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The outline of four different purposes and context of interpreting  the cracks of bone maps fairly neatly onto an assortment of paradigms of pedagogy. Corresponding to the idea that the bones give a predetermined message from the future is what is called variously a process-product approach to education, or a positivist one: the idea that “curriculum” is loaded into students’ brains via certain processes/treatments/interventions, and that students are then produced as people whose brains carry a model of this curriculum, this “knowledge.” We also find this kind of determinism in some critical approaches to education that stress power relations so ardently as to make them appear practically inevitable.

 

Corresponding to the idea that the interpretation of the bones enables a fuller appreciation of the present is the constructivist view of teaching and learning, the idea that learners do not only discover but create knowledge through interaction with other people and the world. In this framework, brains, and learners, are creative agents in the process of knowledge, not only reflectors of knowledge that is “out there.”

 

The idea that the bones and their interpretation add a random element to the universe, change it in unanticipated, unpredictable ways, runs parallel to radical approaches to education such as we find in the old Summerhill and in the “unschooling” movement. Here, learning is structured from the specific learners and their contexts outward, no (or precious little) imposition.