Introduction

Setting out a new theory of education is complex. This is compounded if the terrain offered involves restructuring how we commonly see education and is a shifting terrain open to iterability (repeatable in different contexts, each time with potential differences). The theory presented here is not one of learning but one of understanding education.

In the previous chapter contextual issues around EHE discovery and its implications have been considered. Before moving in Chapter Five, to the empirical data of the ‘discovery moment’ showing signs of paradigmatic diversity in educational studies at a structural level, it is necessary to build first a theoretical picture. The current chapter looks at what that data can mean and why. It looks at the personal nature and powerful difficulty of discovering educational difference – why it is not as simple as pressing a button and ‘switching sides’. This is done from a perspective of incommensurability, interior tipping points, individual readiness and a desire for another, inchoate and emergent way forward. Except, that is, for the discovery ‘moment’, which serves as an éclat.

It is being suggested that this moment is the sign around which we can look at restructuring our current understanding of education. If we presently cannot conceive of education as being necessarily restructured, this is not exactly the issue. Alternative structures are potentially necessary in ways currently unconceived; just as scientific theories that are as yet beyond the scope of thought might one day prove valuable:

The sign of the moment of gestalt switching from one educational world to another that is seen in the data of this book, is an indication presented that we can conceive of education differently.