Editor's Introduction: Education and Cognition—Naturalistic Explorations into the Nature of Mind and Learning

Abstract

My editorship of the Australian Journal of Education terminates with this special, Special Issue. I began my editorship (AJE, 40(1), 1996) by noting that I, like my predecessors, would be keen to stress issues in educational research that I considered of special importance for the field. In particular, conceptions of research methodology and the justification of research were so identified. How well we have done in coveting these areas will have to be judged by the readers of this journal. In publishing research from a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the AJE has, I believe, maintained its character as a broad-based generalist education research journal, one of the few remaining in the English-speaking domain of educational research. It has also maintained and increased the contributions by researchers from outside Australia, as evidenced by the writers published in this issue. Cognition and its importance for education, the theme to which this Special Issue is dedicated, deserves to become a top priority of research in Australian education. For good reason, this century has been described as the century of the brain, and I believe that it is incumbent upon educators, whose business is teaching and learning, to engage with the most current cognitive science research in order to find out what is known about human brain functioning and the acquisition of knowledge and information processing. After all, and this still seems to puzzle some, there is a causal connection between the architecture of our brains and what we are able to learn and the manner in which we learn. It is such knowledge that helps reshape our conceptions of human learning with subsequent implications for the structuring of learning-teaching situations, among other things. More particularly, what is known as `connectionism', or the neural net account of brain functioning, has generated fundamentally challenging insights into our standard, sentential theories of teaching and learning which presume the primacy of symbol manipulation such as use of language; of how to think about the human mind; the nature of knowledge and human practice; of intelligence and rationality; in short: of what it means to be human. The consequences for education theory and philosophy of education, too, are far reaching, as are the practical implications for structuring learning in the preparation of trainee teachers. The contributions by the outstanding writers in this issue discuss the importance of connectionist research from various perspectives and also raise implications of the challenges raised by cognitive science for the most fundamental aspects of human learning, and hence for the business we are all engaged in. The contributions are original, and their importance for pushing Australian research in education into a new dimension cannot be overestimated. The articles are organised somewhat thematically, although this is not an entirely satisfactory way of classifying the order of appearance. The common element which threads its way through all the contributions is the assumption that detailed knowledge of recent connectionism or, more broadly, cognitive science holds the key to our understanding of the human brain, and that it is the human brain which holds the key to understanding learning and teaching, and indeed all other activities we are engaged in whether these happen inside or outside classrooms. The theoretical perspective, more or less explicitly expressed, is that of naturalism, in that it is assumed that human beings are evolved creatures, linked to the vast chain of other living creatures, and endowed with a rather large brain. Just as Dewey argued in his pragmatist philosophy (of education), there is no substantive distinction to be drawn between a person's brain and the mind, the many ongoing disputes about the relationship between these purportedly separate and distinct entities notwithstanding (examples of good discussions are found in Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986 and Dennett, 1996). …