Questions of Epistemology:

Re-evaluating Constructivism and the

Sadhna Saxena*

Abstract: Given the state of total neglect of the child's experience and
knowledge in existing classroom practices, the emphasis of the National
Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 on child-centred education is
important. Equally important, if not more so, is the disentangling of
issues of pedagogy, learning theories and epistemology. This essay
argues that in the NCF 2005 there seems to be some confusion between
pedagogy, cognition and epistemology. It also compares its pedagogic
approach to that of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme
(HSTP) which was based on learning science through experiments.
However, both are silent on the philosophical issues of knowledge
creation and the transfer of knowledge in education. While focusing on
these issues, this essay questions the notion of the child as a constructor
of knowledge from an epistemological perspective.

T
he Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) passed
the revised National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005
on 5 September 2005. The first draft invited sharp
criticism from some of the leading scholars for its silence on the
National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2000, the absence of a
categorical condemnation of the communalisation and
saffronisation of education, and for its propagation of child
centred education and local knowledge (Sahmat 2005; Shrimali
2005). The apprehension expressed was that the concept of
child-centred education as enunciated in the NCF 2005, with

* I would like to thank Ramakant Agnihotri and Kamal Mahendroo for their
valuable comments and suggestions, and help in finalising the paper. The usual
disclaimer applies.
contemporary
education dialogue Vol 4 No 1 Monsoon 2006
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 53

its emphasis on local belief systems and local knowledge, would

promote regressive values. There were other critiques as well,
doubting the practicability of the Framework. As Shrimali has
pointed out: It is loud on words.quite evasive in creating
structures (both human and financial)' (Shrimali 2005: 47).
Issues relating to teachers, their biases, academic capabilities,
voice and agency have also been raised (Menon 2005; Batra
2005). A fear that it will lead to an erosion of the content of
disciplines has been yet another concern (Hasan 2005).
Despite the criticism, NCF 2005 has managed to enrich the
debate on education by focusing on issues which are central to
education knowledge, pedagogy, constructivism, local
knowledge, child-centred education, teachers, textbooks, the
burden of information, examination reforms and so on. There
are many radical suggestions and major departures. Probably
for the first time in a government document there is an
engagement with the concept of constructivism' and child
centred education'. Simultaneously, there is an implied
rejection of the Minimum Levels of Learning doctrine which
dominated school education for almost two decades. Although
the phrase child-centred education' is commonly spouted and
has become almost a clich, teachers and teacher educators
merrily carry on teaching in the traditional behaviouristic
paradigm. There is no escape from the existing reality of our
schools where students are still treated as empty vessels to be
filled with information. The crisis of quality of classroom
transaction and the sorry state of our schools are serious
problems and an absence of systematic knowledge about them
has made the situation even worse.
In such a dismal context, NCF 2005 was expected to break
new ground and perhaps facilitate the beginning of a refreshing,
if contentious, debate on long-ignored issues of education. One
of the most contested issues of NCF 2005 which invited
scathing criticism has been the primacy given to local
knowledge (Habib 2005). A full-fledged discussion on what local
knowledge is, its political and historical context and why it is
called 'local' and not just knowledge, is beyond the scope of this
paper. However, it is problematic to say that all knowledge that
children come to school with is necessarily biased, regressive
and communal. Children come to school with not just biases
54 Sadhna Saxena

but also questions, creativity, rebelliousness and developed

linguistics and computational skills. Their knowledge also
embodies their experiences of injustice, power hierarchies, a
knowledge of their physical and social environment, their
experience of suffering, repression, exploitation, conflicts, their
struggle to keep afloat and much more. It is unfair to rubbish all
of this and say that children only come with certain types of
mindsets and biases. What the school does with these and the
child's spontaneity and inquisitiveness has been a matter of
longstanding concern. In fact, powerful political processes that
lead to a marginalisation of this knowledge have had serious
sociological consequences for the children of marginalised
sections of society.
More than local knowledge, it is the confusion in the
representation of pedagogy, cognition and epistemology in the
NCF that is of serious concern. In this paper, which is divided
into two sections, I attempt to disentangle learning theories and
pedagogy from knowledge creation in the context of science
education. In the first section, I discuss the chapter on
Learning and Knowledge' and the section on Teacher
Education for Curricula Renewal' in the NCF 2005, locating
them in the context of science education. In the second section I
tackle the methodological and epistemological issues in the
context of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme
(HSTP), The HSTP (Eklavya 2004) was an effort to develop and
implement an activity- and discovery-based science teaching
curriculum in middle schools. The curricular debates and
developments relating to this programme are of immediate
relevance to the discussion here.

Which Constructivism?
A major challenge of the recent public discourse on education
has been to understand constructivism. Contemporary
discourse assumes either a single interpretation or a broad
consensus with various interpretations and positions. For the
sake of convenience and understanding, scholars have divided
constructivism into educational constructivism, philosophical
constructivism and sociological constructivism. Educational
constructivism draws upon philosophical and sociological
traditions, but has its own autonomous roots and history.
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 55

Educational constructivism of the personal variety stresses the

individual construction of knowledge and concepts and has its
roots in Piaget's theories of cognitive development. Educational
constructivism of the social variety stresses the importance of
the group for the development and validation of ideas, and has
its origin in Vygotsky's work on thought and language
(Matthews 1995). Here, also, a working distinction is important
between a constructivist theory of learning and constructivist
pedagogy, as the latter label sometimes refers only to improved
classroom practices, i.e., child-centred, engaging, joyful
learning, questioning, etc., and in such a paradigm
epistemology and cognitive psychology details are unimportant.
It is therefore important for us to disentangle the various
interpretations of constructivism; the philosophical,
particularly epistemological constructivism or theories of
knowledge from constructivist learning theories. These
positions have been a matter of intensive debates amongst
science educators for the past many years. As Matthews writes:
Educational constructivism originally learning theories
and theories of pedagogy has got caught up in larger
epistemological and philosophical disputes about the
nature of science and about human knowledge. Two
leading constructivists have recently written that the
authority for truth lies within each of us'. This claim, which
goes back at least to Protagoras in the 4th century BC, if
true, is truly breath taking in its cultural and
epistemological ramifications. (Matthews 1998: x).
In the NCF 2005, the chapter Learning and Knowledge'
traverses to and fro between the constructivist theory of
pedagogy and theories of learning with epistemological claims.
It declares: This chapter establishes the need to recognise the
child as a natural learner, and knowledge as the outcome of the
child's own activity' (NCF 2005: 12). As opposed to treating
them as passive recipients of knowledge, NCF 2005 advocates
giving primacy to children's voices and their active
participation. Its emphasis on child-centred education
children learning from their own experience, children as
constructors of knowledge, with the teacher acting only as a
facilitator, respecting the child's knowledge and accepting
multiple answers does help in restoring the significance of a
56 Sadhna Saxena

child's experience. However, at least in the context of science

education, it fails to provide a guide map for going beyond it. It
does not deal with the historical and philosophical issues of
knowledge creation and transmission in human societies.
According to this NCF document, child centred' pedagogy
requires us to plan learning in keeping with children's
psychological developments and interests' (ibid.: 13). This is
fair enough. However, is engaging cognitively with concepts or
concept formation' equivalent to knowledge construction?' Is
knowledge construction an individual enterprise and has it
nothing to do with the accumulated knowledge achieved
through the labour of society over hundreds of years? The NCF
2005 expects children's direct experience to provide theories
without the aid of instruction. It states:
Alongside is the development of theories that children have
about the natural and social worlds, including themselves
in relation to others, which provide them with explanations
for why things are the way they are, the relationships
between causes and effects, and the bases for decisions
and acting' (ibid.: 15) .(And that) construction indicates
that each learner individually and socially constructs
meaning as he/she learns. Constructing meaning is
learning (ibid.: 17).
Thus constructivism has been dealt with rather loosely in
NCF 2005, as has the issue of knowledge construction. There is
a confusion between cognitive processes and epistemology
which runs through important sections. Its failure in
elaborating the understanding of constructivism in the context
of the development of scientific concepts and acquiring an
existing body of scientific knowledge is of primary concern here.
The difficulty for constructivism which is posed by teaching
the content of science is a fundamental theoretical problem, not
merely a practical one. If knowledge cannot be imparted, and
knowledge must be a matter of personal construction based on
one's experience, then how can children gain knowledge of
complex conceptual schemes that have taken the best minds
hundreds of years to build? In fact, as Joan Solomon, a
prominent British science educator, has so accurately put it:
Constructivism has always skirted around the actual learning
of an established body of knowledge' (Solomon 1994:16, cited in
Matthews 1998: 8).
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 57

Equally, it is important to distinguish between the learning

processes which occur in different disciplinary areas. For
instance, Agnihotri elaborates the distinction between the
learning of language and science:
What Chomsky established (almost beyond any doubt) was
that language is a form of highly abstract knowledge which
the child or an adult can't articulate; however, her
performance is evidence enough that that knowledge is in
place. Chomsky formulated it as Plato's problem, i.e., given
so little, how come a child learns so much? We notice a
constant conflict between what may be innate and what
could be the experiential reality of a child and it seems
clear, at least in the case of language or the visual world,
that a child ends up learning much more than what may
legitimately be construed as her input. A substantial
amount of this knowledge may be structured at the level of
the unconscious. Similarly Piaget established beyond any
doubt that children go through stages of cognitive
development in, for example, number, liquid and weight
conservation and graduate from the concrete operational
stage to the formal operational stage or learn to structure,
say, space; once again that kind of knowledge is largely
sub-conscious.
We cannot say the same thing about, say, the knowledge of
geometry, integral or differential calculus, the structure of
the atom, Newtonian mechanics or Einstein's theory of
relativity. In such cases, teachers can't be just friendly
facilitators; they need to be more. They need to know and
engage in a meaningful dialogue. When one talks of
knowledge in formal spaces such as the school or college,
one wants to be sure that the learner not only displays
empirical evidence (if there is any) of knowing X' but also
knows what that knowledge consists of. The kind of
knowledge we wish the child to have in such domains
cannot be innate. It has to be located in its social and
historical dimensions. The space that needs to be
negotiated between the teacher and the taught in such
domains of knowledge has to be conceptualised differently.
The teacher does need to know not only the experimental
evidence that may exist but also the theoretical
58 Sadhna Saxena

motivations that originally promoted such experiments.

In many cases, such as in mathematics, no empirical
evidence may even be possible; in many areas of physics it
may be years before it actually gets supported by empirical
evidence (Agnihotri 2006: personal conversation).
As opposed to learning science from the child's own
experience, scholars such as Southerland et al., while
theorising the issues of knowledge, beliefs, constructivism and
relativism claims, state:
By using acceptance of a theory as the best scientific
explanation currently available, one is emphasizing that
the recognition of the validity of a scientific theory is not
simply a matter of personal opinion, thus providing a
strong contrast with belief (Southerland et al. 2001: 341).
Matthews strongly advocates that a science teacher needs to
be knowledgeable about the philosophy and history of science
and insists that a historically and philosophically literate
science teacher can assist students to grasp how science
captures, and does not capture, the real subjective lived world'
(Matthews 1992: 28).

Facilitator or Instructor?

The Teacher's Role in Science Education

In its attempt to focus on children, the document seems to have

trivialised the role of teachers as instructors or mediators. It
suggests that the teacher is just a facilitator and the
transmission of knowledge through the instruction of the
teacher seems a strict no-no in this child-centred paradigm of
learning. It states: Now his/her (teacher's) role needs to be
shifted from a source of knowledge to being a facilitator ' (NCF
2005:109) and view knowledge as personal experiences
constructed in the shared context of teaching-learning, rather
than embedded in the external reality of text books' (ibid.:108).
Further: Another significant shift is in the concept of
knowledge, wherein knowledge is to be taken as a continuum,
as generated from experiences in the actual field through
observation, verification, and so on' (ibid.: 109).
Yet this ignores one of the most fundamental dilemmas of
the discipline. Writing on science teaching, Weil-Barais says:
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 59

From the earliest studies, it became apparent that the concepts

used by children often constituted cognitive obstacles, and not
potential foundations on which to build, because they were
frequently at odds with the scientific models' (Weil-Barais
2001:192). How is this resolved in a constructivist paradigm
where transmission of knowledge is not encouraged
pedagogically? Weil-Barais notes that a return to the concept of
epistemological obstacles helps to bring out difficulties
encountered by pupils and to regard the formation of scientific
knowledge in terms of a break (and not continuity) in relation to
previous knowledge' (ibid.: 192). She emphasises that the
learning processes are thus conceived as deriving from a
concept transformation process as against the accumulation
process (as the behaviourist theories would have it). Varma, a
physicist involved in HSTP for over 30 years, analyses this
discontinuity, noting that students' misconceptions develop
through just making sense of the external world as they
encounter it during their life' and not through formal
instruction.' (Varma 2005: 132). In fact they may persist even
after formal instruction.
The constructivists distinguished themselves from
behaviourists by taking up the idea of inner conflict and the
outer social conflict as the learning process. In brief,' says Weil-
Barais, it is because the teacher confronts the pupils with
highly specific problems quite different from the problems they
come up against in their daily lives that the pupils will be
induced to assimilate scientific models' (Weil-Barais 2001:192).
She stresses that the models from everyday life and scientific
models do not function in the same way. And thus she
concludes that the studies on problem solving and modelling
have helped to highlight the importance of the teacher's role as
mediator. And this leads to a discussion on teacher training for
the professional skills needed to make effective use of
approaches based on constructivism or social constructivism.
The teacher serves as a guide; he or she is the fount of
knowledge. The aim is co-construction (pupil and the teacher
construct together) and not just the construction of the pupil'
(ibid.: 194).
While Vygotsky does not see a rupture or a discontinuity
between the conception of the pupil's everyday concepts
60 Sadhna Saxena

(spontaneous concepts) and the non-spontaneous or the

scientific concepts and considers them a part of a single
development process the two are related and constantly
influence each other he does emphasise the role of
instruction and teacher: Instruction is one of the principle
sources of the schoolchild's concepts and is also a powerful
force in directing their evolution; it determines the fate of his
total mental development' (Vygotsky 1985:157).
Similarly, writing on the construction of knowledge,
Brossard says: Such concepts are not simply an extension of
students' spontaneous concepts; they are imported by the
teacher, whose main concern is to choose the appropriate
point at which to introduce them' (Brossard 2001: 203).
Further: It is the teacher who sets up a mechanism according
to scientific knowledge towards which he or she wishes to lead
the students. This movement is, therefore, channelled,
directed, according to the developed knowledge the teacher
wants to teach' (ibid.: 204).
He clearly states that children are invited to thinking
spheres, spheres in which they are not used to operating, and
that they do it with the teacher who questions them, asks them
to provide explanations and guides them in their endeavour.
Thus, what they are unable to do on their own, they do with the
teacher. Teachers, therefore, have a professional responsibility
to see beyond the school fence and ought to know more about
their subject than what they are required to teach.
Emphasising the teacher's role in the epistemological
domain, Matthews points out that those teachers who have
thought through some basic epistemological questions will be
much better able to explain why a proposition is deemed
warranted than those who have not had philosophical training.
In classrooms, he says, 'this need to be able to explain belief in
propositions is crucial when children's experimental results
and observations are usually so at variance with what they are
asked to believe' (Matthews 1997:164). Concept formation is a
complex and tedious process that requires extraordinary effort
that is not simply acquired by rote but evolved with the aid of
strenuous mental activity on the part of the child. And,
instruction is a basic source of the development of the child's
concepts and an extremely powerful force in directing this
process' (Khan 2005: 243).
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 61

However, the extraordinary thrust on the child's experience

in the NCF 2005 has undermined the role of teachers and
instruction, which is actually far more complex and demanding
and requires a totally different kind of teacher preparation. As
Brossard notes: The teacher must use, and use effectively,
various activities critical conversations, counter
suggestions, requests to reformulate which demonstrate the
ability to go through the same field of knowledge from different
points of entry' (Brossard 2001: 206). And all of us perhaps
know how crucial capable teachers are to successful education.
Good teachers can salvage the worst curriculum and
compensate, to some extent, for appalling school conditions;
bad teachers can wreck the best curriculum and squander the
best facilities.

Constructivism in Science Teaching: a Critique

The idea that the development of understanding requires an
active engagement of the mind of the learner/child in concept
formation has been the mainstay of constructivism.
Pedagogically, this transforms into children learning from their
experience, respecting children's knowledge, making sense of
the world and so on. But in the sciences it is not just that. As
Mach warns: The lived phenomenal world is vital to science,
that is where the curiosity and wonder begins, but it is not to be
confused with the inertial world, or the world of ideal gases'
(cited in Matthews1992: 28). Or as Matthews elaborates: Its
pedagogical practice is anti-didactic, and student centred with
an emphasis on student engagement in problem identification,
hypothesis development, testing and argument (Matthews
1992: 34).
Critiques of constructivism have raised several fundamental
issues in the context of defining knowledge, more specifically in
the learning of science. For example, in constructivism what
account of the social dimension of knowledge is given? What are
the criteria for the adequacy of student conceptions: are they
judged against the norms of the scientific community, or
against other students' accounts, or against the individuals'
prior conceptions? Is there a confusion between successful
pedagogical practice and epistemological claims?
62 Sadhna Saxena

Interestingly, in 1993 a public debate erupted in New

Zealand over the Science in the New Zealand Curriculum'
document published by the Ministry of Education. The debate
was carried forward in all major newspapers, some radio
programmes and a TV interview with the Minister of Education.
University staff, school teachers, principals, ministry officials
and others also contributed in the debate. A number of large
public meetings were also organised in Auckland. The debate
was about the influence of the philosophical and psychological
doctrine of constructivism on science education in New
Zealand, and more specifically on the national curriculum
document. According to Matthews, the refrain children
construct their own knowledge' was repeated like a mantra in
the document, but like most mantras the meaning of the
refrain is never examined or defended' (Matthews 1995:12).
This New Zealand National Curriculum identifies scientific
thinking as: being curious, being creative, having hunches,
clarifying ideas and feelings, and thinking about your own
thinking. All of these traits are laudable, asserts Matthews, but
they are not uniquely scientific' (ibid.). In this curriculum, truth
and knowledge are replaced with making sense'. As the draft
syllabus says: Science is about people exploring and
investigating their biological, physical and technical worlds,
and making sense of them in logical and creative ways' (ibid.:
13). But as Mathews points out, science as making sense of the
world' is an erroneous and a dangerous conception of the
nature and goals of science. Science,' he stresses, does not
strive to make sense of the world; it strives to find out truths
about the world. These truths, when found, normally do not
make obvious sense; rather they require the overturn and
reconstitution of common sense' (ibid.: 14).
The question of whether science is finding out about the
world or making sense of the world has been an issue of intense
philosophical debates over centuries. For two thousand years
Aristotelianism made wonderful sense of the world and of
human experience. Yet it finally did not prove to be correct.
Galileo and others did not argue that Aristotelianism failed to
make sense; they argued that the world was not like the
Aristotelians believed it to be' (ibid.: 82)
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 63

The epistemological break from common sense and the

everyday world about us involved in Newtonian science has
been often unrecognised or discounted in science instruction,
and thus the apparent failure of instruction to instruct has
become an enigma. This underestimation of the epistemological
break from the everyday world required by classical mechanics
is particularly prevalent among teachers, the majority of whom
follow empiricist theories of science. However, as Wolpert says:
Scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive:
they cannot be acquired by simple inspection of phenomenon
and are often outside everyday experience' (Wolpert 1992, cited
in Matthews 1995: 82).
Learning science by playing around with objects has also
been stated as making sense of the world. Such articulation
emerges out of child-centred educational pedagogy, perhaps
with little appreciation or understanding of scientific method.
To expect students to learn anything Newtonian by playing
around with objects is to underestimate the epistemological
revolution inaugurated by Galileo and Newton; and also to
underestimate the pedagogical problems in comprehending the
classical scientific world-view. Playing around with, or
prolonged looking at, real material objects will not generate
point masses, inertial bodies, force definitions, geometry and
calculus, says Matthews. The recognition of scientific
idealization gives rise to many questions in this area: what is a
misconception? Is the real world the touchstone against which
we judge our conceptions or is the touchstone just another
conception of the world' (Matthews 1992).
It is interesting to note that the articulation of and focus on
constructivism in the NCF 2005 is somewhat similar to the New
Zealand curriculum framework of 1993. Is it just a coincidence
or, as a rebound from the Minimum Levels of Learning
discourse, a concerted effort to propagate child-centred
pedagogies but without entering into the arena of discourse on
knowledge construction? Whatever it may be, it is indeed a
serious matter and needs a fuller engagement by educationists
and academics from other disciplines to protect education from
the rhetorical chants' of constructivism, relativism and child
centred education. It is important to build understanding and
help teachers distinguish between learning theories, pedagogy
64 Sadhna Saxena

and theories of knowledge construction if we expect them to

enrich their classroom interactions with students.

Constructivism and the HSTP Experience

The Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) was
initiated in remote rural schools of Madhya Pradesh as a
response to the dismal state of science teaching in the country.
The science classrooms were engulfed in a sea of
meaninglessness' where alien terms, definitions, descriptions,
formulae and equations were recited and learnt by rote, with
few knowing what they meant (Science Today 1977). In the
1970s, NCERT's major concern was the exponential growth in
scientific knowledge and its incorporation in school science
books. NCERT's way of keeping pace with this growth was by
raising standards' of the science books, which merely meant
stuffing more content and pushing difficult concepts down to
the lower classes. This was in the belief that if children are
exposed' to them early enough, they will eventually understand
them better.
Also, it was declared that doing experiments in the
classroom was beyond the means of a poor country like India. A
description of some crucial experiments did find mention in
textbooks, but by and large the task of the textbook writers was
to incorporate the latest knowledge in science in as brief and
simplified a form as possible. The result was successively more
incomprehensible science books which even the teachers found
difficult to understand. That it further reinforced didactic
textbook-based teaching, rote lear ning and more
meaninglessness was not surprising.
HSTP was envisaged as a small beginning to counter this. It
sought to bring experiment and observation to the centre stage
of science learning. The experimental observations would
provide the data for analysis and discussion, leading to a
gradual building of phenomenological and conceptual
understanding. As opposed to a behaviourist paradigm of
learning, HSTP insisted on learning science through discovery
by doing experiments. Given the rural setting, learning from the
environment also became a core principle. The text-cum
workbooks evolved consisted of detailed guidelines to do
experiments, record and analyse observations. These were
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 65

followed by a series of guiding questions whose answers were

expected to emerge from a Socratic-like dialogue (Suchting
1998; Nola 1992; Matthews 1980) to be facilitated by the
teacher in the classroom. It was a major curricular and
pedagogic breakthrough in a stagnant and hierarchical
government school system. That it managed to survive for 30
long years in a large number of schools within the mainstream,
itself led to many learnings and innovations.
The context of HSTP naturally provides a platform for a rich
debate on the issues of learning theories, knowledge
construction and acquisition, and epistemology. However, it is
important to keep in mind that the group only engaged with the
science curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds in Classes VI to VIII.
This continues to be seen as the first stage of teaching the
formal discipline of science for all children.

Curricular Possibilities, Limitations and Challenges

The experiment and activity-based approach led to the
development of rich curricular material that guides children to
explore various phenomena of life and physical sciences.
Beginning with simple qualitative experiments, the curriculum
allows a lot of time and opportunity to train children in a variety
of quantitative measurements and analysis. By the end of Class
VIII it becomes possible for children to empirically derive some
quantitative relationships and express them as formulae.
Similarly, qualitative observations gradually become more
sophisticated, leading to an introduction to the micro world
using a simple microscope. Qualitative relationships and cause
and effect questions begin to be posed and derived through
hypothesis making and testing. There are also some attempts at
model making. Thus a serious initiation into the methods of
science becomes feasible.
In the initial years, experiment-based learning was
emphasised. While this led to a very thorough exploration of
empirical learning for children at that stage, it also led to a
restriction on topics that could not be introduced in this way.
Apprehensions that direct transmission of knowledge
encourages rote learning and subverts comprehension
prevented the inclusion of topics for which experiments/
activities were not feasible. It created major hurdles in teaching
66 Sadhna Saxena

concepts of astronomy, microbiology, atomic structure,

evolution, chemical structure, etc. Because experiments or
observations were not feasible for introducing these conceptual
areas, the debate centred on whether the level of abstraction
involved in these concepts was beyond this age group of
children and whether these conclusions were informed by
cognitive theories. It was equally important to raise
philosophical issues of knowledge construction and a historical
critique of empirical methods.
It was not easy to arrive at a very consistent approach to
curricular choices taking into consideration the issues raised.
Often it was the feasibility of experiments/activities and not the
hierarchy of concepts that determined their inclusion or
exclusion. For instance, children and teachers enjoyed doing
the activities included in the chapter on Chance and
Probability', but it is difficult to claim that it led to a full
comprehension of the concepts.
Even the process of arriving at conceptual understanding
from experiments is not without its problems. It is possible for
children to make simple bulb and cell circuits to realise that the
bulb lights up only when the circuit of conducting wires is
unbroken or complete. But an abstract idea like that of the
electric current flowing when the circuit is complete is not so
obvious. A model that talks of something flowing' when the
path is fully connected promptly leads to conjectures like: If we
cut the wire should not the current spill out like it would in the
case of, say, a water-pipe?' Inevitably these questions and
discussions have to be gone through to build an understanding
that current flowing in a wire' is only a limited metaphor with
probably no concrete model to compare with and no set of
abstractions to define it fully.

Overarching Questions of Epistemology

There are many examples of idealisations and model building in
the abstract which normal curricula introduce in an incomplete
and facile manner. Underlying them are some fundamental
questions about the processes of knowledge. Some of the
challenging questions thrown up in the process of curriculum
construction are:
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 67

How should we deal with counter-intuition, i.e., the clash

between experience and scientific truth? Science and
critical thinking are concerned in part with producing
correct accounts of practices and relations in which people
are engaged. This will involve displacing everyday common
sense, immediate intuitions and conceptualisations. For
instance, it does appear that the sun revolves around the
earth; it does appear that bodies need an applied force to
maintain them in motion. Science tells us that these
appearances are false.
Does each individual experience constitute scientific
knowledge? Here, a clear distinction must be made
between HSTP and the NCF 2005. NCF 2005 talks of
knowledge construction through children's everyday
experience whereas in HSTP the basis is children's
experience based on experiments they conducted. NCF
2005 is silent on the transfer of knowledge as this is
equated with behaviourist methodology. HSTP, on the
other hand, has an unclear policy, skirting yet
acknowledging the need.
Is knowledge something that is merely recollection? If yes,
then is transfer not necessary? Matthews says: In coming to
know, the individual does not recollect, or bring into focus
something he or she once knew, but something which has been
known in the society' (Matthews 1980). And, as Karl Popper
succinctly pointed out: What is a priori for the individual is a
posteriori for human society' (ibid.:12). Therefore, both the
silence on transmission of knowledge and the skirting have to
be resolved in context of the philosophical debates on the theory
of knowledge epistemology.
Are all answers right answers or do they have to be judged
against certain standardised norms of knowledge
construction? How are those norms arrived at? Does
science progress only through experiments? Do
experiments and observations, and generalisations based
on observations, known as inductivism, produces theory
or does theory precede experiments and observations?
Is any engagement with knowledge without experiments or
sensory experience (empiricism) necessarily didactic and
behaviourist?
68 Sadhna Saxena

Does engaging with concepts, construction and

understanding of concepts in a child's mind (as described
in the constructivist approach) also constitute a
transmission of knowledge, at least in the sciences?
What is the role of philosophy and history of science in
science education? Is there any need to understand the
major paradigmatic shift in the sciences in the context of
these? While discussing the presentation of Copernican
conflict in an average textbook, Frank explains that our
sense observations actually only show that the distance
between sun and horizon is increasing but it does not tell
us whether the sun is ascending or the horizon is
descending'. Further: Starting from this fundamental
mistake, the average textbook does not provide the student
with an adequate picture of the historic fights of the Roman
Church against the Copernican system' (Frank 2004:101).
Textbooks do not tell students about the conflict in such
paradigmatic shifts or how the opposition can muster the
support of distinguished thinkers like Francis Bacon (the
father of British empirical philosophy), who denounced the
Copernican systems as violating common sense.
In the sciences, especially in physics, what is the role of
idealisation and thought experiments? What are
alternative perceptions and misconceptions? How do
theories emerge? Why can't we arrive at exact theoretical
equations through lab experiments? Can zero friction, zero
resistance, etc., be achieved or they are idealised
conditions? In this context, while talking about the true
nature of scientific revolution, Mittelstrass (1972) said it
was a revolution more dependent upon idealisation,
mathematical analysis, and theoretically informed
experiments than it was upon the patient observations.'
(cited in Matthews1992: 24). Or as Schecker (1988)
recognises, the main progress in Galilean/Newtonian
physics is the release of thinking from the bounds of direct,
sensual experience.' (cited in Matthews1992: 27).
At a much deeper level, the dilemma of the experiment-
based discovery method has emerged out of the still incomplete
dimensions that HSTP in particular and science education
practice in general has yet to deal with. The difficulty is that not
 Re-evaluating Constructivism and the NCF 2005 69

dealing with the historical and philosophical aspects of

knowledge construction and instead basing science education
on experiments prevents a richer understanding of science and
scientific methods. And on another level, perhaps
inadvertently, it leads educators into an even more problematic
arena which confuses successful pedagogic practices with
epistemological claims.

Conclusion
It has to be accepted that science educators are interested in
finding out how, on constructivist principles, one teaches a
body of scientific knowledge that is in large part abstract,
removed from experience, has no connection with prior
conceptions, is alien to common sense, and is in conflict with
everyday experience, expectations and concepts. Children deal
with abstract concepts from a very young age, including
language learning and imbibing the political and social norms
of the society of which they are part. Yet, as Nola has said:
... we are not to confuse the constructing in which pupils
may engage in learning science with the constructing
scientists may engage in while actively doing science. It
might be pedagogically useful for some pupils to follow, in
their learning, the actual path of evolution of some science;
but deep confusion can only result from not separating
scientists' alleged construction' of scientific knowledge
from pupils' constructivist' learning, or teachers'
constructivist' teaching, of science (Nola 1998: 33).
HSTP's initial thrust on empirical methods as the only
desirable way of learning science failed to encompass major
debates of knowledge construction in science and the role of
philosophy in major breakthroughs. Was that because of the
burden of undoing the very didactic and meaningless mode of
teaching in schools that existed (and still exists!) in the early
1970s? Or, rather than being a practical issue, was it a deeper,
fundamental hesitation in treading the arena of the philosophy
of science? Or was it due to a lack of appreciation of the fact that
the sciences, especially Physics, cannot be understood without
understanding the philosophical basis of the terms of the
discipline cause', law', theory' fact', belief', explanation',
evidence' and so on? Guided discovery and experimental
70 Sadhna Saxena

method became the mantra which replaced rote learning. This,

in a way, set limits to what could or could not be included in the
science syllabus/workbooks, not necessarily guided by the
principle of hierarchy of concepts or based on understanding
derived from theories of cognition and learning.
NCF 2005, on the other hand, is a step backwards in science
teaching, as instead of dealing with some of these very
fundamental issues in school science education, it focuses on
children learning science from their own experiences with the
teacher acting as facilitator. The issues of epistemology have
thus receded further.

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