Holistic Delusion

All I can say about those holistic-education evangelists out there is that you must all be wrong in the head. There is no such thing. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There is an ideal called 'holistic education', but the thing itself, in an actual and realised way, does not exist.

You have only to look at simpler constructs like Howard Gardner's 'Multiple Intelligences' scam. First he says there are five. Then seven. Then eight and a half. And so on. Meanwhile, he sells millions of books, and people run around designing curriculum and games and toys based on 'multiple intelligences'. Well, it's not a position he found tenable, and anyone worth his salt should have seen it.

Each brain is unique. You can reify and classify, analyse and debate all the possible outcomes of what the brain does (whether it's cognition, ideation, imagination, whatever). All you get is convenient categories. Some are too broad to be of use; some are too narrow to be useful. And any kind of categorisation militates against the ideal of holism, since such things argue that the brain can be splintered into orthogonal fragments of function and behaviour.

Sooner or later, the marketization of education will result in all kinds of educational con-men running rampant while they consume the diminishing supply of taxpayers' money. It has happened before and will happen again. No one person will be able to say, "Après moi, le déluge," because le déluge has already descended.