A Warm, Epistemic Caress

As students move from Class XII to college, they face radical shifts in the way disciplines are taught. The ‘difficulty’ of understanding subjects is the result not only of a quantitative expansion of the discipline’s horizons, but more importantly, of fundamental qualitative shifts in the way knowledge is produced in professional scholarship. Sometimes, this makes for rude surprises.

A student wants to study psychology because he/she wants to figure out why men are from Mars and women are from Venus. More ambitiously, they wish to learn about the vagaries of the human mind. As the major gets going, they find themselves in labs feeding mice and in class before PowerPoints on neurons. Another student has taken up economics because she longs to unravel the ethics of human want and lack in the world. They find that they have signed up for advanced mathematics and statistical modelling instead.

Inevitably, there are disappointments, sometimes defection from chosen courses. This is what career confusion looks like: caught between adolescent imagination, the pragmatics of professional consideration and the contemporary intellectual reality of a discipline. Post-secondary education is about exploring disciplines as they exist in the current state of research, which can diverge starkly from the way they appear in popular imagination. This is a reality for which the student has to prepare.

However, a responsible educator knows how to present the alien contours of research knowledge in a way that makes sense to early student learners and excites them. It is a good idea for the educator to ask: what is a teaching question for a discipline? What is a research question? How are they different from each other?

Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari

In 2008, the Teagle Foundation published a report on economics major that raised this question. Research questions, it claimed, are those which take small steps in highly specialised domains. Teaching questions tackle big issues that are essentially unanswerable. Research questions are by definition small, narrow and technical, as that is the only way to find new knowledge. Teaching questions tend to be big and sweeping. Teaching questions, the report insists, must be asked as they drive a passion for learning and provide an understanding of the discipline in a historical capacity, even though it is hard to come up with answers that might add to our knowledge.

Economics, the report says, has its own set of teaching questions. They include the issue of the appropriate organisation of the economy, whether capitalism is preferable to socialism, whether the market has an alienating effect on individuals or whether consumer sovereignty is acceptable. The ethical, political, and philosophical significance of markets, for instance, has been debated forever. For Marx, a central problem of Western societies was the alienation created by mar kets. Hayek, on the other hand, argued that the market was central to individual freedom. These are important questions and yet, their philosophic and subjective dimensions make their objective resolution impossible. These are not questions that are part of the economics major any more as they do not fit into the current paradigms of research. But the report feels that this is a loss as such questions can ignite student passion. In contrast, smaller, more technical research questions simply encourage uncritical acceptance of established knowledge.

The report notes that employers look for students who have attempted the big think questions rather than those who have cultivated research skills specific to the discipline. They need employees who have a capacity to learn, with demonstrable critical, quantitative and communicational skills. These are the skills of a liberally educated student, not one immersed in disciplinary expertise.

Teaching questions are what the Harvard educationist Howard Gardner calls “disciplinary ways of thinking”: the fundamental spirit and methodology of disciplines lying deep inside the maze of facts and information that make up their bodies. These questions make up the souls of disciplines. The study of English literature at the traditional Indian university, for instance, has been dominated by the factual contours of literary history: from the earliest Anglo-Saxon chronicles to the 20th century. Unfortunately, the historical mapping rarely bothers to highlight the fact that the very category of literature came into existence with Enlightenment modernity, that forces as varied as the spread of print culture, acceleration of capitalism and the rise of the middle-class and the development of the nation-state came to shape our gradual understanding of literature as something produced in writing and accordingly consumed through reading in isolation. That the idea of literature as fabricated fiction more or less took shape with the birth of the novel, the quintessentially modern literary genre. The big think questions, here too, are left unexplored.

Is history restricted to the sphere of the rational? Is the idea or the practice of literature separable from the figure of the author? Does the market have an alienating effect on individuals? Such big think questions put us on the search for what Gardner calls “the epistemic forms of the disciplines”. On such quests, we can only grope our way, as the light of knowledge is dim when spread across vast domains. In the face of such questions, research conviction is difficult, possibly unattainable. But they should drive the excitement of learning in college, for they unite young passion to the intellectual realities of the disciplines.

The natural sciences have their own share of big think questions. What relation does the three regular states of matter: solid, liquid and gas share with their unusual fourth—plasma? Surely it is a different relation than what the three share with each other, since matter occurs as solid, liquid and gas on earth naturally, but can be induced as plasma in the earth’s atmosphere only under artificial conditions? Does the fact that plasma occurs naturally only in outer space make this relationship a unique one?

The famous Navier-Stokes equations, named after Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes, offers an intriguing insight into the primal epistemic form in the physical sciences. A key application of a fundamental law of physics to fluid motion, the Navier-Stokes equations describes essential principles of the way fluids move and circulate. They explain processes of scientific and engineering interest, and help with phenomena as diverse as blood-flow, air-pollution, the design of aircrafts, cars and power stations, weather and ocean currents. But probably the greatest intellectual fascination of the equation is that in spite of their wide practical applicability, they have so far proved analytically unsolvable. This un-solvability has been declared one of the great open questions of mathematics. Empirically evident but rationally un-provable—is it possible to have a more fascinating scientific problem?

Epistemic forms are the very souls of disciplines. Thinking like a historian, Gardner reminds us, is very different from thinking like a literary critic or a biologist. Learning a subject is not merely about covering a canon in detail or taking in a lot of information; it is also assuming the very mode of thought that defines that discipline. The latter should be the core goal of teaching and learning, and will make the transition from high school to college, stimulating, enjoyable, and rich with possibilities.