Quantum Pedagogy: _Laplace’s Dream_

Educational theory appears to face an epistemological impasse. Like old historical maps depicting the same area differently, our current understanding of educational psychology through learning theories struggles to provide a unified explanatory structure. Behaviorism, Social Learning Theory, Cognitive Psychology and Constructivism are all excellent theories that describe how we learn and yet, are difficult to integrate within a single deterministic framework. Each contains grains of truth but none offers a complete picture. Nevertheless, learning does happen – thus a theory must exist somewhere, an ideal theory that explains learning completely, a theory that remains elusive to the human mind. We have sought it by trying to expand every theory, to smooth out all the edges, tweak the ideas, play the numbers. Alas, we have failed. However, what if the theories are not themselves wrong? What if we are looking this the wrong way and the problem is not with the theories per se, but with the way we are thinking about them? It is our epistemological assumptions that force us towards a certain, categorical, way of thinking. And a categorical thinking forces us to take a certain, clean, perspective on how learning is achieved. This article proposes that we are locked in the perfect deterministic world of Laplace, a world that we can describe only ad hoc with our current theories. In science, the only way out from classical epistemology was the quantum revolution. What if we question determinism, embrace uncertainty and redefine pedagogy? What will the nature of educational aims be, what new philosophy shall arise, what new questions shall lurk in that strange world? And what answers? This paper proposes Quantum (Ped)Agogy as a probabilistic epistemological framework where the learning theories reappear on specific areas, coexisting with the overall proposal without being competing and deterministic models. This paper is part of the Quantum Pedagogy framework (see Positioning Note).