Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical
science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have
been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will
provide a nutshell explanation for student learning
in general. I argue that identifying the person with
the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is
not the person, and that it is the person who learns.
In fact, the brain only responds to the learning of
embodied experience within the extra-neural
network of intersubjective communications.
Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural
program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for
educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally
narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus
restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community.