What is Problem Creating

The teaching of scientific subjects at schools and universities presents the eminent opportunity for what the psychiatrist/phenomenologist Ronald Laing termed a devastating experiential invalidation. For a long time, international institutions have been on the watch for the pathetic condition of the current didactics and pedagogy of science, which is no longer able to motivate pupils. What the author of this chapter claims is that the problem is more serious than how it is usually characterized; the standard ways of causing pupils to assimilate logical-mathematical truths that are essential to their social surviving, radically invalidates the existential – and hence ethical and political – totality of their experience of the world, namely their voice and capacity to emit it. The experiment described in this chapter consists of a series of courses entirely aimed to re-legitimize the “negative” experience of doubt and “aporetic” disorientation that any normally sane human subject necessarily makes when her mind for the first time comes to deal with the enigmatic world of scientific truths. It served to re-work the legitimization of education that allows the pupils to listen to that subtle dimension of the phenomena and of their own minds, which alone is able to feed their deepest creative energies, whether scientific, artistic, or directly philosophical.