Why ask Why? The Debate over WHAT Teachers Need to Know

With the wonderful success of our recent EvoS core course experiment; Mythic Minds - a group of us at University of Toliara are now working to develop a Positive Education Action-Research Laboratory - an innovative research group focused on refining, expanding, and disseminating the best practices we all just experienced within this pilot program. It sounds exciting and uncontroversial - and in a land with numerous Human development challenges - why would we not explore educational strategies aimed at maximizing Human flourishing?

"Why Ask Why?" might be acceptable if we want our kids to chug
Bud Dry - but if we want them to be
thoughtful, healthy, and happy Human Beings -
we'd better get really good at asking - and answering
these very big questions of "Why?"

Indeed - it really isn't controversial. I even chatted with a local Baptist missionary recently about the aims of our work - and indeed - he was quite supportive. Yet - unsurprisingly - he offered that "I like this positive psychology stuff.... but I'm not clear on exactly why you are bringing all this evolution stuff into it?". To be sure, my Baptist colleague is not alone. An apparently secular University of Wisconnsin-Madison Law Professor recently commented on an article from the Evolution Institute that "once you know how people learn, the intervention at the point of teaching and learning some material eliminates any cause and effect dependency of how we got that way" . This certainly seems reasonable enough - if we know "how" to best teach Students - why do we need to understand "why" it is we got that way? Shouldn't we focus intensely on  "how" best to teach Students; and just leave the "why we should teach in this way?" questions- up to Philosophers and others who focus on cosmic contemplations of the navel? The short answer is - definitely not.

To be sure - I strive to emulate, with unending respect, a great many Education Professionals who do not venture into the deep-time mysteries of evolution to inform their practice. In the emerging "3-6-10" model of Positive Education practices we are exploring in our Laboratory; two of the three organizations we follow have no evolutionary inclinations at all! Despite their proximate focus - many Educators know they have hit the nail on the head. So why then - why in the world should we spend our precious time asking questions about "why" some educational practices are better than others?

The answer is simple and two fold; engaging our sense of awe - and [only perhaps] more importantly -being able to ask better questions!

For me; and for many of us - it is simply an amazing, awe-inspiring story; the story of how Human Educational systems came to be. From an ancient ancestral adaptive need some 1 million years ago - until the shockingly inappropriate industrial renovation of childhood social systems within the last couple of hundred years - it's a wild ride filled with mystery, magic - and an explanatory power no serious Educator would want to miss. But interest alone does not make a curricular strategy.

The (perhaps) better response to my Baptist and Secular Skeptics lies in the realm of inquiry. Yes - many have "stumbled" (albeit through intensive empirical study) upon improved - and perhaps even currently idyllic models for teaching the evolved Human Brain-Mind; but that is not a secure direction for continued success. A perspective built on a deep-time and holistic-mechanistic understanding of why we got to this state where we can begin to describe how we should teach - this perspective is the one that allows us to ask the most appropriate questions to ensure a positive developmental future for the world's growing Humans.

A more unified perspective of Human Sciences makes it clear;
Ultimate explanations - the "why" questions -  are critically interconnected
to the more immediate - proximate level explanations of "how" we
must teach Students across the board!

I can understand and empathize with those who wonder "why ask why?" - but I can certainly not agree that it's a valid, or even interesting question. If we take a truly unified perspective to the human sciences; it becomes instantly apparent that the ultimate level of explanation - the "why" questions that inform an evidential understanding of the proximate level regarding "how" we should teach - are of the utmost importance and value to shaping the future of Academia K-12; and into Higher Education as well.