Shifts in paradigm revolutionize our understanding of how to proceed. Often, they result from groundbreaking discoveries, but these discoveries need not reveal something previously unknown. Some involve reinterpreting what was already known but misunderstood or underappreciated. Two historical examples — microorganisms and the Copernican Revolution — illustrate these two distinct types of paradigm shifts.

Before Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed microscopic life through his hand-crafted instruments, the existence of microfauna was unknown and unimaginable. The causes of degenerative conditions such as disease, decay, spoiling, and fermentation were attributed to intuitive but inaccurate theories like miasma and spontaneous generation. Van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of bacteria, protozoa, and other microorganisms revealed a hidden and previously unguessed world. This amounted to an entirely new dimension of reality, paving the way for the germ theory of disease, with implications extending far beyond biology, revolutionizing individual and social health and hygiene. 

In contrast, the Copernican Revolution involved the introduction of no new matter, no unknown entities, no hidden dimension, but, rather, ‘merely’ a shift in perspective. In proposing his heliocentric model, Nicolaus Copernicus took familiar concepts - the sun, the Earth - but in reversing their roles and relative importance, fomented a reconsideration of celestial architecture and dynamics that would ramify across the full range of human understanding. The shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric model of the universe prompted a reassessment of our place in the cosmos, driving a move away from scriptural authority and towards rationalism and empiricism that would lay the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution, of which van Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries would be just one, albeit significant, outcome. 

If we now seek a new paradigm in education, the question arises: Of which type will it be: an advance in the content of knowledge, akin to the discovery of microorganisms, or a shift in perspective on what is already known, akin to the Copernican Revolution?

The modernist paradigm, within which schools typically work, with its gravitational pull towards scientific progress and technological innovation, doubtless favours the former - the disclosure of a new dimension that revolutionises the field. Hence, protracted excitement about the “science of learning”, which began gaining prominence in the late 20th century and which has proliferated since, boosted by breakthroughs in neuroscience, cognitive science, and, most recently, AI; with its focus on neuroplasticity, the organisation of memory, retrieval paths, pattern recognition, microlearning, and so on. 

The danger is that much of this neuroscientific activity, far from breaking with the current paradigm, is strongly aligned with its materialist and reductive assumptions — the brain as a learning machine to be optimised through technical interventions (chunking, intermittent reinforcement, dual coding etc.) — and is best construed as further ‘normal science’: tinkering and puzzle-solving in a highly familiar ‘problem-space’, delivering performance upticks, but on metrics that already presuppose the very paradigm from which escape is sought.

Let’s plan, instead, for a next revolution in schooling that is not the discovery of a novel manifest of learning mechanics — a catalogue of incremental techniques and strategies — but, instead, a Copernican-style inversion of the vantage point from which we already view the core purpose of a sustainable education; that is, the project of engendering not human accomplishment but human wisdom, on the basis that, prosocially, wisdom must arbitrate accomplishment. 

Recall, wisdom is rooted in knowledge; there is no other means of obtaining it. And knowledge, traced to its genesis, is always rooted in experience. To make our purpose clearer, remember, too, that there are two forms of human knowledge. One we share with every living organism. It is tacit, felt, embodied, pre- and unconscious (and, indeed, in part, not neural or cognitive at all), inchoate, implicit. Let's call it big K Knowledge. The second is more or less wholly unique to humans alone. It is conceptual, categorical, symbolic, representational, explicit. Let's call it small k knowledge.

Big K Knowledge is inextricably tied up with the complex business of being alive. A state about which, for all its advances, science can still say little. Knowing (capital K) hinges on or manifests in an organism’s normative, (bio)semiotic grip on its milieu, its affective Umwelt; in short, what Georges Canguilhem terms the living institution and negotiation of norms in the pursuit of autopoiesis [Canguilhem 2008]. Small k knowledge is the expressed, abstracted, compressed, symbolic residue of big K Knowledge; going forward, it can only be supplemented by the living of lives, the disclosing of lived experience, from which big K knowledge accrues, to be condensed, distilled, and abstracted once more, in an unending cycle of fecundity.

Parenthetically, we note that AI (so-called) is exceptionally well-placed to combine and recombine small k knowledge, but has precisely zero big K knowledge. Put it this way: even at its current levels of operation, AI knows more than any human, but Knows less than an amoeba. And this is not permeable: even the most sensorily ‘embodied’ AI would remain a performative echo of organismic life, not its participant. We see clearly that AI is an unfortunate misnomer and would better be called Combinatorial and Calculative Acumen (CCA). But this is not to underestimate its vast potential. CCA can be of real value if it prompts living organisms capable of its use (i.e., humans) to cogitate as living organisms in ways that encourage them to experience anew (including by revisiting what is already Known or known) and so add to their repertoire of big K Knowledge, leading, in due course, to the production of more small k knowledge. However, without that generative living component, the CCA phenomenon is the shuffling of a gargantuan deck to play countless novel versions of the same residual hand.

An aside, yes, but more than a detour - CCA’s singular left-hemispheric sterility provides a clue that was always available, but which its unmasking makes more immediately evident, helping to frame the ‘Copernican’ inversion needed to revolutionalise education: the Helio-Tacitric Shift, if you will: a Copernican re-centring of education on tacit, lived, relational Knowing—the sun, the source, Life—around which explicit, propositional knowledge should take its rightful orbit.

Just as Copernicus added no new planets but relocated the Earth, the Helio-Tacitric Shift adds no new neuro- or other scientific or technical facts about learning, but relocates the centre of gravity of education from the explicit curriculum (small k knowledge) to the tacit surround (big K Knowledge) in which, inevitably, all explicit learning is nested. In short, the Helio-Tacitric Shift focuses on the quality of the person. That is, the quality not of the knower (as confirmed by examinations) but of the Knower (as adumbrated by life). 

Acknowledging and endorsing the power of small k knowledge to change the world - or, put into different language, for Homo colossus to crash the ecosphere - a new educational paradigm adopts as its aim the challenge of enabling people via the quality of their character, shaped and forged by the quality of their experiences, to dwell together with care; and, in essence, speculates on behalf of the Next Enlightenment.

Canguilhem, Georges Knowledge of Life Fordham University Press, 2008

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th Anniversary Edition Chicago University Press, 2012

Wheeler, Wendy Expecting the Earth Lawrence & Wishart, 2016