Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy

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From “Somatic Scandals” to “a Constant Potential

for Violence”? The Culture of Dissection, Brain-
Based Learning, and the Rewriting/Rewiring of
“the Child”

Bernadette Baker

To cite this article: Bernadette Baker (2015) From “Somatic Scandals” to “a Constant
Potential for Violence”? The Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the
Rewriting/Rewiring of “the Child”, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 12:2, 168-197, DOI:
10.1080/15505170.2015.1055394

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 Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 12:168–197, 2015
Copyright © Curriculum and Pedagogy Group
ISSN: 1550-5170 print / 2156-8154 online
DOI: 10.1080/15505170.2015.1055394

ARTICLE
From “Somatic Scandals” to “a Constant
Potential for Violence”? The Culture of
Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the
Rewriting/Rewiring of “the Child”

BERNADETTE BAKER
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

Within educational research across Europe and the US, one of the
most rapidly traveling discourses and highly funded pursuits of the
moment is brain-based learning (BBL). BBL is an approach to cur-
riculum and pedagogical decision-making that is located within
the new field of educational neuroscience. In some strands of BBL
research the structure and function of the brain is located causally,
as providing the sole and/or most important basis for making deci-
sions about what and how to teach children. This article analyzes
the “messy and numberless beginnings” of the hope placed upon
neurological foundationalism to provide a solution to the “prob-
lem” of differences between students and to the achievement of
educational goals. Rather than arguing for or against educational
neuroscience, the article moves through five levels to examine the
conditions of possibility for subscribing to the brain as a causal
organological locus of learning. It maps pertinent historical condi-
tions, including the relationship between technologies of self, histo-
ries and cultures of dissection, and arcs of discourse from soul-body
to mind-body relations, as well as surveys more recent and pivotal
examples of the movement from squeezing to scanning in modern
mind-brain relation debates that have redefined “the ideal child.”
A range of contemporary fantasies, projections, and contestations
of some of the central assumptions within “Western” conceptions
of Being that sustain the conditions of possibility for BBL research
are outlined. This includes the thorny problem of human-centrism

Address correspondence to Bernadette Baker, Department of Curriculum and Instruction,

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Teacher Education Building, 225 North Mills Street, Madison,
WI 53706, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

168
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 169

even in those accounts that claim to question scientific materialist

approaches to the nature of reality.

INTRODUCTION: SOMATIC SCANDALS

Vignette 1: The Irish Giant
In 1783, Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, passed away. Byrne died
in terror lest his body be turned over to the anatomists after having been
chased, if not hunted, by them during his life. In order to thwart their desires,
he requested in writing that he be buried at sea. The anatomists were part
of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, founded in 1540, and together
with the College of Physicians operated as one of the regulating bodies
for healthcare in London. The collection of human materials began in the
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

mid-18th century and form part of the taxonomic process of categorization

initiated in the 16th century. In 1783, the undertakers of the Irish Giant
were bribed by the surgeons and Charles Byrne’s body was turned over to
the anatomists. Today it forms the centerpiece of the John Hunter Museum
collection in the Royal College of the Surgeons of England (Sawday, 1995,
p. 4).

Vignette 2: Ishi’s Brain

In 1911, a Yahi called Ishi in an area now called California, described in
media accounts as “America’s last Wild Indian,” was chased, if not hunted and
eventually handed over to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, for the purposes of
studying a “primitive.” Ishi lived, was kept, or was imprisoned with fondness
in Kroeber’s San Francisco home from 1911, put on display at the home’s
museum where he publicly demonstrated stonework and hut building, until
his death from tuberculosis in 1916. Kroeber was in New York at the time
of Ishi’s death and emotionally appealed to authorities to not perform a
dissection, writing in a panicked letter that arrived too late: “Please shut
down on it. We propose to stand by our friends. If there is any talk of the
interests of science, then say for me that science can go to hell” (quoted
in Starn, 2004, p. 28). The autopsy was performed. After the autopsy, Ishi’s
brain disappeared and rumors of its preservation and not being buried with
him circulated. In 1999, the Smithsonian announced it would return Ishi’s
brain to the Yana people who were the closest living relatives of the Yahi
and in 2000 a private ceremony was held to reunite Ishi’s brain with the
other of his remains (Starn, 2004).

Vignette 3: Coffee With Your Cadaver, Sir?

Such mistreatment of the wishes of dying men would of course no longer
be tolerated. Or would it? In 1994, a story began to circulate in the Danish
 170 B. Baker

press. At the University of Copenhagen, the practice of exhibiting corpses

in the prestigious laboratories of forensic medicine to interested and paying
members of the public had been found to be flourishing since the 1980s.
Audiences, each paying 50 Kroner, had been ushered into the labs to look at,
and touch, the dead, which is not the purpose for which the bodies had been
donated: “Films and slides had been shown. Coffee had been served. The
revelation of this (illicit) practice caused the university deep embarrassment,
and a police investigation was ordered” (Sawday, 1995, p. 5).

In the field of education, many current debates point to the challenge

that 21st century societies pose for classroom practice. From rapid techno-
logical changes, to extreme poverty, to mobile populations, to the effects
of war, the question of what counts as knowledge, as wisdom, as common
core, and for whom, has become hotly debated once more and disagree-
ment over which skills, performances, or memories define learning is at a
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

new peak.
Significantly, however, one of the fastest traveling discourses in
contemporary educational research—the emphasis placed on brain-based
learning—is also one of the most understudied in historico-philosophical
terms. Brain-based learning (BBL) emerged more fully as a discrete nomen-
clature in the late 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, alongside further
descriptors such as educational neuroscience and MBE (Mind, Brain, and
Education).1 At a general level, BBL is a signifier for theories of learning
based on functions and structures of the brain (see e.g., Byrnes, 2001; Geake,
2009; Jensen, 2008; Sousa, 2006, 2010).
The impact of BBL on educational research, especially in Europe and
the United States, has been profound. In addition to multiple universities
establishing centers directly named as or focused on an interplay between
neuroscience and education, the early 21st century saw the founding of the
journal Mind, Brain and Education; in 2012 Trends in Neuroscience and
Education was launched; and in 2008 the first AERA (American Educational
Research Association) special interest group (SIG) in MBE was established,
followed by the European Association for Research in Learning and Instruc-
tion’s (EARLI) interest group. Graduate students are now completing dis-
sertations in interdisciplinary educational neuroscience and funding for BBL
projects is provided by the most elite of agencies including the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
BBL can be invoked in relation to a wide array of studies, from those
focused on mining religious traditions for the effects of contemplative prac-
tices on the brain, to neuroscience experiments performed in laboratory
settings on animal learning and rehabilitation, to corporate stress reduc-
tion programs done in workplace settings, to teacher and student brain
wave and/or brain scanning based projects. Following their 2002/2007
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 171

publication Understanding the Brain, the OECD (Organisation for Eco-

nomic and Cooperative Development) will release a report in the fall of
2015 on the implications of educational neuroscience for teacher educa-
tion. Educational neuroscience has already been recognized, then, as an
emergent international, interdisciplinary, rapidly growing and transformative
field.

A growing international movement, called educational neuroscience (or

MBE), aims to inform educational research, policy, and practice with neu-
roscience and cognitive science research. Usable knowledge from this
field is already making important contributions to the field of education.
However, this new field is also likely to radically alter our understanding
of learning and schools. The research brings a powerful capability to di-
rectly intervene in children’s biological makeup, stirring ethical questions
about the very nature of child rearing, and the role of education in this
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

process. (Stein et al., 2011, p. 803)

The intellectual possibilities, interdisciplinary potential, and limits of

such research have been the focus of some scholarship (Fischer et al., 2010;
Immordino-Yang, 2011; Varma et al., 2008), as well as what the choice of
nomenclature might imply, such as:

We argue that there is a fundamental difference between doing educa-

tional neuroscience and using neuroscience research results to inform
education. While current neuroscience research results do not translate
into direct classroom applications, educational neuroscience can expand
our knowledge about learning, for example, by tracking the norma-
tive development of mental representations. (Szücs & Goswami, 2007,
p. 114)

At base, across the nuances between nomenclature, the belief is that

greater study of the brain will reveal laws of learning and guide pedagogical
programs and strategies (Spitzer, 2012). I am interested here not in the range
of practices or any one set or group but rather in the operational assumption,
that is, in the conditions of possibility for and politics of belief in neurological
foundationalism with a specific organological locus.
Currently, there is a hope placed upon neurological foundationalism to
provide a solution to the “problem” of differences between students and to
the achievement of educational goals. This hope has messy and number-
less beginnings, not the least of which are the vast and varied taxonomic
projects that the opening vignettes signal. In their 2013 overview, Rose and
Abi-Rached have noted three dominant pathways to what is now consid-
ered the domain of neuroscience: the study of insanity, the study of nerves,
and the study of the brain, areas of research that were initially consid-
ered unrelated. Although this is changing in the newer waves of research,
 172 B. Baker

educational neuroscience draws upon and sometimes conflates aspects of

the prior trajectories into a field of study that attempts to bring laboratory-
based findings conducted in clinical and/or university settings into classroom
practice, moreso than the reverse. The examination of fields and forma-
tions claimed as new is especially important in contemporary educational
circumstances, where rapidly traveling, highly funded, and popularly dif-
fused discourses have been treated relatively superficially, apolitically, and
ahistorically.
With this article I enter into disputes concerning neurological founda-
tionalism not in order to resolve them, however, and not in order to map
what can and cannot be gleaned from laboratory science or random-control
experimental structures for pedagogical purposes. Just as neuroscience re-
search does not centrally engage curriculum studies in order to justify its
claims about humans, the process here is not one of centrally engaging
neuroscience research in order to justify curriculum studies’ orientations.
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

The orientation adopted here is rather more historico-philosophical in order

to reapproach and reconsider what the curious mix of religious, national-
ist, and psychologized trajectories bequeath to refigurations of a variety of
subject–objects. This includes “the child” and “the brain” in the 21st cen-
tury trans-Atlantic north, a geopolitical delimitation that reflects the initial
site of production of discourses that are presently being marshaled to the
rewriting/rewiring of “the child” especially.
It is important to iterate at the outset that the terminologies, binaries,
and concepts traced are not being naturalized, nor am I claiming to be
outside of their play, or arguing for or against neuro research. While BBL
research theoretically has the power to overturn historic caste systems that
have characterized structural relations in the trans-Atlantic pinned to cultural
prejudices and interpretations of “the body,” I am extremely concerned about
the recirculation of racializing, sexualizing, and ableizing tendencies in such
literature and the prospect of neugenics—the “backdoor” to a new version
of the seemingly ideal child at cost of the right to Be for many of the young
whose status as children constitutes little protection from historical insult and
injury (Baker, 2002; Campbell, 2009; Duster, 2003). This relates to what Stein
and colleagues (2011) caution as the difference between raising children and
designing children:

Designing children involves altering dispositions and behaviors by use

of mainly physical means while adopting 3rd person perspectives and
instrumental attitudes. Some current practices surrounding psychophar-
macology in schools fit this description. Raising children, on the other
hand, is a process in which dispositions and behaviors are altered mainly
through the use of shared languages and values while adopting 1st and
2nd person perspectives and cooperative attitudes. We argue that design-
ing children is ethically unacceptable . . . (p. 803)
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 173

This recognition is crucial and also part of a broader problem that such
a concern comes dangerously close to reinforcing: the problem of human-
centrism and its abjections and ontological scales, rationalized one way or
another. This concern joins spirit with and intersects with the recent Jour-
nal of Curriculum and Pedagogy special edition dedicated to posthumanism
and especially the question of the animal and anomal (e.g., Lukasik, 2013;
MacCormack, 2013; Wallin, 2013). While I do not centrally focus on the
human/animal debate here, the final section of the analysis is dedicated to
the problem of human-centrism, and in this case by turning Heidegger on
his head. The very bases of the racism, anti-semitism, and nationalism for
which Heidegger is now well-known can simultaneously be challenged by
the structure of the logic he exposes, in principle erasing the ground for on-
tological hierarchies. Especially via his recently retranslated ruminations in
Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) Heidegger can be reapproached,
not as exemplar but as paradoxically providing an audit trail for strategies
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

that would, if taken to their infinite point, theoretically undermine his own
ridiculous views of race, religion, and nation by problematizing the construc-
tion of “the human” upon which such views were grounded.
In this article I will move through five layers that deliberately do not
result in a checklist for pedagogical practice and that point instead toward
some horizons for asking questions about basic assumptions in educational
research. First, I begin with some key patterns and absent presences in
the BBL literature, which the opening vignettes underscore and that point
toward conditions of possibility for the logics within BBL. Second, I ex-
amine some of those conditions, including the relationship between tech-
nologies of self, histories and cultures of dissection, and arcs of discourse
from soul–body to mind–body relations. Third, I offer three different historic
and pivotal examples of the movement from “hands on” to “hands off” in
“modern” mind–brain relation debates that have redefined “the child” (espe-
cially the “ideal” child) and “the brain:” the work of F. J. Gall (in)famously
associated now with phrenology (squeezing), of William James, the Har-
vard University professor of psychology and philosophy who questioned
the mind–brain relation (conditioning), and a recent overview by the OECD
of imaging technologies and allied ethical concerns (scanning). Fourth, I
examine a range of contemporary fantasies, projections, and contestations
of some of the central assumptions within “Western” conceptions of Be-
ing that sustain the conditions of possibility for BBL research. And last, I
consider the problem of human-centrism even in those accounts that claim
to critique scientific materialist approaches to the nature of reality, sug-
gesting that rather than reducing BBL or related discourses to charges of
scientific materialism or neugenics it may be more opportune to consider
how lines are (re)drawn around conceptions of the human and mind more
generally.
 174 B. Baker

BRAINING THE MIND AND CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY

FOR BBL

It is certain that education can be presented with a big challenge. It should

be capable of referring to a scientific basis that can give more certain
answers to questions of means and principles through which educational
aims can be achieved. This is the goal of the Learning Sciences and the
Brain Research project. (Laukkanen, 2004a, 2004b, p. 50)

Human existence cannot be reduced to mere physiological processes.

Human beings should be studied by taking account of all the aspects
of his or her existence and the multidimensional whole they com-
prise. . . . Only this . . . will keep it clear that knowing a single aspect
of human existence is not the same as knowing it thoroughly. Only thus
can we avoid the unreal fantasies that the concepts of neuroeducation or
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

neuropedagogy stand for. (Purjo, 2008, p. 361)2

That “the human” has been turned into an object of study in general as
part of “Western thought” is a recognition within curriculum studies and
educational philosophy that is by now passé. What tends to be more the
focus of contemporary debate is what forms such study can take, rather
than whether and how societies arrived at and adopted arrangements that
have taken devotion and fascination in particular directions, such as the
observation of internal organs in the dissected human. On the surface and
in terms of BBL literature, Laukkanen and Purjo represent two seemingly
oppositional trajectories of research in regard to the devotion and fascination
that object-making, appeals to mystery, and study seems to inspire, in this
case, organology and holism respectively.
Such positions are, however, two sides of the same coin within cul-
tures of dissection and human-centric approaches to Being.3 The following
sections illustrate how a “materialist” trajectory that is today associated with
naturalizing “the body” and a “philosophy of consciousness” trajectory that
today is associated with naturalizing “the soul” are meeting up, within BBL,
around an even deeper naturalization of “the mind” and mind-as-mysterious.

Key Debates and Absent Presences

The range of literature that could now fall within the domain of BBL or
claim to be related is vast. Research projects that make direct appeal to the
brain are varied in their intent, in some of their philosophical assumptions,
in the sites of production to which they make appeal, and in the conditions
of proof. Terminologies can overlap and intersect and research may or may
not involve direct participation in laboratories. The analyses offered do draw
upon experiments conducted in such settings, however, and make use of
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 175

their conclusions in different ways. On the one hand, mindfulness, selfhood,

consciousness, and affectiveness studies implicate the function and struc-
ture of the brain for varying and broader “social” purposes (e.g., Connelly,
2002; Damasio, 2010; Davidson, 2012; Massumi, 2002), and on the other,
studies focused on command of content knowledge such as those tied to
literacy, mathematics, or science education performances (e.g., Menon, 2010;
Ozden & Gultekin, 2008; Tallal, 2000) implicate the brain for more restricted
“classroom-based” purposes. What is in common is the importance attributed
to the acts labeled as learning, relearning, or unlearning. While not all re-
search that overtly invokes the role of the brain makes appeal to the brain as
causal or to neurological foundationalism, at least three genres have arisen
in what Derrida (2008) might call a limitrophy, in the thickening around
the edges: (1) self-help style guides written for a general public such as
National Geographic, Time, Scientific American, et cetera, which map and
color the functions of brain areas and explain the concept of neuroplasticity;
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

(2) programmatic guides, including curriculum plans, written for practic-

ing professionals, such as teachers, nurses, therapists (e.g., Hardiman, 2012;
Schoeberlein & Sheth, 2009) dedicated to selecting and reorganizing activities
based on brain research; and (3) disciplinary-based and peer-reviewed pub-
lications written for specific subfields within an academic community, such
as medical, psychiatric, psychological, et cetera (e.g., Jensen, 2008; Sprenger,
2013), that appear as theoretical or basic research within the subfield. Across
the literature both overtly and implicitly the uniqueness of the human is tied
to the fundament of the biophysiological and neurochemical organization of
the brain.
In what is claimed as Western history, there has been much consid-
eration given to the nature of qualities thought unique to human beings,
generating many moral imperatives and moralistic differentiations. This con-
cern if not obsession with what is exclusively human has spawned a series
of oppositions and debates discernible still within the broad range of con-
temporary BBL literature including:

• Spirit/matter—is this the same as soul and body and are these different
“substances”?
• Mind/brain—is there a relation between mind and brain?
• Monist/dualist—is there one energy interpenetrating all things or are mind
and body dualistic energies and/or entities interacting?
• Localism/holism—can brain operations be understood through specific
functions (localism) or associational interconnected networks that may
even exceed the organ (holism)?
• Internal/external—is mind explicable primarily through an organological
locus and the appeal to genetics (the inherited brain) or are exterior
cultures and environments more powerful shapers of mind processes (the
social brain)?
 176 B. Baker

• Neural communication—are mind and consciousness the same thing, are

states of consciousness an effect of brain and neurons or are mind and
consciousness something beyond brain and neurons?

While such binaries may not be posed bluntly and many times not as ei-
ther/or such a list points to the range and the current limits of the debate that
repeatedly appear across the caveats, nuances, and assumptions embedded
within the emergent BBL literature. Several other repetitions stand out that
have been less subjected to historico-philosophical interrogation. First, mind
is always discussed as real, it is presumed to exist and assumed that humans
have a special one. Second, rarely does the BBL literature mention the term
race or acknowledge the deep history of racism in psychology especially
(see Danziger, 1990, 1997; Fairchild, 1991; Gould, 1981, for such histories),
although frequently mentioned are the categories boys, girls, and animals.
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

Third, almost always mentioned are things coded as mental illnesses and
in particular schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s or dementia, and autism. And last,
often conflated are the terms mind, consciousness, and behavior. The ques-
tion, then, remains, why? Why are these overt and explicit patterns in the
literature, as well as absent presences?

Technologies of Self and Histories and Cultures of Dissection

In the second volume of the History of Sexuality and in the Hermeneutics
of the Subject lectures, Michel Foucault argued that truth effects and truth
production in the West are not reducible to archaeologies of the academic
disciplines or genealogies of power systems such as prisons, hospitals, asy-
lums, clinics, and schools. What was also required was investigation of how
a being came to see “themselves” as human and came eventually to see self
as “a modern individual,” able to do particular kinds of work on that self
and others (Foucault, 1990, 2005).
Foucault begins this third strand of analysis by assuming that belief in a
“oneness” called “self” is a repetitive pattern in Western thought. In thinking
through how a sense of “self” emerges out of intersubjectivity, out of being
born into a unit characterized as social, he offers analyses of different “tech-
nologies of self” that link “human” to “self.” Four different technologies that
posit unique relations between “truth” and “the Subject,” different “arts of
existence” are surveyed (Foucault, 2005), and for Foucault, Descartes consti-
tutes that pivot point where science splits from philosophy and spirituality in
terms of those arts (Foucault, 2005). In a Cartesian epistemology, one does
not need to put oneself necessarily in the “right” condition to receive truth.
The search for clear and distinct ideas can take place instead via following
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 177

appropriate methods, knowledge (connaisance) is thus believed to be pro-

duced in a site ejected from the body, and through this, consciousness is
standardized as access to Being.
Such hermeneutics of the subject typically involve a perception of
body as material and fleshy, encasing a more highly valued ontological
principle—soul or its analogs. Foucault traces how the soul-self that turns
around to gaze back at “itself” is constituted of a different “substance” in each
tradition he reviews: Greek, Roman, Christian (with the Gnostic exception),
and post-Christian. Post-Descartes the idea of “care of self” is more or less
lost, spirituality is increasingly defined as putting oneself in a condition to re-
ceive truth, while philosophy is dedicated to determining whether and how
lines between truth and falsity are drawn and science to following methods
to produce truth.
While Foucault is later interested in technologies of self that result in
reflective processes, in what he calls subjectivation, and in the strategies
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

and rituals that are “bought into” the making of “the modern individual”
who turns him or herself into an object of study, Jonathon Sawday (1995)
and Andrea Carlino (1999) have noted the implications for more gruesome
pursuits—the practice of human dissection. Such practices are often ignored
in the Western philosophy 101 mapping of the changing qualities attributed
to the human and its borders. The invention of a messy and transgressive
culture of dissection is today further normalized or passed over as medical
and forensic but it was once a site of revulsion for centuries (Carlino, 1999;
Sawday, 1995).
In The Body Emblazoned, Sawday (1995) unpacks the trajectories via
which the autoptic vision and terms such as dissection and anatomization
came to be associated with a more neutral scientific sense out of “a violent,
darker side” that was “a constant factor in metropolitan culture” (p. 1) of the
Renaissance. In elaborating the shift from 16th and 17th century European
practices of dissection to issues at the turn of the 21st century, Sawday
(1995) notes the non-inevitability of such transformations, underscoring how
initially “what was to become science—a seemingly discrete way of ordering
the observation of the natural world—was . . . no more than one method
amongst many by which human knowledge was organized” (p. 1, original
emphasis).
For Sawday (1995), the “scientific revolution” of the European Renais-
sance encouraged the seemingly endless partitioning of the world and all
that it contained:

As the physical body is fragmented, so the body of understanding is held

to be shaped and formed. In medicine, too, anatomization takes place
in order that the integrity and health of other bodies can be preserved.
The anatomist, then, is the person who has reduced one body in order to
 178 B. Baker

understand its morphology, and thus to preserve morphology at a later

date, in other bodies, elsewhere. (p. 2)

The culture of dissection that formed in Europe was a network of practices,

social structures, and rituals surrounding the production of fragmented bod-
ies, which sat uneasily alongside an image of the European Renaissance as
the age of individuality, of a unified sense of selfhood. Within the early cul-
tures of dissection it was impossible to think about the body as a discrete
entity, however. Like Foucault, Sawday posits that “the body’s” interior could
not be thought without recourse to an analysis of soul or its analogs, the
presence of an essence assumed to have an animating or self-moving quality,
a quality considered higher than the flesh or physical envelope of the body
and within which soul was temporarily or partially contained at a certain
level:
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

It is virtually impossible [today] to think about the body outside a pre-

vailing medical–scientific discourse. But it was not always so. What we
consider to be primarily the focus of medical attention—the accounts of
physicians, surgeons, anatomists, physiologists, biologists—has in other
epochs, been entertained under quite different categories of description.
Those categories, bounded by theology and cosmology—the polarities
of ritual—did not admit the possibility of thinking about the body as
a discrete entity. In the west, prior to the “new science” of the late
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the body’s interior could not be
understood without recourse to an analysis of that which gave its materi-
ality significance—the essence contained within the body. A belief in the
presence of that essence, a belief, that is, in the existence of an anima,
a soul or a thinking entity, necessarily informed any possible perspective
of the body. To consider the body in isolation was not merely difficult
but, strictly speaking, impossible, since the body’s primary function, it
was held, was to act as a vessel of containment for the more significant
feature of the soul. (Sawday, 1995, p. 16)

Carlino (1999) argues in Books of the Body, however, that what is im-
portant is not the gradual rise of science around fascination and practices of
dissection, but the 200 years of inertia once dissection was legalized in the
1200s by the Catholic church for human subjects and thus no longer restricted
to subjects coded as animals. Carlino documents how in the wake of this le-
galization the narratives about what was seen on the interior did not change
for several centuries, nor did the ways of theorizing that interior. Instead,
what carried over from the Galenists and from the Aristotelian heritage were
two fundamental and lasting contributions to anatomical methodology: (1)
the systematic practice of dissection as a tool for learning about the interior
parts of animate bodies and their functions, where, crucially, the evidence
obtained from observation is placed first among the principles of naturalistic
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 179

knowledge, and (2) a theoretical legitimation of a research paradigm that

was based on the analogy between animal and human physiology. Here,
analogy was theorized in terms of likeness of function more than of struc-
ture, such as animals that had lungs being put alongside animals that did not
have lungs but some other organ that filled the role of the lung in animals
that had them:

Aristotle’s analogy was an analogy of functions rather than a homology

of structures. On this basis, by studying the organs of certain animal
cadavers (‘more similar to man’s’) and relating them to the corresponding
human organs, the existence of which was speculatively or semiologically
verifiable, it was possible to infer from the first the functioning of the
others. (Carlino, 1999, p. 133)

One of the many things that unites the “modernist” opening vignettes, then, is
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

the advent of that which is forgotten right in our midst—the devotion to and
fascination with the “mystery of the human body” and its claimed similarities
and distinctions from other kinds. Such devotion required, at a minimum,
the quest to turn what had already been designated as “the human” into an
object of study amenable to observation of a fleshy interior.
Human dissection, legal or illegal, was not a new invention, however.
Rather, the eventual legitimation by the Church of what had for many cen-
turies been considered vulgar and taboo enabled a culture of dissection to
flourish in the European Renaissance. As Carlino and Sawday both note,
this was a radical culture and a radical change in conditions of possibility
for what “study” could mean. The reappearance of human dissection was
proclaimed as being useful and noble against an historical backdrop that
had positioned such practices as transgressive. The opening of “the human
body” was, then, a next step after “animal” dissection but not necessarily
inevitable:

Neither Aristotle’s empirical research, founded on the principle of a func-

tional analogy of the internal parts of the body, nor medical practice
inspired by Hippocrates between the 5th and 3rd century B.C., which
based its diagnostic and therapeutic method on the theory of humors
and on an external examination of symptoms and pathological processes,
were to lead to the formulation of a theoretically coherent question that
would require the opening of the human body. It is nevertheless clear
that the practice of animal dissection and a broadening of the field of
medical inquiry would shortly lead to working on the human body, since
only that would satisfy the new demands. The dissection of animals had
revealed the possibilities offered by direct observation. (Carlino, 1999)

What had to be overcome for this next step was the prior unease,
disgust, and contempt associated with dissective practices “that lay in the
 180 B. Baker

incision, in the profanation of corporeal integrity, in the contact with blood”

(Carlino, 1999, p. 164) and this necessitated discursive changes not only be-
tween the visual and the word, but also in the direction that fascination with
the soul–body took. Carlino notes how the reintroduction and translation of
Hippocrates, Galen, and Arab physicians brought the Christian West’s atten-
tion to methodologies for the study of the structure of “the human body”
and educational practices were transformed, enabling the lifting of the Papal
ban on human dissection:

The chronological convergence of available ancient authoritative texts,

which emphasized the cultural importance of knowledge about the parts
of the human body and in which both animal and human dissection were
discussed, and the revival of this discipline and practice in the West, is
certainly not accidental. (Carlino, 1999, p. 177)
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

The method of manual operation and clinical practice in medicine especially

had now to be linked to a theoretical knowledge and coherent frame that
anatomy, generally, and structuralism, in particular, were to provide.

Arcs of Discourse: From Soul–Body to Mind–Body

As Sawday (1995) has further noted, scientific culture in its infancy cannot
be separated from other cultural forms. In exploring the history of “the
body,” “the fear (or desire), which the prospect of anatomical knowledge
of the interior seems to have excited, needs to be traced” (p. 2). The other
cultural forms from which an emergent science could not be separated in this
case concerned an ontological scale that already underwrote both domestic
and transcultural endeavors. In the earlier systems of exchange between
bodies and bodies of knowledge, the most vulnerable and available “human
subjects” were repetitively dissected—mainly local marginalized populations
such as criminals, the young, the orphaned and prisoners taken from raids of
other lands. Historically submerged, then, are the extant ontological scales
that shaped what was at first an illicit practice in order to give us “our”
representation of our interiors, as though a natural format for fascination.
As Carlino (1999) notes, too, even though revulsion and repulsion have
been common existential responses across centuries of anatomization prac-
tices this reaction has been underestimated for its continuity and impact
within such practices and beyond. Sawday (1995) concurs, arguing that the
impact is not merely linguistic:

Dissection might be thought of as a self-explanatory term, though that

is not entirely the case. In its medical sense, a dissection suggests the
methodical division of an animal body for the purposes of “critical ex-
amination” . . . —a neutral investigation of the morphology of structure
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 181

of the object of study. But the metaphoric sense of the term leads us
to an historical field rich in cognate meanings. Thus, a dissection might
denote not the delicate separation of constituent structures, but a more
violent “reduction” into parts: a brutal dismemberment of people, things,
or ideas. This violent act of partition tends to be associated with the
related term (speaking conceptually) of “anatomization.” In the literary
sphere, dissection and anatomization have come to be associated with
satire, and hence with a violent and often destructive impulse, no mat-
ter how artfully concealed. A literary/satirical dissection, then, may be
undertaken in order to render powerless the structures within which the
dissector’s knife is probing. Anatomy, too, is an act of partition or reduc-
tion and, like dissection, anatomy is associated primarily with medicine.
But, just as in the case of dissection, there lurks in the word a constant
potential for violence. (p. 1, emphasis added)
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

One of the possibilities I suggest here, one of the important, broader arcs of
discourse, is that the reactions to anatomization and “the bodily interior” in
early European cultures of dissection provided a scaffolding and a language
for reactions to a larger unit’s inward turn—the body politic. The body politic
is a provincial term, drawing on the assumptions within Western political
philosophy about the nature of something referred to as a society. It implies
the organization of a group who codify themselves as human and who are
thought to share a common form, a common area, a common heritage, and a
set of values explicated in a social contract—what Protevi (2009) might refer
to as the “political affect” of “bodies politic.” Under such presumptions, a
social contract can only form in regard to a societal interior anatomized into
supposedly discrete parts or populations who theoretically negotiate their
relationships.
One outcome of social contract theory and enactment is that popula-
tional reasoning within early versions of social contract societies, like anatom-
ical reasoning in medicine, allocated different values to different parts of an
interior. Without this division and scale, the orphaned, the criminal, the pris-
oner, et cetera, could not have become the most frequently used subjects
of dissection through which to generate a “body of knowledge” about the
soul–body.
If it is such that the fears and desires associated with the once hidden
interior that Christianity in particular tried to cope with, first by banning
dissection, then by permitting it in 1240, were carried forward in new form,
then it is possible to postulate something further, that the dividing prac-
tices integral to “early modern European political constitutions” built around
genocide, slavery, nationalism, and imperialism cannot be divorced from the
formation of sciences about Being, species, and populations differently val-
ued (Abraham, 2006; Oliver, 1997). Without the fears and desires integral
to the construction of prior ontological scales that placed dividing practices,
 182 B. Baker

tabulation, and observation as the new strategies of “naturalistic” knowledge-

production, contemporary–isms that imbued the taxonomic projects around
race, sex, ability, sexuality, nationality, and more would have no precedents
from which to draw. Without division and without a scale, how could racism,
for example, have operated?
In practice, this would mean in “populational” terms of the body politic
that the divided “interior” of a social contract society (and eventually nation),
would imply some subjects–objects have been positioned as inherently more
highly valued than others. The divided exterior, the projected foreign outside
Other, would also be positioned on a spectrum from ally to enemy. An
interior/exterior problematic thus plays a constitutive role in the assumed
normativities of the mainstream body politic, including how “technologies
of self” are taught and deployed as though “shared values” (Baker, 2001).
By the late 1700s, examples that may bear out this confluence of consti-
tutive forces and projections become evident: the soul–body relation, inte-
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

gral to medieval Christian scholarship especially, had become more distinctly

and noticeably modified into a mind–body one, but this version of Being has
to be understood for its provincialism as well. Stanley Krippner notes that
the operation of culturally loaded assumptions as universal is a common
story within the history of Western theories. Mind is no exception. Mind
is not a universal term, concept, or category within this moment or across
timespace. And even when translations or analogs posit the existence of
an “invisible thing,” what the thing is and does and how it comes to be
varies:

Not only is the term “consciousness” socially constructed, and not only
is the body (at least in part) a discursive formation, but the so-called
“mind/body problem” has been constructed differently in various times
and places. . . . Each culture has a specialized terminology in those as-
pects of mind/body interaction important for functioning and survival.
There are cultures that do not differentiate between “Mind” and “Body”
at all, other cultures have no word for “mind,” and others where verbs
rather than nouns predominate. In the latter, for example, there might
be a word that corresponds to “dreaming” but no equivalent word for
“dream.” (Krippner, 1994, p. 83)

Krippner (1994) notes further that when “mind/body” are mentioned to-
gether they appear in Western literature more often than not as a problem of
unification and coherence between parts considered separate but related: “It
is only in the West that this interaction is seen as the mind/body problem”
(p. 83).
By the late 1700s, the elevation of mind and eventual displacement of
soul rewrote how histories of philosophy were narrated. A soul–body con-
figuration was increasingly under challenge, reworked especially in debates
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 183

over Christianity and origin narratives. Through such debates, soul becomes
increasingly associated with the private, personal, and theological—what
Foucault has defined as the realm of spirituality. The literature that chal-
lenged the centrality of soul to human ontology and to causal explanations
was at the turn of the 19th century characterized as both atheistic and ma-
terialist by critics (Richardson, 1999). It was literature that referred to itself
as science and that focused on the relationship of mind to body rather than
soul to body. This literature, which Richardson (1999) has characterized as
Neural Romanticism, did not completely disavow the prior roles attributed to
soul, religion, spirit, or allied terms but wove their presence into arguments
as an aside or as a springboard from which to begin but not return.
Christian conceptions of the Divine-human and Supernature-nature re-
lation especially were very sensitive topics even well into the 1800s and the
conceptualization of an “I” without soul troubled commentators like Samuel
Coleridge (Richardson, 1999). Christianity in the debates, and in this analysis,
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

was/is not operating, however, as a villain but as a discursive and powerful

literary carrier, as a malleable meeting place for a variety of discourses about
the nature of Being and reality. Christian-saturated and Christian-inspired dis-
courses set parameters on what could be assumed about Being, what could
be unlocked or tested, and what put up for debate.
This becomes evident in the carryover and in some cases the reversal
of medieval Christian metaphors of lightness–darkness, of ascent, and of
self-formation in the Neural Romanticism debates. Denys Turner (1998) has
argued that metaphors of inwardness, ascent, and lightness–darkness form
a closely related cluster that characterize Christian theology in general as
distinctly negative and apophatic.4 As metaphors particularly influenced by
various sources within Neoplatonism, the ancient and medieval purposes of
such enduring metaphors were not the same as those served by them in
modern Christian doxa. Turner posits that in a variety of earlier and later
medieval scholars a double negation is at play that locates the unusual
or extraordinary within the ordinary. By moving from the lower level of
lightness to the higher level of the darkness of the abyss, of no-thing-ness,
of that which required no theory, was ineffable, and uncharacterizable, an
ascension toward union with the Godhead was believed to be achieved
and the selfishness of a concept of self evacuated, ensuring salvation. By
the 1900s, however, the same metaphors had been stripped of their prior
involvement in transcendence and the double negation is replaced by a more
superficial appeal to the concept of experience that casts the ordinary and
extraordinary in opposition.
The arc of discourse that Turner outlines plays out quite legibly in
the debates over human ontology in the early 1800s, including those that
Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, participated in. What Turner does not
note is how the culture of dissection was a condition of possibility for the
Neural Romanticism that began to see what was previously thought of as
 184 B. Baker

“mystical union” or “spirit” as an “impulse” carried by the white matter of

the nervous system. I suggest here that within the body politic of societies
formed around social contracts that the metaphors that Turner points to
helped to mediate a shift from anxious reactions to cultures of dissection and
their ethical issues to the fantasies and projections onto future figurations
of “the child.” This shift included the making up of different “kinds” of
children—beyond “dissectable orphans”—as a newer meeting place for fear
and desire, problematization, hope, and putative rescue, today attached to
technologies of the brain and the reform of classroom pedagogy.
The mediation took place with different intensities and in unique lo-
cations. Across the 1800s, the debates within Neural Romanticism enabled
in some ways a “deeper” movement into not just a fleshy interior, but one
focused on parts called nerves, exchanging Christian metaphors regarding a
Divine-human ontological scale for what are now called biological ones on a
chain of Being. In this line, breaking down into parts was assumed to explain
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

a prior totality and that “logic” exceeded application to cadavers, becoming

a more accepted epistemological strategy that endures today, including in
this analysis. But unlike the Aristotelian analogy of functions, the 19th cen-
tury debates more tightly conjoined the description of inner structures to an
action considered observable. Braining the mind was but one outcome and
version of such logics, forwarding a breaking down that more decidedly re-
located soul to the private, religious, and/or personal and that treated mind
as a real substance, as an invisible, yet public thing, the superior factor in
the body’s physical envelope, securing in a new way human difference from
animals and plants.

FROM HANDS ON TO HANDS OFF: CHARACTERIZING

MIND–BRAIN RELATIONS AND THE ENSUING DEBATES

Three brief examples of a kind of “silent trail” of the mediation of fears

and desires from Christianity to biology and around a new interior/exterior
problematic can be traced which have implication for today’s (non)debates
around BBL. The examples are pivotal in that in each “the child” is at some
level rewritten as a human character with unique attributes and “the brain”
and its role in rearing and education is repositioned accordingly.

Squeezing: F. J. Gall (1758–1828)

In F. J. Gall’s work of the early 1800s, which he called physiognomy and
organology, and which was wrongly labeled phrenology, some radical new
dissection techniques were developed. Through them the spine and brain
were displayed in unprecedented detail (Richardson, 1999). Gall argued that
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 185

while the brain was not necessary for life it was really a series of organs
that had localized functions. By squeezing the skull one could detect which
qualities or flaws had grown larger and more pronounced and key here was
that behavior was linked to the operation of an organ. Argued Gall (1798):

I adduce the following proofs:

(1) The functions of the mind are deranged by the lesion of the brain:
they are not immediately deranged by the lesion of other parts of the
body.
(2) The brain is not necessary to life; but as nature creates nothing in
vain, it must be that the brain has another distinction; that is to say
(3) The qualities of the mind; or, the faculties and propensities of men
and animals, are multiplied and elevated in direct ratio to the in-
crease of the mass of brain, proportionally to that of the body; and
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

especially in proportion to the nervous mass. A man like you pos-

sesses more than double the quantity of brain in a stupid bigot;
and at least one-sixth more than the wisest or the most saga-
cious elephant. . . . The faculties are not only distinct and inde-
pendent of the propensities, but also the faculties among them-
selves, and the propensities among themselves, are essentially dis-
tinct and independent: they ought, consequently, to have their
seat in parts of the brain distinct and independent of each other.
(p. 312)

What was satirically called bumpology eventually came to be seen as a racist,

sexist, and ableist fad (Gould, 1981) supposedly discredited, but what car-
ried over was the presumption that the structure/state of an organ is the
only proper explanation for function, taken as observable behavior. The
deeply racialized, sexualized, and ableized assumptions in the existing onto-
logical scale remained relatively intact, elevating continental conceptions of
whiteness especially via a new organological basis, and dispersing and sep-
arating “phrenology’s” logic, methods, and findings between pseudoscience
and science (Gieryn, 1999).
The ideal child of Gallian texts is implicitly a Teutonic one, understood
as a deterministic behavioral sequence with a modicum of elasticity in some
and not others. “The child” participates in and is rewritten within a Bildung-
style mentality that elevates adulthood as rational and separates out “primi-
tives,” “savages,” and “criminals.” Within what might be called a scientifically
Catholic framework a structural-functional organology drives judgments of
maturation, meaning in this case that one is considered fated to full and
proportional maturity or not based on the initial relation drawn between
skin color and head squeezing. Behavioral sequences matter as evidence of
an organological locus although behavior is not entirely pre-programmed.
It can be tempered in the “highest” ontologies by applying different forces
 186 B. Baker

to oppose the internal instincts but is considered non-modifiable in others,

such as those deemed criminal.
Key to note in this system of logic is the reversal of the
lightness–darkness metaphor of medieval Christianity. After the Enlighten-
ment, darkness becomes the lower status term in explanatory accounts, in-
scribed with the qualities of an uncontrolled and irrational mystery, and light-
ness with truth and clarity. Under this view darkness can never be equated
with the wisdom that it previously was, nor equated with transcendence as
it previously was, nor can darkness in scientific proceduralism constitute a
model of universality that would remain unnamed or unmarked. The neg-
ative metaphoric position is a reversal of the medieval order of things and
is projected beyond the description of mystical union onto an exteriorized
ontological scale marked by phenotype, what Sylvia Wynter (1995) calls a
shift from the spirit to the flesh, from theology to populational reasoning,
and from religion to biologized Race as the main form of identification in
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the New World by 1900.

Conditioning: W. James (1842–1910)

The braining of the mind was still topical at the turn of the 1900s and one
of the most well-known commentators regarding the mind–brain debates
was William James. James’ work on the brain was largely hands off and
more observational of other people’s dissection research than any of his
own. It was thus based on reviews and his own more direct involvement
in hypnotic experiments and psychical research. In Talks to Teachers James
(1899) argued that the state of an organ may condition but may not be fully
responsible for a state of consciousness:

The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it sensation,

feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend to discharge
into some motor effect. The motor effect need not always be an outward
stroke of behavior. It may be only an alteration of the heart-beats or
breathing, or a modification of the distribution of blood, such as blushing
or pale, tears etc. But in any case it is there in some shape when any
consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern
psychology is the belief at last attained that conscious processes of any
sort, conscious processes merely as such, must pass over into motion,
open or concealed. (pp. 170–171, original emphasis)

He deliberately called his picturing of the brain’s action symbolic not literal
and he demonstrates through diagrams how acquired habits in the child can
be substituted over native instincts, like asking for a toy rather than snatching.
Such symbolic representation left the door open for what he called spiritual
causality because mechanistic did not mean purely materialist for James
(1899):
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 187

I myself hold with the free-willists—not because I cannot conceive the

fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand its plausibility,
but simply because, if free will were true, it would be absurd to have
the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance. Considering the inner
fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will
endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in freedom itself.
I accordingly believe freely in my freedom; I do so with the best of
scientific consciences, knowing that the predetermination of the amount
of my effort of attention can never receive objective proof, and hoping
that, whether you follow my example in this respect or not, it will at least
make you see that such psychological and psychophysical theories as I
hold do not necessarily force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist.
(pp. 191–192)

The ideal child of the Talks to Teachers lecture series is rewritten within
what might be called a social scientifically Protestant framework, initially
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

appearing as a collective self who is experiencing native instincts, eventu-

ally modified into acquired habits, and then becoming an individuated self,
through uncertain processes. “The child,” left unmodified or unqualified,
participates in the reconstruction of blackness and whiteness, among other
populational distinctions, as collective subjectivities within the New World
(Baker, 2013). Here, very similar patterns of broader Protestant tropes of
self-unmaking and remaking appear in the rewriting of the child. Undoing
native instincts is the required breaking down, building acquired habits is
the required internal transformation, and the tension between the structurat-
ing effect of a Bildung-style norm and the flexibility and creativity seen as
necessary for growth and individuality interlace rather than oppose.

Scanning: OECD
Like contemporary literature that tries to present itself as balanced, James did
not place much faith in either the metaphysical Absolutists or the organic
Physiologists to solve the problem of the origins of the stream of conscious-
ness. In 2007, the OECD is, however, very confident about what can be
called a fact and what is a neuromyth in regard to a universalized notion of
child development. In the review Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a
Learning Science, non-invasive technologies of scanning, such as PET, fMRI,
MRI, et cetera and their possibilities and limitations are discussed more than
invasive ones, as are ethical issues, and the differences between laboratories
and classrooms.
The review concludes in part that the educational implications of neuro-
science are conditioned on the values and goals of each learning community:

Neuroscience is a tool with specific strengths and weaknesses which

is extremely useful for tackling certain questions as to when foreign
 188 B. Baker

language can be learned most easily but it is less useful for answering
which foreign languages should be taught. (OECD, 2007, p. 148)

Key within the “Yes, but . . . ” conclusions offered by OECD, however, is

a totalization operating within the apparently specific or local. In the name
of the personal, the individual, the tailored, and the idiosyncratic that neuro
research is meant to represent a more totalized rendition of Being eventuates
in which knowledge of educational processes is ultimately reduced to the
authority of biology. Totalization within this logic is not the opposite of
individuation and tailoring but their condition of possibility.
The ideal child of the OECD text, then, is one formed within an
arch Western liberal policy framework, officially secular, culturally Christian-
inspired—“the child” is a generic organism, differentiated after the facticity
of its biology and by it, rather than a product of extant power relations.
The child is amenable to stageist and phasal holism where the neuro is
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

meant for inclusion, not selectivity, where human–machine integration is val-

ued, where the periodicity of childhood is normalized, such as adolescence
constituting a separate phenomenon of “high horsepower, poor steering,”
(p. 9) where ageing is inherently undesirable, and where context enters after
the fact of biological production. Despite the rigorous caveats, cautions, and
limitations discussed, neuroscience ultimately determines the “true nature”
of children’s biology, with learning placed at the intersection of biology and
education.
There is, further, in the logic drawn upon, the absent presence of an
ascent toward some unnamed perfection here that the measured-sounding
and liberal reasoning in the review rely upon and that is important to raise. It
is implicitly considered a fate worse than death to experience what might be
called a severe brain-based disability and the role of the school is subtly to
ensure that the so-called disaster of disablement is avoided and rewired back
toward the norm or eradicated from view (Campbell, 2009; Stiker, 1999).
This begs the question: if falling within the range of acceptable normality
has such pressure and funding devoted to it, what happens when someone
is judged as deviating? Here, charity mentalities and redemptive discourses
risk reappearing amid the body politic’s rearrangement of the ideal. A vari-
ety of “new kinds” of children are named, problematized, and/or “rescued”
from themselves or communities of origin. For example, in the United States,
children labeled as having “severe cognitive impairment,” as well as children
coded as “the indigenous child” and “the urban child,” whether figured as ob-
jects of concern or objects of despise in educational policies like A Nation at
Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excel-
lence in Education, 1983) become stereotypes, figures, and fantasies within
the body politic, subtly presumed to be “holding the nation back,” figures
onto which the previous emotions about the “good and bad” potentials of
interiority are once again projected. The hatred of what the interiority might
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 189

become, its potential for loss of perceived independence, transfers to the

hatred of projected Others interior to a nation, threatening what any nation
might become if coherence between internal groups is not achieved through
the band aid of formal education and against a pluralized background of
foreigners in competition and co-existence.
One senses in such well-intended OECD reviews dedicated to improving
children’s education, as well as politically-motivated documents like A Nation
at Risk, the struggles and the despise that used to inhabit the inner world of
the conflicted Christian born with original sin and in need of transformation.
Via the culture of dissection and moving from the spirit to the flesh, from
the Church to the body politic, through a variety of taxonomic projects,
including the fabrication of populations and statistics, the fears and desires
of imperfection especially recirculate, this time in the name of the “disabled,”
the “indigenous,” and the “urban” child, and today under the banner of global
economic readiness.
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

It is clear that in many locations children cast as “disabled” and those

cast as racial or ethnic “minorities” are pushed into a deficit discourse and
blamed for national or social problems. The contexts for BBL research are not
divorced from educational policy making in the name of the nation or from
the effects of broader historical injustices. While the linkages discussed here
are clearly a thought experiment crossing a variety of primary documents
and utterly suggestive, covering a wide swathe of timespaces, linking arcs of
discourse deliberately at a general level, the point is not the simplistic project
of who is to blame for everything bad that ever happened in the world but
how the very categories of good/bad, high/low, better/worse, and true/false
both carried over and became subjected to different rules of formation—and
contested.

CONTESTATIONS

The above points to at least three possibilities for understanding how the
revulsion and repulsions of earlier centuries carried forward in newer forms:
(1) from Greco-Roman technologies of self to Christocentric cultures of dis-
section; (2) from the formation of the body politic in social contract theory
that divided an interior into good and bad parts, such as Christian or idola-
tor, to the Neural Romanticism of the human and subhuman; and (3) from
metaphors for explaining events like mystical union “phenomenologically”
to metaphoric reversals of Enlightenment episteme which oriented to con-
ditions of proof “materially.” In the process the Divine–human relation and
the soul–body complex becomes modified more noticeably into a human-
to-human relation indexed by a mind–body complex considered the realm
of science.
 190 B. Baker

Via Toni Morrison, however, the study of reality should not restrict the
reading lens to things like brain sciences or specific policies. Just as revealing
are texts now called fiction or novels and it is the psychoanalytic of fear and
desire that she takes up especially in understanding how absent presences
can operate effectively in the maintenance of a divided interior and systemic
racism. In her analysis of American fiction, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
and the Literary Imagination, Morrison (1992) argues that the language
of racialization that helps to constitute literary Whiteness and literary
Blackness operates through the fabrication of a stylized Africanist presence,
sometimes overt, sometimes not. Such a stylized character becomes the site
for projecting all the fears and desires of Whiteness onto what she calls “the
black body,” a figurative presence supposedly in service to and energizing
the realizations tabulated as “factual” insights attributed to Whiteness.
For Bruno Latour, the issue is not reducible to a single identity, binary,
experience, or nation but rather to the operation of Science with a capital
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

“S.” In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns,

Latour (2013) asks why has it become so difficult to argue that something
can be both constructed and real: “why can’t we say of something that it is
‘true’ and ‘made,’ that is, both ‘real’ and manufactured in a single breath?”
(p. xxv). Although many feminists and critical race theorists have already
elaborated how constructedness and reality are not mutually exclusive prin-
ciples, Latour (2013) offers a different route to the colonization of under-
standing by contesting the Subject/Object division that critical theories largely
accept at an implicit level:

When the ground has been cleared, when experience has become a
reliable guide once more, when speech has been freed from the awk-
ward constraints peculiar to Modernism, we shall be in a position to
profit . . . from the pluralism of modes of existence and to get ourselves
out of that prison, first, of the Subject/Object division. (p. xxvi)

For Itty Abraham, there is everything to fear, though, if an analysis of how

science becomes Science neglects what occurred in the so-called colonies. In
“The Contradictory Spaces of Postcolonial Techno-science,” Abraham (2006)
demonstrates how against other already ancient and effective explanations
for events, such as centuries of Vedic philosophies in India, Western science
had to stake its claim:

Modernity, nation, and later, state all pass through and are interpellated
in the institutions and cultures of modern western science. However,
colonial and later postcolonial science was always a contradictory forma-
tion. Though science presents itself as universal knowledge, it is never
able to do so unambiguously in a location distant from its putative origins
in Western Europe. Science’s conjoint history with colonial and imperial
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 191

power implies a constant representation of its condition in order to pass

as universal knowledge in the colony. (p. 211)

For Abraham, without claims to science, nation building would have been
jeopardized, empire building a more difficult cause, and the boundaries of
the West less resolute.
All such efforts to grapple with the impact of clashing worldviews rely,
though, indirectly on conceptions of rationality that participate in what they
critique. Observations that are formed external to such horizons of enact-
ment are significant. HH Dalai Lama not only argues that there is a heavy
dependency on concepts such as the unconscious in Western psychology
that presume certain parameters about Being but that trying to explain all
events and behaviors all of the time, trying to develop a rational system that
can do so, naturalizing the unconscious, and assuming that Life means a
single life from point A to point B is indicative of a particular strain within
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

Western thought that reinforces a closure:

Underlying all Western modes of analysis is a strong rationalistic

tendency—an assumption that all things can be accounted for. And on
top of that, there are constraints created by certain premises that are taken
for granted. For example, recently I met with some doctors at a univer-
sity medical school. They were talking about the brain and stated that
thoughts and feelings were the result of different chemical reactions and
changes in the brain. So I raised the question: Is it possible to conceive
the reverse sequence, where the thought gives rise to the sequence of
chemical events in the brain? However, the part I found most interesting
was the answer the scientist gave. He said, “We start from the premise
that all thoughts are products or functions of chemical reactions in the
brain.” So it is simply a kind of rigidity, a decision to not challenge their
own way of thinking. (HH Dalai Lama & Cutler, 1998, pp. 5–6)

Together, such contestations and their presumptions expose the curious mix
of religious, nationalist, and psychologized trajectories that have reshaped
the purposes of schooling. What would “a decision to challenge” dominant
ways of thinking look like, then, especially in the midst of BBL’s rise to pop-
ularity through well-intentioned studies and the simultaneous threat of old
populational reasonings, geopolitical groupings, and essentialized thinking
reforming around new technologies such as fMRI?

THE CONSTANT POTENTIAL FOR VIOLENCE? THE PROBLEM

OF HUMAN-CENTRISM

The “problem” toward which I finally point with this analysis is not simply
the speed and relative lack of robust historico-philosophical debate that has
 192 B. Baker

greeted the advent of BBL, nor simply BBL’s cultural baggage, but rather
that both BBL and counter-appeals via holism as captured in the quotes
by Laukkanen and Purjo constitute two sides of the same coin of human-
centrism that already operate upon abjections and castes. Both approaches
depend on some accepted notion of human distinctiveness, on some aug-
mentations of “human nature” and not others, and make no explicit statement
with regard to some accepted practices for eradication and not others, such
as eating meat.
For Calarco (2008), this points to “the question of the animal,” which
Western philosophers have taken up or sublated in different ways. For
Calarco (2008), the solution to the problem of asserting “uniquely human
characteristics” is neither the obliteration of a human/animal line nor its to-
talization but to question anthropocentrism as such, about which he remains
cautiously optimistic:
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

The genuine critical target of progressive thought and politics today

should be anthropocentrism as such, for it [is] always one version or
another of the human that falsely occupies the space of the universal and
that functions to exclude what is considered nonhuman. . . . To allow
this anthropocentrism to go unchallenged renders thoroughly unradical
and unconservative much of what today goes by the name of radical
politics and theory. (p. 10)

For Martin Heidegger, though, such insights drawn from critical animal stud-
ies may indicate that “we” already have a special kind of dilemma. In the
mid-1930s, Heidegger argued that the determinateness of the human be-
ing needs to be rethought. In that rethinking, though, whether it is called
Christian or anti-Christian, religion, science, or the humanities, the baggage,
Heidegger suggests, seems to be similar—a kind of liberalism indicative of
Western conceptualizations. His analysis moves through several levels to
illustrate this as a problem of transcendence, including:

(1) The transcendent (inaccurately also called “transcendence”) has histori-

cally been framed by appeals to the God of Christianity.
(2) This “transcendence” is denied and the “people” itself—its essence left
rather indeterminate—is put forth as the goal and purpose of all history.
This anti-Christian “worldview” is only apparently un-Christian, for in
essence it nevertheless agrees with the kind of thinking that characterizes
“liberalism.”
(3) The transcendent is in the above case an “idea” or “value” or “meaning,”
something for which one cannot live or die but which is supposed to be
realized through “culture.”
(4) Any two of these transcendences are mixed together—Christianity and
ideas of a people, or cultural politics and ideas of a people, or
 Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Child 193

Christianity and culture—or else all three are mixed in various degrees
of determinateness. This mixed formation is today the average and dom-
inant “worldview,” in which everything is intended but nothing can any
longer come to a decision (Heidegger, 2012, pp. 21–22).

Moreover, Heidegger asks, who is doing this kind of rethinking? Isn’t it the
human being rethinking the human being? And thus we first become aware
of what he calls the plight of the human being continuously rethinking the
human being pushed up against what could wipe humans out altogether
regardless of that rethinking. The first dislodging of the human being is,
then, the awakening to plight—plight arises as awareness of a tension be-
tween presumptuousness (it’s the human dislodging the human, after all,
thus reinforcing the initial starting point) and a dislodging that could befall
humans.
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

The awakening to plight is a step toward that which he calls the Event
in which all the concern for ontology, for what is soul–mind–body, which
has been the obsession of philosophy, science, and history for Being, with
an “i,” is evacuated so that Beyng, with a “y,” can be realized:

The event is the “between” in regard to both the passing by of god and
the history of mankind. Yet it is not an irrelevant connecting field. . . .
The passing by is not history, history is not the event, and the event is
not the passing by. (2012, p. 22)

Beyng, which cannot be put opposite Being or versus Being, has no other,
and cannot be dissected or broken down. Beyng refers to the needlessness
of going through any construct whatsoever, including god, language, tran-
scendence, or the history of humankind.
Being with an “i,” then, equals remaining trapped within theories,
concepts, and constructs—religions, sciences, philosophies, worldviews, et
cetera—and their concern for definitions of things such as the human, race,
sex, animal, plant, soul, mind, body, and more. If one is asking “how to?”
or “how do I get to this state of Beyng?” one is still trapped in the world of
Being, of wanting a theory to guide “you” and thinking in terms of states
that have some outsideness or Other as point of contrast. In contemporary
terms, Beyng is closer to what psychologists might call flow or the Now, the
non-necessity of making appeal to an “exterior” set of principles whether
conceptualized as immanence or transcendence.
This provocation in the work that Heidegger delayed publication of ex-
poses a fecund site for both undermining his own racist, anti-semitic, and
nationalist stereotypes and the educational debate that includes and exceeds
the proclivities of BBL or concerns expressed around its baggage. Integral to
Heidegger’s articulation of the limits of Western analyses is not just the stan-
dard critique of Cartesian dualism where consciousness was placed as access
 194 B. Baker

to Being, but it suggests the possibilities and limits of critique itself—noting

the political and speciesist work that BBL does when elevated as an admin-
istrative platform and plane of composition in institutional life remains part
of the same circle that secures the explanatory power of “the mind.” As rel-
atively unquestioned scientific subject–objects in the 21st century one might
say that the (provincial) superiority accorded the mind and its naturalization
in one way or another continues to haunt every description, utterance, or
assumption ever made about the young, their brains, and their education,
both making possible and blocking in Heideggers’s terms awakening to the
plight and the coming of the Event of Beyng.

CONTRIBUTOR

Bernadette Baker is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and In-

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2015.12:168-197.

struction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and Professor of Education

Research at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research
areas include philosophy, history, comparative cosmology and sociology as
they intersect with curriculum studies and transnational and postfoundation-
alist approaches. She has published widely in educational philosophy, cur-
riculum studies, history of education, disability studies, and cultural studies
journals in the field.

NOTES
1. Google N-Gram tags the sharp rise in usage of the nomenclature “brain based learning” since the
mid 1990s, and hence this is the descriptor I will be deploying.
2. I thank Antti Saari for access to and translation of these quotes.
3. I deliberately deploy human-centric rather than humanist to signal that it is not only “Western”
conceptions of humanism that have taken human-to-human relations as the central and most important
site of study within a cosmology.
4. Negative in terms of the importance of negation and evacuation as a strategy of insight, not in
terms of hypercritical or whiny.

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