And we're not wrong: that's exactly what most of us do. Humans have not evolved to seek accuracy or truth, but rather survival, and one of the strategies our species uses is to tell stories, both to ourselves and one another, that enhance our chances. 

That tree we see, if we believe reductionist science, is a product of photons that reflect off a collection of atoms and our minds put it together to tell a story that allows us to avoid harming ourselves by hitting our head on its branches. Or a story that allows us to identify whether or not we can count on it for sustenance, shade, or refuge. Indeed, as cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues in his book The Case Against Reality, what we see is almost certainly not what is actually there. As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

Yet still, I see a tree, which is a complex system that connects the soil to the sky. I breathe the oxygen it produces. It breathes the carbon dioxide that I produce. This means that I am part of the system that is this tree and it is included in the system that is this human. Interconnectedness is what our lived experience tells us about the world. It's what formed the basis of most indigenous science prior to being colonized by Western science. There is no doubt that the science of reductionism has created powerful "tools" for us to understand nature, but often at the expense of lived experience. 

We are not separate from "nature," we are in the midst of it. Western science depends on objectivity, but there is no objective place from which to consider reality. All data sets include the biases of the observers' perspective. When we break it all down into atoms and waves and formula derived in computer models or laboratory settings, we ultimately render it meaningless and functionless. And math? Well, as Nancy Cartwright puts it in her book How the Laws of Physics Lie, "(M)athematical physical laws don't describe reality; they describe idealized objects in models."

No wonder science denialism is on the rise. It's a form of sales resistance. We've been sold "science" -- Western science -- as a collection of "facts," that only the ignorant would dispute. Yet our lived experience disputes it every second of every day. Reductionist science tells us that time is not part of reality, but tell that to the man who's just missed his train. It tells us that colors are products of our minds, not reality, but tell that to the woman who mistakes a tiger for a zebra. It tells us that hot and cold are psychological phenomena, but tell that to the person who is shivering.

In their book The Blind Spot, a physicist and a pair of philosophers (Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson), warn about how science is "sold" to society:

It may take the form of science documentaries telling people they are nothing more than their so-called genetic programming (genes aren’t programs, and they require the existence of whole organisms embedded in their ecosystems to be expressed). It may be breathless science news articles that claim future generations will upload themselves into computers (your selfhood or personhood isn’t a computational data structure). It may be public lectures or op-eds that claim physics has now answered the question of why there is something rather than nothing (this is not the kind of question science can answer) . . . When Blind Spot ideas are presented to the public as facts that only the naive and uneducated would dispute, it is likely to exacerbate opposition to science in public policy debates.

As early childhood educators we are currently being "sold" the lie that "earlier is better." Policymakers and parents, wielding "data" collected by pseudo-scientific testing, are trying to get us to buy into the mathematics-driven story of bottoms-in-seats, drill-and-kill direct instruction. They sell it with fear-mongering and snake oil about poor children "falling behind." Meanwhile, our lived experience of this approach is the reality of miserable, anxious children whose development is stunted because they never learn to play. They are taught that learning is hard and they are incompetent; that their curiosity is a distraction, that their bodies must remain still, and their voices silent. When we object, they accuse us of being naive and uneducated, of standing in the way of "progress." They show us their metaphorical maps and try to convince us that it is the real terrain, even as we live, every day, in the actual world and witness with our own eyes the harm they are inflicting on children.

A while back I wrote about meeting a man who believes the earth is flat. The conversation reminded me of the aggravating round-and-round debates I have with those who are convinced that children need worksheets and homework. As frustrating as science denialism is, however, I find myself wondering if its rise isn't simply as aspect of the system trying to correct.

The Blind Spot authors write:

(B)est practices in the domain of science and society include becoming aware of how the story of science is told to the public. Without doubt that story is about the profound capacity of the human imagination and our ability to prevail over ignorance and bias. But if the story is told as one of transcending the human, then it becomes an essentially religious narrative about the search for perfect knowledge beyond our finitude. Instead of saying that science is a means for rising above the great, strange mystery of being human in the vast wide world, a better story is that science takes us deeper into that mystery, revealing new ways to experience it, delight in it, and, most of all, value it.

Taking delight in the experience of exploring a mystery. This is what makes humans come alive. This is what a proper education is all about.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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