Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (in Education)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" refers to embryological parallelism, the idea that the development of any individual organism strongly parallels that organism's evolutionary history.  For example, in mammalian embryos, the backbone appears very early, followed by other neural developments in the order that they first appeared in mammalian macro-evolution.  The cerebrum is the last brain structure to develop in the individual human, as it is the newest structure in macro-evolutionary terms.  

If we look at whale embryos, legs begin to develop before retracting back into the body cavity.  Hair also develops briefly, but whale embryos lose this hair at further stages.  Birds have fingers at early stages of development, but these eventually fuse to form wings.  Birds also possess the genes for teeth, but these genes have been "turned off", and teeth never develop in birds.  Both human and monkey embryos briefly have tails to reflect our be-tailed common ancestor, but this tail disappears abruptly in humans, whereas it continues growing in monkeys.  This all correlates strongly with both genetic, mathematical models and the fossil record.

I find the parallelism between macro-evolutionary history, individual organismic development, and mathematically modelable genetic histories endlessly fascinating, and I am obsessed with reconciling and systematizing these phenomena.  But, I do not know enough about the subject right now; it is something that I would like to explore in depth in the future.  

For now, I'd like to see how such a model could be applied to education: that is, the educational development of the individual student recapitulates the macro-history of human knowledge.  I will detail some caveats and qualifications later in this article.  Hopefully all potential concerns will be addressed.     

First, we must consider the purpose of an education.  Plato said that education should be to give the student a privileged and rational view of reality.  Rousseau suggested instead that education should be about giving the individual the right to pursue her own curriculum through self-discovery.  Others have suggested that the purpose of education is to socialize children - to homogenize them and allow them to fill productive roles in society.  For the most part, all education systems embrace one or more of these paradigms: Plato's concept of preparing a future elite; Rousseau's idea of intellectual freedom; and the standard Modernist, functionalist program.  

There are some notable variations on one or more of these themes which seem to mesh with my idea of education recapitulating the history of human knowledge.  One interesting theory I came across in my (admittedly shallow) research is Kieran Egan's idea (through psychologist Lev Vygotsky) that an education system should follow the natural mind development.

Egan believes that education should follow the way the human mind naturally develops.  He identifies five stages of understanding: somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic.  Somatic understanding, according to Egan, refers to the stage before language when a child discovers the physical capacities of his own body.  The mythic stage is when the mind becomes capable of representing opposites, and by extension, images, metaphor, and story structure.  The romantic stage is when rational thinking begins and the limits of reality are discovered.  Philosophic understanding represents the systematization of disparate data under the umbrella of general principles, with a corresponding recognition of patterns and limits.  Finally, an ironic understanding recognizes the limits of human knowledge and remains open to the existence of other valid philosophic explanations.  Egan has written extensively on education theory.  Being in Japan makes it difficult to get a hold of any of his books, but I am looking forward to reading some of them when I get back to the United States.  

The second idea which I think goes nicely with the idea of individual education recapitulating the intellectual history of society is Great Books curricula.  The idea of Great Books arose at a time when American universities were focused on specialized, technical education at the expense of general knowledge.  The Great Books approach to learning stresses that any education should be grounded in a general familiarity with the history of Western thought.  Philosopher John Dewey famously argued against this idea that there should be significant cross-over in education (that knowledge of rhetoric or philosophy could be of pragmatic use in law or medicine).  

History seems to have vindicated the generalists in a certain sense.  The history of twentieth century failure in the sciences and social sciences is often the history of conceptual failure or the history of proceeding in an entirely reasonable path from flawed first principles.  Take economics as an example: the history of mainstream economic thought over the last hundred years or so has been a history full of ever-more-complex, ever-more-mathematically-elegant models which are all based on the presumption that individuals are perfectly rational, economic actors or that our economic programs will do what we say they will do.  

Actual behavior contrary to the models is often explained away as epiphenomenal or unrelated to the perfect model.  Unpredicted results of national economic programs are usually rationalized as the result of "liberal" or "conservative" contamination (see Paul Krugman's views on stimulus).  There is little attention paid to alternative theoretical structures.  In this sense, it seems much of social and natural science can be described in Egan's terms as "philosophic".  This is appropriate, since ironic understanding would be necessarily grounded in the exposure to and contemplation of disparate philosophic systems, such as those represented in the canon of Western literature.

This idea of education recapitulating the history of human thought raises the further question of how to define ourselves.  Any education system consciously incorporating the principles explained above must decide whether it is going to recapitulate the intellectual history of the world, Western Civilization, Western Europe, Anglo-America, the United States, the Northeast, New England, Massachusetts, Eastern Massachusetts, Norfolk County, Cohasset, or the Carr Family.  In a world with few ties to place, this becomes a difficult puzzle to solve indeed, but the best system would probably spend some time on each level.  In my home, I could expect to learn my family history and values well enough plus gain valuable perspective on society at large; and at school, I could expect to come to understand the history of that school's location and everything above.  At a national university, I could naturally expect what I learn to be at the national level or above.  

What I have described as individual education recapitulating societal intellectual history is perhaps not unlike our existing educational system.  Given the level of individual autonomy within the existing system (Central planners usually do not wind up micromanaging individual curricula and do so even less at the level of the university, where students and teachers are more or less allowed to design and choose their own classes.) and the tendency of nature and culture to follow similar patterns, it is possible that education systems - in the United States at least - represent a spontaneously emergent order wherein the education of any one individual correlates strongly with the intellectual history of the collective.