Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

captures you. How about your Facebook profile? Sure, this tells them a bit more, but does it really capture you or does it leave some important stuff out? This will be the topic of the first chapter.

      Fromm also explains how abstractions alone are not inherently problematic. They are in fact very helpful. He explains that, without them, contemporary civilization would certainly return to a more primitive form. You might find yourself introduced to somebody else online, perhaps even mediated by a social network like Facebook. Rather than having nothing but a name to go off of, the information provided on a Facebook profile might be helpful in determining any potential similarities between yourself and this new contact. Abstractions are useful. But reading the information on somebody’s profile does not mean that you have met them. This is an abstractification. This is what would happen if the concrete social introduction were replaced by the abstract social introduction; this would be as if meeting somebody meant nothing more than exchanging names, occupations, alma mater, and favorite bands. Once again, the haunting familiarity of this kind of social introduction demonstrates the pervasiveness of abstractification. Fromm notes how this process has gotten out of hand in his introduction of the term “abstractify:”

      Instead of forming abstract concepts where it is necessary and useful, everything, including ourselves, is being abstractified; the concrete reality of people and things to which we can relate with the reality of our own person, is replaced by abstractions. (114, emphasis added)

      You see how fitting Fromm’s term is for the present work? Abstractification is the replacement of processes with things. This even includes ourselves. That is the overarching thesis of this book. The process of being human has been replaced by (that generic category) human being.

      Overview

      Part I. In order to accomplish the task of demonstrating the deficits of fact-mindedness, I will have to outline the metaphysical framework of how we look at our universe. This is how it became possible to speak about things in fact—that is, without greater skepticism or personal insight. This begins with epistemology, or what it means to “know” something. It wasn’t always possible to know something “in fact,” and before that, you only knew something if it was divinely inspired. Incidentally, both of these epistemologies (theories about knowledge) place the responsibility of understanding outside of the person. The next part will describe certain ontological assumptions—assumptions about whether or not something can or does exist (and what that might mean). To state something as fact requires not only a certain level of predictability in the universe, but also an unquestionable way of making observations.

      Part II. Fact-mindedness has important consequences for education. I argue that it has created the scenario where people can begin to take the word of a fabricated newsstand’s regarding current events. Two important things happen between the early years of primary school and the later years of secondary school. 1) Students lose the creativity, curiosity, and unique insights that are their personal way of understanding and interacting with their world. 2) Students become less sensitive to, and eventually completely lose touch with, their intrinsic motivation. These two things amount to a student losing the skills for discernment and understanding, and then the sense of personal initiative in these processes (that is, they completely lose the desire to learn). That this occurs between pre-school and high school is not news and can be seen in the shift from “school is fun” to “school is boring” to finally “why am I even doing this?” Concluding Part II is an argument for why education has proceeded this way. Following the Marxist Louis Althusser, I argue that schooling does not simply result in the loss of motivation of students, but it is specifically engineered to accomplish just this! It requires that we take a long and hard look at who benefits from an education that encourages students to abdicate their own sense of understanding, and to take the word of others instead.

      Part III. I will examine the fields in which these ideologies seem to dominate: physics, biology, and psychology. I’m going to do my best to keep these as simple as possible. I will try to demonstrate how, in each of these topics, it has become customary to take its subject matter to be a collection of things. Physics is concerned with particle things; biology with organic things; psychology with, well, more organic things; and so on. Moreover, the reduction of processes to things has been embraced and taught with an almost dogmatic fervor. I suspect that you know this approach (knowing things) quite well—you might even be good at it in some cases. I also suspect that you are intimately familiar with the second approach (understanding processes). This is because it is as close to you as your experience.

1For me, getting an afternoon cup of coffee is tantamount to self-actualization.

      CHAPTER ONE

      You are Becoming your Facebook Profile or, Abstractification by Facebook

      You are becoming your Facebook profile. It started off as harmless, albeit peculiar, event where you were asked to fit your personality—who you are—into the template provided by Facebook. This fitting procedure required that you subtract large portions of yourself in order for there to be enough room. You have subsequently grown accustomed to this reduced-format “you.” As you have grown and changed in life, so too does your Facebook personality change because your experiences have been used to inform your profile. You have even found the ability to experience life, albeit narrowly, through the social world mediated by Facebook. I will argue that, over time, this process has reversed. Rather than taking the concrete experiences of your existence and abstracting them into your Facebook profile, it is now your abstract Facebook profile that has restricted your concrete life experiences! Following Fromm (1990), I have chosen to call this procedure “abstractification.”

      Abstractification begins with a basic abstraction—kind of like how a tree you can draw in five seconds symbolizes tree, but doesn’t really represent any real tree. The five-second sketch “tree” saves time when trying to draw or describe a tree—“you know, a brown trunk that is perpendicular to a grassy setting with a green, symmetrical ball of leaves at the top.” Such a tree isn’t growing outside your apartment, but you don’t have time or patience to describe it in detail. With the abstract tree, there is no problem. The problem arises with abstractification. Abstractification occurs when the abstraction becomes more real when talking about trees than the living tree that’s growing next to the sidewalk. You might look at the tree and think “well that’s not a tree, because it’s not a brown trunk with a green bunch of leaves.”

      My argument here is that social media, of which Facebook is the most contemporary and popular example, is responsible for the abstractification of its users. This means that its users—each a unique and singular person, have become increasingly generic; that is, they have become abstractions of themselves. Facebook has facilitated this in three ways: first, users must necessarily fit themselves into pre-determined, generic personality categories in the construction of their profile; second, by using Facebook to engage with others socially, users must necessarily identify with and through their abstracted personality—that is, their profile; and third, the implementation of technology—for example, the camera—has increased the number of intersections between Facebook’s virtual-reality and the life-world (it is in the latter where unique individuals come into direct contact with one another). While it has not yet been specifically stated, my argument here is that abstractification is not a good thing. In its use here, it may be understood as a loss of individuality—that which makes a person unique.

      Recall the experience of creating your original Facebook profile. It may be difficult to think back before your virtual doppelganger came into being, but imagine that you are creating one for the first time. As you begin to answer each of the questions, you consider which answer best represents you. That is, among the available options, which abstraction most resembles you? Jaron Lanier (2009), the father of virtual reality, explains the ubiquity of this task. “Personal reductionism [or abstraction] has always been present in information systems. You have to declare your status in