“The social and scientific revolutions of the past two centuries have transformed our perspective on the most fundamental aspects of civilized life”

The Paradigm of Revolt in Public Education

by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

In 1962, historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn shocked the academic world with his book The Structures of Scientific Revolution. He asserted that scientific communities are closed minded and promote convergent thinking as a function of dogma in scientific work. The jolt is that science is popularly thought of as promoting divergent thinking and open-minded inquiry. Kuhn concedes that in the beginning when questions are first arising around a subject this is the case, but once a field rounds up its foundational questions, it forms a set of assumptions that become the dogmatic underpinnings of that community. Kuhn explains that “a scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of espoused beliefs.”

Kuhn called these sets of assumptions “paradigms” and though there has been much confusion about this word, by paradigm he meant two basic things. First, the notion of a model, a piece of work in a scientific discipline that serves as an example for other works in that discipline. Second, a disciplinary matrix or a view of the world and what an explanation of it should look like. He asserted that this is something you acquire as a result of having worked through typical questions in a particular discipline or community.

Kuhn characterized normal science as the work scientists do with a paradigm. The paradigm is a blueprint and the regular work of scientists is to solve puzzles that fill out the paradigm. If a scientist and his experiment do not prove the assumptions they are considered a failure, not the paradigm. These unsolved puzzles are rejected by the community, not based on whether or not they are true, but because they did not support the paradigm.

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In this modern age, Dan Robinson, in The Wonder of Being Human, succinctly observes the process by which the scientific communities invade spheres of life not properly under their jurisdiction.
What begins as a discovery in science, or even a scientific conjecture, is soon taken as a model or metaphor of some larger realm of human concern. In time, at the urging of the leaders of public opinion, the metaphor becomes installed as the reality and the seasonless convictions of the ordinary person are thus put on official notice! Only years later, under reality’s sobering lights, does it once again become clear that our ageless dilemmas have survived these once “new truths”; that the vexing problems of value have not surrendered to the thick and thickening book of fact; that the most recent revolutions of perspective have done little more than move us around the circle whose center is the human condition.

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