Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

be said for most people’s faith? Cafeteria Christianity is probably the most popular religion in the United States, especially when the Bible is much more vocal against gluttony than it is homosexuality (consider Proverbs 23:20–21; Proverbs 28:7; Proverbs 23:2; Deuteronomy 21:20; 2 Peter 1:5–7; 2 Timothy 3:1–9; 2 Corinthians 10:5; Matthew 11:18–19; and Galatians 5:22 for a start). Where are the Christians who should be protesting in front of the various buffets? How we identify ourselves and how others identify us is usually not the same. Furthermore, the labels that we place on ourselves or others place on us fail to truly identify who we are.

      Who we are cannot be condensed into a single attribute. I’m “white(ish),” but I came from an impoverished family who moved out of Appalachia. Being “white” does not allow for that understanding to be made apparent. Then again, this is a label created by society to, at first, talk about different people from different places. With time, we started placing hierarchies on these different races. What we are left with now is the residue of historical traumas of the past mixed with historical racism and present day racism, which is all coagulating in a society that is very angry for a variety of reasons. The reality is that there is no scientific thing as race. We look different. We like different things. We have different histories. That is the reality. People react differently to different people based on preconceived notions that have been amplified by the media and the people of our community. What we are left with is self-induced fears, hatred, and ignorance. What we are is a nation that refuses to acknowledge that the biggest differences that divide us are all manufactured; unfortunately, although race is not real, the hatred that is based on these differences is all too much a reality.

      Jamie Barker, PhD

      June 2017,

      Albany, GA

      Author Foreword

      During the Democratic National Convention for the 2016 United States Presidential election, former US Representative Newt Gingrich was interviewed by CNN political news reporter Alisyn Camerota. The two were arguing whether or not crime had been rising or falling over the last decade. Camerota quoted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) facts that crime had been on a steady decline in the last decade while Gingrich tried to convey the subjective felt-sense of the people—namely, that they were feeling less and less safe.

      I was at once intrigued and horrified by the position Gingrich had taken. My intrigue was for the epistemological position he was unflappably taking—a position marginalized in scientific and academic communities. He was arguing that subjective awareness is more important for understanding people than is deductive reasoning. As a phenomenological psychologist, I am sympathetic to this position. In many ways, I have sat where Gingrich has sat, being ridiculed for trusting the words of my participants and trying to understand their experience instead of reducing them to an anonymous number in a clinical trial. Gingrich’s public statement of position signified the importance of a scientific inquiry and education that validates a qualitative approach. He was hoisting the flag of feelings over facts.

      My horror was in how short he had stopped with trying to understand these feelings of unsafety. Rejecting the unquestionability of deductive reasoning as the sole progenitor of truth does not mean that we yield to opinions, feelings, and perspective. Just like there are rules in logic and deduction, there are rules for understanding subjective experience. If ten people report feeling less safe, the analysis is not over! Were the alleged reports true, then there is something important that needs to be learned: despite a decline in crime, people report feeling less safe. Evidently there is a dimension of safety that is not directly related to crime. However, we cannot know what this dimension is unless we listen to those who describe it and subsequently apply a rigorous method to it.

      Gingrich, perhaps inadvertently, gives the nod to the chief importance of qualitative research. However, what he describes is a straw man argument: “qualitative research means feelings over facts.” Watching this interview left me feeling deeply despondent. As educators, we have failed our students by training them in a very lopsided manner: namely, facts over feelings. Whenever a student wishes to better understand feelings, or is faced with a problem that cannot be easily resolved with a fact, they have no methods for doing so. Indeed, they have a severely impoverished sense of what this might even mean.

      If nothing else, the 2016 US Presidential election has demonstrated an important shift in social validity. Instead of naïve capitulation to the sovereignty of facts, we are beginning to see people, uneducated and educated alike, push back, arguing that the facts do not do justice to their feelings. Instead of relying on credible resources for news about current events, there has been a massive proliferation of fabricated news by which people educate themselves about current events. We must bear witness to the demise of facts as unquestionable statements about reality. In this book, I argue that this is not a bad thing.

      Fake news is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. The popular social media website “Facebook” has taken steps to make fake news stories less profitable. This is not the solution. If anything, legislating against the fabricated news stories is just a way of ignoring the problem. The problem is that we have been subjecting students and adults to a terribly lop-sided education for decades. Had the education provided been more balanced, then the fake news epidemic would never have materialized.

      The problem is fact-mindedness. Facts are the relics of enlightenment thinking. They represent unbiased and unquestionable truth about our universe. The more you collect, the more you know; the more you know, the more powerful you are; the more powerful you are …. You get the picture.

      Facts aren’t the bad guys. Blaming them would be as misguided as blaming the Middle-Eastern entrepreneurs for the result of the 2016 US Presidential Election. These were the entrepreneurs who fabricated the stories that became so popular on conservative websites in the United States that demonstrated how terrible Hillary Clinton would be as a Presidential Candidate. Facts are not bad, but they do not alone constitute an education.

      Facts are not hidden in the universe. You don’t start digging a hole in your backyard hoping to discover some new fact about nature. Facts are placeholders: they allow us to say something about the relationships between things. That ten times ten is one-hundred is a fact. But for Pedro, the ten stacks of ten pennies that he has collected adds up to one-hundred pennies. Even though he may know that “10x10=100,” he may still have to count them to be sure that it applies to him as well. Until he has done so a few times, he won’t understand what that facts means for him. For Pedro, the fact that 10x10=100 isn’t understood until he experiences this directly.

      In this book, I argue that judgment must always be applied to matters of fact. That is to say, the fact is not the end of the story. For many years now I have been averse to the kind of education that privileges fact-finding and answer-giving. The idea that gravity compels bodies does not substantiate itself; it is a way of describing the relationships between bodies. Gravity helps us better understand physical relationships, but by itself, and outside of any meaningful context, that fact of gravity is useless.

      Matters of fact are little medieval superstitions masquerading around as scientific currency. It is not simply that facts are over and done with. Facts have made it possible for us to relinquish the bit about ourselves that makes each of us unique. Facts take the place of individuality, critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and personal meaning. As a result, we lose trust in ourselves and in others, and become alienated from anything even remotely personal. This has been known in contemporary philosophy for over a century, and scientists—at least the earnest ones—have known this for a little bit longer.

      I’m not arguing for the end of facts but for a release of the compelling hold that facts have on us. Any belief in a fact is way of shifting responsibility for understanding from yourself and onto somebody else—an expert, a textbook, a scientist, or a for-profit fake news website. It relieves you from having to invest yourself in the importance of whatever detail to which the fact pertains. That schizophrenia has a hereditary component is interesting by itself. It allows us to speculate as to why a given person may develop the disorder. But any psychologist who has studied this phenomenon (or student who has taken the time to better understand it) will explain that the hereditary component is more complicated than the fact