1. As long as we have been Hominidae, we have been cyborgs, to use donna Haraway’s word for human unity with machines (Haraway, 1985 [2016]), animals who use objects to establish reflexive relations between object, body and mind in order to extend our bodily capacities and to attribute meaning. To get stuff done and make sense of what we are doing, we make ourselves at one – practically, meaningfully – with the object. (And for that matter, so do many other creatures in the earth’s evolutionary unfolding.) Living with useful objects, they become animated, lively partners that meet our needs and serve our interests.
1.1. Modern theories of learning (behaviorism, cognitive science, neuroscience) have a cognitivist or mentalist bias. They suppress our cyborg natures. As a consequence, the objective of learning become long-term memory of ‘facts’ the correct application of procedure – this is convenient, because mechanical tests can readily count right and wrong answers. To focus on the mental, objects (books, computers) need to be hidden away.
1.2. Mentalist approaches to learning are anti-social. It is as if mind begins and ends with individualized brains. Witness the test as the last analysis of learning, where social connections are forbidden.
1.3. Linear or transmission models of learning are premised on an objectivist concept of knowledge. Facts and procedures are not open to interpretation. The epistemic agency of the learner is reduced to compliant accommodation and assimilation.
1.4. Objectivism and empiricism reduce the meanings of things to the fiction that things can speak for themselves, that facts can exist independently of Social Systems of meaning and processes of attribution of meaning.
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COPE, Bill and KALANTZIS, Mary, 2022. The cybernetics of learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 6 December 2022. Vol. 54, no. 14, p. 2352–2388. DOI 10.1080/00131857.2022.2033213, p. 2381–2382.