Health, Sport, Education and... The Rest

Health, Sport, Education and... The Rest

Opinion

Everyone talks about change. In such a way that “change” became kitsch as a theme. Some talk about the change that is coming. However, change has already occurred. Others confuse THE CHANGE with the changes, the thousands of changes that are happening, some more evident than the others, others more surreptitious but, eventually with enormous impacts, not only in abstract and in a global picture, but also in people’s day to day, in their lives, in their relationships, in the way they see the world. Let’s talk about CHANGE. In the break (see Thomas Kuhn) that occurred, in the background that led to the paradigm shift (again Kuhn), the world which we live in today. This does not mean that ‘the old world’ has disappeared, that the remnants of the past are not among us, and that people. Especially people, formed in an educational framework that we can consider outdated and with foundations that did not know how to reformulate themselves, are the biggest blockages to the update and the new victims of the change, but also their biggest eventual beneficiaries (even when they do not perceive it or do not notice what has already happened). Science, one of the biggest culprits (some will blame it) for this CHANGE (and for others as well) struggles in adapting as well.

Ancient history that we will remember in a schematic (and simpler) way. Plato (with the cave and the shadows) contrasts with Aristotle much more concrete and objective (some thought). Aristotle prevailed, but able to survive in the conflicts of powers and social tensions until well after the end of the dominance of the Middle Ages and well into Modernity, leaving victims (unfortunately there are always victims), such as Galileo who had to retract himself, or Giovani Bruno (burnt alive), and many other mishaps that all certainly know. In the late nineteenth Century and the beginning of the twentieth Century change (this change) began to take place in science (with many other victims of course). We leave some references of this construction: Einstein, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking, among many others. But, as in the days of geocentrism and heliocentrism, the scientists who saw everything spinning around them (and indeed from their point of view all turned around them) for taking control of the institutions in the name of a logical empiricism (or positivism) that gave them security (and a space of comfort... personal) and sometimes the escape to ‘the bonfires’ that continued to exist, sought to block innovation.

We have thus come to the confrontations and conflicts that we are experiencing nowadays and which we will try to define from some examples:

a) In Health: with the struggles to implement the definition of health by the World Health Organization (from the middle of the last Century), aiming a state of balance and not mostly filling the faults.

b) In Sport: where the empiricism (sometimes very little logic) that still prevails in sport (be it sport, health, leisure, education, etc.) seeks to oppose to a rationalization that is imposed by the ability to record phenomena and measure them.

c) In Education: with the blocks that make it incapable of generating dynamics, methodologies and the necessary tools (material, but mainly conceptual) that allows the ability to accompany change when it would have the obligation to anticipate and prepare it.

“E pur se muove!” (“and yet it moves”) as Galileo would say. CHANGE has taken place and the available means and instruments require a continuity in the process, with many options open but none of them a return to the past (with which some still dream). It was done because the tools allowed it, but also because “on the shoulders of giants” (those already mentioned: Einstein, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking, among many others) the road became visible and the course was imposed. Unfortunately, with many victims on the way because some were not able to leave their comfort zones (or their petty interests).

Kuhn Told us

“There are always anomalies, phenomena that the paradigm cannot account for or that even contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored, but if they accumulate they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.” In Scientific Americaron, May 23, 2012. We do not pursue the search for the Truth, (Kuhn denied that science is constantly approaching the truth - ibiden) but, as Karl Popper told us, the possibility of “conjecture and refutation” perceiving the triple relation phenomenon / signal / observer that was pointed out by Einstein. The break is done, the Change has happened, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make efficiency work and effectiveness to be pursued. We have outlined a draft of a framework that is essential to have as a reference in order to understand the problems which we are dealing nowadays.

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