Stud Philos Educ

DOI 10.1007/s11217-014-9440-5

Deneurologizing Education? From Psychologisation

to Neurologisation and Back
Jan De Vos

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract The long standing reign of psychology as the privileged partner of education
has, arguably, now been superseded by the neurosciences. Given that this helped to drive
the emergent field of neuroeducation, it is crucial to ask what changes in education, if
anything does in fact change, when the hitherto hegemonic psychologising discourse is
substituted for a neurological one. The primary contention of this paper is that with the
neuro-turn a process of neurologisation has also been initiated, which can be analysed
by taking into account its genealogical predecessor, psychologisation. In doing so, I argue,
one ultimately discerns a primordial incompatibility between education and neuroscience,
one that can be traced back to the fundamental and problematic reflexivity of modern
subjectivity itself, which the discipline of psychology was never able to wholly resolve.
From here, I proceed with the argument that while the eagerness of the psy-sciences to
embrace neuroscience testifies to how much psychology needs neurology (weak psychology, strong neurology), the neurosciences are structurally incapable of disconnecting
from the paradigms of the psy-sciences (weak neurology, strong psychology). Following
on from this proposition, other strong/weak factors are brought into the equation: strong/
weak nature, strong/weak culture, strong/weak subjectivity and, most pertinently, strong/
weak education. Finally, the critical question becomes: if education in itself needs to take
recourse to both the psy-sciences and the neurosciences, then how can we begin to account
for the fact that these sciences invariably end up becoming captured within educational
discourses themselves; that is, the fact that teachers, parents, and pupils themselves are
taught the key insights of neuropsychology.
Keywords

Neuroeducation
Psychologization
Neurologization
Critical theory

J. De Vos (&)
Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, Centre for Critical Philosophy, Ghent University,
Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
e-mail: JanR.DeVos@UGent.be
URL: http://www.criticalphilosophy.ugent.be; http://users.telenet.be/jan.de.vos/

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Introduction
The long standing reign of psychology as the privileged partner of education1 has, arguably, now been superseded by the neurosciences. In the space of only a couple of decades
the brain has become a crucial component of attempts within education to seek reinforcement from the sciences of the mind and behaviour. For many, education as an applied
science can no longer circumvent the physicality of the brain, that to which any psychological dimension, at least so it would appear, must be referred back to. In so-called
neuroeducation, neuroscientific knowledge is integral to the ways in which we have come
to think of, and give form to, education and parenting.2
The fundamental question, then, is what changes in education, if anything does in fact
change, when a prevailing psychologising discourse is traded for a neurological one. The
wager of this paper is that any truly comprehensive understanding ofand, for that matter,
any critical engagement withthe current neuro-turn in education must take into account
its genealogical predecessor, that is, the psychologisation of our life-world and, more
specifically still, within education. Psychologisation in this sense is used to describe a
process whereby psychological discourses and theories have become the backbone of our
attempts to understand ourselves, others and the world at large, resulting in a fundamental
shift in the nature of modern subjectivity.3 It is my contention that with the neuro-turn an
analogous process has been initiated, which one can refer to as neurologisation (De Vos
2014a, b). In this paper I examine the potential continuities and discontinuities between
these two phenomena, and in this respect a closer analysis of neuroeducation will prove to
be most insightful, specifically in terms of structure, for reasons that should become clearer
later in the paper (see also: De Vos forthcoming).
However, to be clear from the outset, a critical assessment of the neuro-turn in education should not endeavour to deneurologise education, in an attempt to engineer a return
to some form of pre-neurological and ostensibly more genuine being in the world. The
answer to you are your brain in other words is definitively not I am just me. Or
phrased otherwise, it is not that the neurologising of our self and world-view severs us from
a supposedly more genuine, direct pre-theoretical experience, but, rather, that it threatens
to obfuscate our fundamental alienation as modern subjects.4 You are your brain, this

See here, for example, Pestalozzis plea to psychologize education (Bowers and Gehring 2004), William
James Talks to the teachers on psychology (James 1925) or Edward Thorndikes valuation of The
contribution of psychology to education (Thorndike 1910).

For an overview of this burgeoning field see Elena Pasquinellis plea for a good marriage between
education and the science of the mind-brain-behaviour, as well as her warning about some of the treacherous
terrain facing research and practitioners in this endeavour (Pasquinelli 2013). In this paper, however, I will
contend that these aforementioned slippery slopes are not merely avoidable pitfalls or simple misunderstandings; rather, they are structurally unavoidable deadlocks that undermine the entire field of
neuroeducation.

For a general assessment of psychologisation see, for example, De Vos (2012b, 2013b) and Parker (Parker
2007) and for how psychologisation operates specifically within education, see Burman (2012) and Ecclestone and Hayes (2009).

This can be understood as meaning that, in modernity, the very epoch in which we are called upon to
emancipate ourselves from tradition and pre-conceived knowledge, the modern subject is, to put it in
Kantian terms, the one who has to assume the fundamental alienation that derives from having to dare to
think for oneself.

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powerful interpellative mantra of neuroscience,5 comes close to enacting a full ontological

closure: your Self, or, concomitantly, the illusion of having a Self, is, at least potentially,
fully objectifiable. That is, allegedly science can understand, by way of naturalization, how
and/or why we (mis)understand ourselves, others and the world. In this way, the neurosciences, rather than deconstructing the chimera of the Self implanted through the wave of
psychologisation of the nineteenth and twentieth century, threaten to numb our nagging
sense that this psychological Self was always already flawed on its own account.
Of course, the neurosciences are far from a unified field. Nevertheless, it is my contention that even the most sophisticated and nuanced of approaches will, unwittingly or
not, take the you are you brain argument on board; and, as such, risk being caught in the
exact same problems and paradoxes of popularized neuroscience. If, then, as more critical
authors such as Stephen Rose observe, we neuroscientists need to recognize our limitations (Rose 2011, p. 57), then my argument is that the ascendant discipline of neuroeducation is an expedient example through which to illuminate the more general conditions
of (im)possibility of neuroscience. There already exists a significant corpus of critique.
There is, for example, the likes of John Bruer, he who famously referred to neuroeducation
as a bridge too far (Bruer 1997), and the work of others yet still who have criticized the
use of brain enhancement strategies on the basis that they erode the metaphysical distinction between things and persons (Farah 2005). From here many authors call for a more
cautious and deliberate approach. Busso and Pollack, for example, argue that the
imprecise use of brain language may undermine legitimate efforts to meaningfully
incorporate neuroscience into educational practice (Busso and Pollack 2014, p. 5).
However, and this is the central question of my paper, what if this ambition were to be
thwarted by a more fundamental aporia? That is, what if there is a basic incompatibility
between education and neuroscience? The genealogy of this aporia, as I argue in this paper,
can be traced back to psychology and its perpetual shadow of psychologisation. I claim that
both education and the neurosciences are by no means unified, self-sufficient fields (neither
in theory, nor practice): in order to unify their fields, both educationalists and neuroscientists must rely on things out with their respective theoretical frameworks, disciplinary
boundaries and practices, and it is at this precise point that psychology comes in. But, as I
will demonstrate, psychology is by no means an unproblematic suturing kit.
The crux of my argument centres around the fact that you are your brainwhich, as
aforementioned, is central to both popular and academic neuroscienceenjoins us to shift
perspective: ultimately, look, this is what you are implores us to identify with a particular
scientific gaze. Here, it is immediately apparent that the neurosciences are inevitably riven
through by processes of neurologisation, and that these processes must be understood in
tandem with those of psychologisation. For it is through psychologisation that the subjective position becomes the proto-scientific position: that is, we identify with the psychologist so as we can observe and manage ourselves through the theoretical perspective of
psy-science. Today, however, we first and foremost adapt the gaze of the neuroscientist, as
it is from this position that we view the colourful brain scans that ostensibly reveal the
nature of our being and that which it is predicated on. However, through these dualprocesses of psychologisation and neurologisation, we are, on the one hand, isolated from
the world around us as well as ourselves, whilst, on the other hand, this very rupture itself

What might at first glance appear to be an overly simplified phrase from popular neuroscience can in
actual fact be attributed back to two Nobel prize winners: Eric Kandel said you are your brain and Francis
Crick wrote: You are nothing but a bunch of neurons (cited in: Rose 2011, p. 57).

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is obfuscated: this is because the proto-scientific position affords a certain illusory,

orthopaedic wholeness in relation to ourselves, others and the world at large.
The principal argument of this paper is that in this way the paradoxes and inconsistencies
of the psy-sciencescaught as they are in the hall of mirrors that is the fundamental and
problematic reflexivity of the modern subject (De Vos 2011)are far from being resolved as
a consequence of the neurological turn. On the contrary, I will argue that while the eagerness
of the psy-sciences to embrace the neurological turn testifies to the ways in which psychology
needs external structural reinforcement (weak psychology, strong neurology), the neurosciences themselves are also structurally incapable of casting-off the stabilizing paradigms of
the psy-sciences (weak neurology, strong psychology). Following on from this proposition,
other strong/weak factors will be brought into the equation: strong/weak nature, strong/weak
culture, strong/weak subjectivity and, most pertinently, strong/weak education.
Subsequently, the crucial question becomes: if education in itself needs to take recourse to
both the psy-sciences and the neurosciences, then how can we begin to understand the fact that
these sciences invariably end up becoming captured within educational discourses themselves:
that is, the fact that teachers, parents, and pupils themselves are taught the key insights of
neuropsychology. This, as I will attempt to demonstrate, is a powerful but often unacknowledged current within the different strands of neuroeducation: they eventually end up becoming
neuro-education, which I have hyphenated for the express purpose of indicating how they
essentially boil down to hailing the subject within the neuroscience class. Of course, the question
then still remains, if we have succeeded in graduating from the psychology class and have now
enrolled in the neuroscience curriculum, then has there been a structural change or not?

The Question of the Surplus

In response to the popular claim that neuroscience has the potential to revolutionize
education and parenting, Bas Levering rightfully asks, as summarized by Ramaekers and
Suissa: what exactly is it that we now claim to know which we did not know before, and
what exactly is it that would follow from this knowledge (Ramaekers and Suissa 2012,
p. 21)? In other words, what or where is this surplus?
Of course, the question of this surplus has always itself been a major issue within
education. Either education is concerned with instilling something in a subject, or it
involves decanting something extra out of you, as per the motto: plus est en vous (there is
more in you)the personal motto of Lodewijk van Gruuthuse, a fifteenth century nobleman from Bruges). In the first instance, the subject is either a blank slate, or an entity with
its own (developing) substance onto which something new, something extra is grafted.
Now from here the question is then what kind of surplus is at stake in neuroeducation.
One particular surplus (constituting a major difference in relation to the previous psyapproaches) is psychotropic medication, used to remediate a shortage of chemical substances (whether of stimulants or inhibitors) in the case of disorders which directly or
indirectly affect learning processes. At the least, we could say that we are certainly a long
way away from the classical view of education and its envisioned surplus of the universal.6
Modern education, by contrast, at most addresses the general level, and this becomes
particularly evident with the neuro-turn in education. That is, it starts from a general
conception of capabilities, skills and dispositions of the human being as these are
6

Think of Platos idealism and his view of education as aiming toward the illumination of universal truth,
as well as Socrates maieutics in which the soul has to be delivered from universal knowledge.

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determined, constrained or at least relayed by the material substrate of the brain, and when
necessary addresses the shortcomings or deficiencies at this material level with medication.
But, of course, psychotropic medication is merely but one aspect of how neuroscience is
utilized within education, and, in fact, many advocates of neuroeducation would argue that
it is not the most important issue. Rather, the surplus, as many argue, pertains to the fact
that now that we know how the brain works, we can adjust our educational methods or
even get rid of methods which we now know to be ineffective. Again, this knowing does
not concern the universal; indeed, on this point, neuroscience is relatively modest: it does
not attempt to show how things are, rather it tries to envision how things work or what they
look like beneath the skull. In this respect, neuroscience is in accordance with modern
sciences lack of concern with the truth as such. Just consider the example of evidence
based methods: the central issue there is not to know why something works, but only that it
works. Scientific knowledge envisions the statistical, mathematical rendering of what is
looked upon as the natural and material substrate of things.
To sketch out the shift that this modern conception of knowledge effected within the
field now classified as the human sciences, one could argue that the mediaeval motto, plus
est en vous, was recalibrated in the Enlightenment in terms of the modern sciences and its
knowledge. The plus-en-vous came to mean: there is something in you that you did not
know about: you have a wrong idea of what is in you, there is something more/something
else in you. Consider how Vesalius made incisions in the skin to lay bare the modern flesh,
which is entirely different to the medieval, biblical weak flesh. There the plus est en
vous ceased to be a religious, moral or ethical injunction related to some universal truth,
becoming instead a scientific observation concerned with the general knowledge of the
natural, objectified and mathematized, substrate. The modern subject, then, no longer
attributes causality to (evil) spirits or a weakness of will; it is the body and the material that
are now regarded as the source of the unknown forces driving the human being.
Within the domain of the burgeoning human sciences the basic assumption thus became
that the human being suffers from a fundamental and objective misconception regarding
him/herself and by extension society which can be, if not corrected, then at least pointed
out by science. Science, then, is inextricably intertwined with education, aiming to make
you aware of your nave, mistaken forms of dealing with yourself, the other(s) and the
world. Today, for example, we are taught to reconsider our thoughts on love, altruism or
morality, as neuroscience can reveal to us how these are influenced, shaped or, for some,
entirely reducible to material and evolutionary determinants.
The neurosciences clearly inherited this educational drive from the psy-sciences.
Remember, here, the primary educational intentions of Stanley Milgrams shock generator
experiment (1974). In the experiment participants are led to believe they are giving electric
shocks to another person. At the end of the experiment, Milgram enters the room. As the
ultimate representative of science, and in a truly Candid Camera moment, he lifts the veils:
not only about the deception of the experimentthe fact that the electric shocks are fake
but, further, the veils of our culturally induced ideas, all for the purposes of teaching us the
real social psychological mechanisms of obedience (see De Vos 2009).
The crucial point, here, is that it is widely held that this psycho-education will benefit
us: Milgram believed in the emancipatory potential of this study. The plus est en vous can
thus be turned into a surplus: once you know how it works, you can manipulate and profit
from it. Just consider how the concept of positive thinking essentially rests on the idea
that you can lead or even mislead your psyche. It is this logic that returns in full force with
the neurological turn: you can fool your brain, so we are told in the numerous popular
train your brain websites, and the more sophisticated academic discourses on neuro-

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feedback (for an overview see Weiskopf 2012).7 Perhaps this goes some way to explaining
the eagerness inherent to the neurological turn: the contingency and volatility of psychology never managed to flesh out the plus en vous; in neuroscience this is allegedly a
given: is it not simply the brain?
But not let us not get ahead of ourselves: the logic of the neurological turn in education
is tributary to the phenomenon of psychologisation, and as the latter is closely tied to
psycho-education, it is expedient to look closer into the relation between education and the
psy-sciences itself.

The Weak and the Strong

Although psychology since its inception, that is, since its emancipation from philosophy and
its aspiration to be a real science (Parker 2007), has profoundly influenced theories and praxes
within education and schooling, it is only in the post-World-War II period (especially from
the Cold War leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall) that one can speak of a genuine
psychologisation of the school (De Vos 2012b; McLaughlin 2010). One could refer here to
evolutions within psychology (e.g. the cognitive revolution in psychology in the 50 and 60 s
and its evident orientation to education), but perhaps it is more expedient to look at some of
the key changes in the field of education itself, which can be seen as antecedents to psychology entering the school system. Again, in the interest of clarity, my intention here is
neither to applaud nor simply condemn this psychologisation tout court; rather, I am interested in exploring the conditions of (im)possibility of the psychological discourse.
Let us hereto, to cite one example, consider how in Flanders a particular kind of
psychologisation of education emerged firstly in religious teaching. Up until the 1960s
catechesis fairly unproblematically centred around Christian doctrine and its ontological
claims (Pollefeyt 2004). However, due to an increasing secularization driven by a rapidly
changing socio-economic and cultural climate in post-war Europe, this form of religious
education became untenable. This led to what Pollefeyt refers to as the anthropological
turn in catechesis, with its focus on the subjective experience of the individual and its
reliance on the human and the social sciences: the class became a discussion group tackling
contemporary issues (Pollefeyt 2004). However, I would argue that rather than the
anthropological, it is above all the psychological discourse which one finds in catechesis
textbooks, which often recite verbatim psychological theories and data pertaining to, for
example, puberty (puberty and sexuality became important themes in catechesis). Just
think of the typical Who Am I? books or learning units in religious education, with the
obligatory drawing of a centralised Me-figure. As a religious education book from
Northern Ireland literally states, its purposes are as such: that pupils will have considered
the term identity and what it means (Maggil and Colson 2008, p. 4).
Weak catechesis, strong psychology? Perhaps this is a general issue: psychology is
invocated to re-mobilize a stranded discourse, a theory or praxis which has reached a limit
or deadlock.8 In this sense, the psychologisation of catechesis can be seen as a prelude to
7

Do we not move here from the plus est en vous to the capitalist scheme of pursuing the surplus, the latter
of which is achieved via outsmarting the labourer, the colonial other, future resources, and now, in turn,
the brain?
8

The psychologisation of unemployment, for example (e.g. the individualising psycho-social programmes
aimed at the unemployed), testify to the impasse governmental labour policies find themselves in (Crespo
and Serrano 2010; De Vos 2012b; Parker 2007).

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the psychologisation of education, which had reached crisis-point itself in the post-war era.
Indeed, one could argue that with globalisation, and the shift from a Fordist production
economy towards a post-Fordist knowledge economy, the classic educational approach,
grounded in the transference of knowledge and an attendant regime of discipline, had run
its course. It is here that the psychological turn made its appearance.
Initially the psy-discourse found its way into the school via the para-scholar services,
such as vocational guidance and psycho-medico-social counselling. However, it did not
take long for psychology to colonise the curricula. To again use the example of Flanders,
the psy-discourse entered the class rooms via the so-called attainment targets (the minimal
learning outcomes). The government stipulated, for example, that three to 6 year olds
should be able to speak about feelings such as joy, fear, sorrow, and surprise (Vlaamse
Gemeenschap). Authors who would applaud this thus want the school to become an
optimal care system which gives every child maximum opportunity of a full and wellbalanced development of their personality (Roelands and Druine 2000, p. 79). These
attainment targets are evidently saturated with psy-terminology: referring to social skills,
assertivity, the ability to be respectful and tolerant, etcetera (see: De Vos 2008). Kathryn
Ecclestone describes a similar movement in the United Kingdom whereby wellbeing and
mental health permeated the classroom through what she perspicuously calls the curriculum of the self (Ecclestone and Hayes 2009).9
However, if at first glance this looks like strong psychology, a closer inspection might
afford another perspective. For if we look at the pedagogical methods developed for
teachers operationalizing the attainment target of emotional literacy, we are presented with
learning material which aims at teaching the children a more differentiated vocabulary
concerning emotions, in order to express feelings in a more appropriate way (Kog et al.
1997). It is important to highlight here how the toddlers are turned into students of psychology: nursery school teachers introduce them into the Elementary Psychology of
Feelings. This is the ultimate undertow of psychologisation: implementing psychology in
the school cannot but involve educating the pupils in psychology. Weak psychology,
strong education?
One could argue that psychology structurally leads to the embracing of an educational
paradigm: it is in this way that psychology establishes itself as a scientific discipline. That
is, through its theories and praxes, psychology addresses the human being as homo psychologicus and henceforth produces the psychologised subject who views oneself as an
object of psychology. Psychologys thats what you are thus invites the modern subject
to view itself (as well as others and the world) via the objectifications of the psy-discourse.
Hailed into the psychological discourse we come to identify with the operator/agent
position of scientific objectivations: we become our own psychologist (De Vos 2012b).
Psychology, then, is in itself a weak discourse: it structurally relies on the educational
paradigm; it has to be taught. In this way psychology is psycho-education; psychology is
psychologisation. My somewhat bold claim, therefore, is that psychology cannot but enter
the school, whether it be as an actual course or as learning content. This is not only
discernible in the field of affective educationalthough obviously the affective turn is
closely related to the psychological turnbut also in the growing preoccupation with
mental disorders in education. ADHD as a phenomenon, for example, is based upon
masses of information and educational campaigns. In clinical settings even the child itself
9

Purdy and Morrison make a strong case against the The Northern Ireland Revised Curriculum and its
claim for scientific support in neuroscience, condemning it for being another unwitting step in a curriculum spiral (Purdy and Morrison 2009, p. 108).

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is subjected to theory: you suffer from ADHD and you know what that is Even cognitive
psychology must enter the classroom as part of the curriculum:10 not only are teachers
taught how humans think, but the pupils themselves are also instructed in the theoretical
basics of cognitive processes.11 In short: the modus operandus in the psy-praxes is the
administration and the implantation of scientific knowledge into the subjects life-world,
imploring it to internalise this scientific, objectifying gaze and turn it upon itself.12
Moreover, as the school became an integral care-centre, the other side of this psychologisation almost inevitably involved an equally sweeping pathologization. That is, a
focus on the personal and the subjective runs the risk that everything which goes wrong
within schools will be framed through the same subjective and personal paradigm. This
perhaps goes some way to explaining the widespread fixation in schools on all sorts of
personality disorders. The prevalence of ADHD, autism-spectrum disorders, dyslexia,
dyspraxia is a testament to this (see for a critique: Timimi et al. 2010; Timimi and
Radcliffe 2005). It is precisely in the growing morbidity of these mental disorders within
education that one witnesses the shift from the psychological to the neurological, as these
disorders are predominantly viewed as neurological rather than mental disordersthe
development of matching pharmaceuticals (see higher) also played a decisive role here.
Psychology, it seems, even as it has proved to be a very powerful and invasive discourse,
has a fundamental weakness: it cannot account for that which does not work; that is, it
cannot account for that what thwarts its humanist ideals. The psy-discourse cannot think
the flaws in the psyche on its own terms, so it would appear, and it is this that fuels the turn
to the neurological (De Vos 2012b). Weak psychology, strong education thus must be
paired with weak psychology, strong neurology. Or will we again need to turn this around?
I will take a closer look to this in the following section.

Neurologisation or Why Psychology Sticks

Psychology, for structural reasons, necessarily has to deflect criticisms that it is grounded
upon competing and conflicting theories rather than, as it as a discipline prefers to claim,
empirically certifiable facts. Hence, the vantage point psychology implores us to adopt to
view ourselves is never entirely beyond doubt. With the advent of the neurosciences this
limitation is seemingly solved, as it is no longer the psychologist who can see inside us,
but rather the fMRI scan, which, compared to the partial and blurred imagery provided by
psychological theories, allegedly delivers uncontested, high-definition images of our
brain.

10
So if, for example, behaviourism and later Carl Rogers positive existentialism were important threads in
education in the recent past (as one of the reviewers of this paper remarked), then the next move would be to
look there for traces of psychologisation also, that is, for traces where pupils and students themselves were
introduced theoretically into these psychological theories. But such an undertaking falls out with the scope
of this paper.
11
See, for example, an educational brochure for 16 year old pupils which contains a whole chapter on the
learning brain dealing with the basics of cognitive psychology and its correlate neurology (Raeymaekers
2009).
12
This sets the implementation of the psychological discourse apart from that of the medical discourse, for
example. Even though the latter often goes together with medically educating the pupils, the backbone of
medicalization does not rely on it: screening and vaccination programmes, for example, can adequately run
entirely independently from this.

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However, the following question immediately rears its head: how strong is neurology?
Can it unilaterally encompass the field hitherto covered by the psy-sciences? A useful
touchstone via which to confront this question is precisely the burgeoning theories and
praxes of neuroeducation, which will rapidly return us to the observation that the weak/
strong carrousel has not stopped quite yet.
Take, for example, the Brain Targeted Teaching project of Mariale M. Hardiman of
the Johns Hopkins University. It stems from neurological research demonstrating that
while particular threats impede learning, positive emotional experiences can contribute to
long-term memory (Hardiman 2010). The programme promotes the use of Mood Management Skills, a CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) program with adolescent students:
Caught up in all of its contradictions it is often difficult for you to understand that
adolescence is simply a phase of your life. You are embroiled in its passion and
caught in its web. You may act before you think and jump to conclusions before
checking out the entire story. Amidst all of this confusion, you may need a road map
that helps you find your way through this maze called adolescence. Mood Management is a skills-building program designed to be your road map (Langelier 2001,
p. 1).
Adolescents, then, are to be acquainted with neurological sciences. Of particular
significance is the strongly interpellative you, which, together with the developmental
approach, draws the adolescent out of his or her life-world and summons them to adopt
the theoretical perspective of the neurosciences to look upon themselves. Adolescents,
we are told elsewhere, can learn to closely examine their emotional response to a given
situation (Sylwester 1994, p. 64, my emphasis). One should not overlook how
neuroeducation is packaged in an educational form: it is neuro-education, literally
educating the pupils and students themselves in neurology. The educational neuroscience
laboratory Engrammetron at the Simon Fraser University, for example, not only offers
teacher/parent workshops and presentations, but also gives student workshops. One such
workshop entails: How to Study Effectively: Strategies that consider cognition, emotion,
and motivation. Whilst the workshop Brain, Mind, and Emotion is designed to
acquaint school age students with what neuroscience can tell us about brain functions,
specifically learning and the affective component of human existence..13
In order to answer the question, where does this inculcation and/or enforcing of this
meta-perspective ultimately lead to, we need only refer to the words of neuro-educationalist Langelier himself: Emphasis is placed on teaching them to recognize when they are
in their emotional mind with the ultimate goal of learning how to exit from it (Langelier
2005, p. 4, my emphasis). Here we see in vivo the shift from the psychological to the
neurological. For, is the basic message of this Mood Management Skills program not that,
at the same time that you are called upon to contemplate yourself from the experts
perspective, you should attempt to supersede the psychological strata? You should reject
your direct psychological ways of reacting, and, hence, de-psychologise yourself! That is,
through becoming a scholar, a CBT expert of emotions fluent in the latest research on the
issue, you become de-psychologised.
Weak psychology, strong neurology. But to be absolutely clear, this de-psychologisation was always already at work within the actual psy-discourses themselves. This was
because, during the psychological turn the subject was hailed into a position beyond its
own psychology, turning it into a mere spectre that hovered above its own psychology. But
13

http://www.engrammetron.net/outreach/workshops.html.

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now, during the neurological turn, the subject is seemingly grounded by virtue of such
down-to-earth issues as heart rates, oxygen levels and adrenal glands secreting cortisol.
Does this signal the death knell for the psyche and the expiration of psychology and
psychologisation? Perhaps not, if only for the fact that the psy-complex has a longstanding
tradition and expertise in psycho-education which, as we can observe, is most readily
offered in service to the expansion of the neuro-discourses. Just consider how in the case of
ADHD it is primarily the psychologists who are eager to spread the news in therapy
settings, schools, and in the media that ADHD is not a psychological disturbance but a
brain disorder. Here, already, some weakness seeps into the neurological: it needs to pass
through education. To put it bluntly, the first lesson of any ADHD-discourse (that it is brain
based) needs so much repetition precisely because decisive evidence for the neurological
basis of ADHD is still lacking. Weak neurology, strong education. Hence, neurologys
twin is neurologisation; just as in the tradition of psychology, it interpellates us into the
scientific vantage point. We are once again hovering above ourselves.
However, there might be other reasons yet why neurology(zation) does not mean the
end of psychology(zation). Looking at the literature on neuroeducation, and how it leans
predominantly on the cognitive-behavioural approach (Ansari et al. 2012), it appears that
neurology will not easily usurp psychology. If research shows, for example, that pupils
with better mathematical skills use more of this or that part of the brain than poorly
performing pupils, is this really the definitive explanation? Does it really usurp the typical
hermeneutic explanations (or psychologising explanations) of bad results at schools in
terms of family relations (systems theory), or in terms of Oedipal transference (psychoanalysis)? In fact, one could argue that the fundamental reason why this or that brain region
is used or not is not explained per se with neurology and fMRIsunless one takes the
radical position that educational differences only reflect lesions, anatomical malfunctionings or idiosyncrasies. At least, then, some doubt is introduced as to whether neurology is
truly strong enough to counter psychology(zation).
Interestingly, a project aiming to get pupils acquainted with the fascinating world of
the brain asks the same question:
Do we really understand how the brain computes that 9 times 6 equals 54, or how
they recognize the face of my boyfriend (without equivocating it with that of the
geography teacher, or how they can remember how happy I was with my first little
bike? Even after twenty centuries of research and speculation we do not have the
answers to these questions ready at hand (Raeymaekers 2009, p. 5, my translation).
In the end, neurology can only show us mute images, mere chemistry and pure electricity:
there is a lot to see, to count, to show, but there is not really something to know. It is
there, as the quote implies, that classic psychology reappears: one could even argue that,
alongside cognitive psychology and developmental psychology, the much maligned
Freudian psychoanalysis is evoked: indeed, how else are we to interpret the peculiar
example of a brain that interchanges my boyfriend with the geography teacher, if not along
standard Freudian lines of love following the oedipal scheme and education being a setting
under the spell of transference?
This weak neurology, strong psychology is the logical counterpart, then, of the earlier
weak psychology, strong neurology. That is, neurology cannot but evoke the psychological
as its hermeneutic counterpart, while psychology cannot but solicit something like neurology in an attempt to fix its structural groundlessness (De Vos 2012a). Here I argue
against Andrew J. David and against Paul Howard-Jones who, in their critical assessment
of neuroeducation, propose that psychology can stand on its own, as it would be adequately

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supported by behavioural studies (Davis 2004; Howard-Jones 2008). Nor, I claim, can
neurology stand on its own; in fact, for some neuroscientists this is not even remotely
problematic: Kenneth Pugh of the Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, for instance, says
in an interview: psychology is a glue holding the system together, mapping the direction
in brain imaging, now, 5 years from now and into the future (Murray 2000). Should we
not conclude, then: brain imaging is pre-mapped, or brain mapping is pre-imagined? What
appears to be sticking is the psychology.
However, to be absolutely clear on this point, the paradoxical link between the two
disciplines, and the true glue so to speak, is education. In psycho-neuro-education the latemodern subject, interpellated to occupy the vantage point of the sciences, becomes a metasubject, beyond both the brain (a non-human, non-experiential, non-phenomenological
entity), and the mind or the psyche (in its turn a non-human, non-experiential, nonphenomenological category). This problematic (in the sense that it remains unquestioned)
Von Munchausen meta-subject that is called into life by psycho-neuro-educationthat
which is able to pull itself out of the morass by its own hair, and thus transcends both
nature and nurtureaffords me the opportunity to take my argument a step further yet still,
in order to ask the question: what is education? Or, alternatively, what should it be? Is it
not the case today that we are at a loss when confronted with such a question? In other
words, we seem to know less and less about what education is.14

The Problem with Education

What education is, is a question which is either barely addressed or not addressed at all
within the field of neuroeducation. Consider, for example, the way in which the wellknown and widespread idea that the neurosciences reveal the relevance of affect in education is taken for granted and/or seen as obvious in the literature. The basic message of a
paper by Mary H. Immordino-Yang and the well-known neuroscientist Antonio Damasio,
for example, is that we have the wrong idea about learning: rational thought is not opposed
to the affective; the affective always already permeates rational thought and is a necessary
and inextricable part of it (Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007). While the authors consider this a ground-breaking insight, our initial reaction may be to simply shrug our
shoulders: is this not old hat, a commonplace insight? However, the real issue is perhaps
that, given that the authors want to sketch a biological and evolutionary account of the
relationship between emotion and rational thought (Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007,
p. 3), they all too readily and uncritically conclude that addressing this issue is what
education is about. By making the brain the locus of educational praxis in this way, do not
Immordino-Yang and Damasio unwittingly transform the old dualistic nature versus
nurture discussion into a paradoxical, but just as dualistic, nature versus brain dichotomy?
That is, in an another apparent Von Munchausen-esque gesture, educating the brain seems
to be required in order to confront nature. Perhaps this paradox is at work in many
contemporary disorders themselves: in the case of ADHD, genderdysforia and autism, for
example, nature (that is, ideal nature or nature as it supposedly should be), is thwarted by
the brain! The brain, then, is supposed to play tricks with nature, and it is on this same
paradoxical level that theorists of neuroeducation place education as such. Hence, the first

14
This is yet another paraphrasing of Jose Saramagos seminal utterance: We will know less and less what
is a human being (Saramago 2008).

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question to be asked of such supporters of neuroeducation might not be, what do you mean
by neuro, but, rather, what do you mean by education?
At a minimum, it is evident that the cognitive-emotional divide, once a central construct
within the old public/private partition, is no longer believed to be the bedrock of education.
Formerly, one could argue, the school dealt with rational thought. Emotions, if deemed to
be unhelpful for attempts to instil discipline and character in support of the rational project,
were supposed to be reserved for the realm of the home and the family. The call to bring
emotions into education itself in this way seems to signal that something did not work
anymore in this scheme. This led to a decisive and profound shift in education: education
used to be disinterested in the personal and the psychological, you were not probed on
these terrains. Now, by contrast everybody is duty-bound to bring the personal into the
equation; in fact, not doing so is readily considered as indicative of problems or even
disorders.15
Hence, the aforementioned crisis in education, to which the psy-discourse came to the
rescue, might in the first place concern a faltering partition of the public and the private
sphere. Why dont you share your emotions with us, as Dr. Phil says, the echoes of which
can be heard in the class-rooms during circle time. Psychologisation and neurologisation
are the paradigms through which subjectivity, a formerly supposed sovereign and private
terrain, folds over, as it were, to the public and political domain. In other words: (psycho)neurologising subjectivity means turning the private inside out to the public.
Do we not, moreover, end up being unable to conceive not only of education, but also,
more generally, of the public and cultural field as such? Let us reconsider the aforementioned blind-spot within the psy-paradigm which leaves it structurally unable to account for
that which does not work, and pushes it towards the neurological paradigm. Learning
disabilities, for example, are believed to be brain-based and heritable (Fletcher 2012), and
violence and aggression are considered as dysfunctions of the neural circuitry (Davidson
et al. 2000). Concomitantly, today, any potential malfunctioning in the social or political
spheres is increasingly reduced to the biological and the neurological. Think of the
attempts to explain the success of right wing rhetoric with the functioning of the amgydala
(see e.g. Connolly 2002). Even if one professes an interdependence of the biological and
the cultural, problems and symptoms seem to be only thinkable at the level of the biological (De Vos 2013a). Whilst, for example, Connolly explicitly claims an interdependency of nature and culture, and Davidson et al. point to environmental and social
influences, these authors converge around the position that the sole and conclusive ground
for explanation is the brain; the cultural is thus no longer thought of as being capable of
harbouring problems in its own terms. Strong biology, weak culture.
However, the central claim of neuroeducation is that, ultimately, biology is not that
strong, for it can be manipulated, or better yet still, to use the appropriate terminology, it
can be managed by an educated brain. This is where, surprisingly, Immordino-Yang and
Damasio conceive of emotions in a very technical, functional, and cold-rationalistic way.
When they describe how patients with brain damage fail to put into use their emotional
resources, they note that they have lost their ability to analyze events for their emotional
consequences and to tag memories of these events accordingly (Immordino-Yang and
Damasio 2007, p. 5). Living becomes an issue of managing life using emotional
strategies (Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007, p. 7). Here, the life-world is academified:
15
Of course, I am not calling for a return to a rational knowledge and disciplinary model within education.
My interest, once again, is to look for the conditions of (im)possibility within, in this particular case,
education.

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the lay person is viewed as a scholar, someone who tags events, providing them with
metadata and deals with them as if he was an entrepreneur. Hence, strong education/
culture/economy, weak nature/life-world? The urgent question, as such, is if neuroeducation in this way is not the ideal tool for the neo-liberalization and mercantilization of the
school. The fact that schools take the emotional on board can in part be explained by the
fact that single or dual working parents no longer have the requisite time to dedicate to the
emotional regulation of their children. But perhaps a more pertinent argument yet still, is
that it is precisely in this way that the emotional field can be put to use for the particular
surplus characteristic of the post-Fordist affect-economy and post-Fordist market: that is,
the direct commodification of social relations and subjectivity.

Conclusions
In concluding with a discussion of the role of the neuro-discourses in the realization of
surplus in late-capitalism, this brings us back to one of the central critiques against the
eager embracement of the neurosciences within education. That critique concerns the
following questions: what do we know more about now because of neuroscience? What do
neuroscientists teach us that we did not in fact already know, besides telling us where this
or that function is ostensibly located in the brain? In this paper, I have demonstrated that
the surplus, above all, hinges on redistributing positions. That is, neuro-education wants
everybody, from the teachers, parents, up to and including the child, to know about the
brain. And as we are turned into proto-neurologists ourselves, we can benefit from this
knowledge. Or, as Immordino-Yang and Damasio put it: The more people develop and
educate themselves, the more they refine their behavioral and cognitive options (Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007, p. 7). They literally speak of managing ones physiology, mind and life (Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007, p. 4 and 5) without taking into
account that neuroeducation culminates in neuro-education and its aforementioned paradoxes which I have documented in this paper (you become your own Von Munchausenlike educator, your own pedagogue).
But here, of course, our original question returns: is neurologisation not a mere continuation of psychologisation? For we have already identified within psychology the
interpellation of the modern subject to understand itself, others and the world as if he or she
were a psychologist. In neuroeducation, this partition of discursive positions is repeated:
everybody is called upon to become a student of neuroscience. Nevertheless, a peculiar
shift can be discerned in this changing of the guard. Ramaekers and Suissa rightfully argue
that more so than developmental psychological language, neuropsychological language
has the effect of establishing the idea that it is now possible to have real knowledge
(Ramaekers and Suissa 2012, p. 20). That is, it is argued that we have moved from the
contingencies of competing and conflicting psychological theories to the firm ontology of
neuroscience. And this, in contradistinction to the limits of classical psychology, allegedly
has the means to effect very tangible and material effects in education. For example, the
previously discussed Mood Management Program claims that its nine-steps programme
actually alters the number and strength of synapses: [i]t is exciting to realize that as
adolescents learn these steps, they are actually changing their brain (Langelier 2005,
pp. 56).
Here we have it again: strong culture/education is believed to be capable of changing
nature/biology. Consider how Douglas Chute, a neuropsychologist at Philadelphias Drexel
University, expresses his hopes in an interview:

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that eventually his research team can use nIRSa portable imaging form involving a
sensor clamped to the headto find out if conditioned changes in blood flow to
various brain regions can improve learning performance in ADHD children. In real
time, children would watch on computer screens how their blood flow changes as
they approach learning tasks differently (Murray 2000).
Somebody must be writing an app right now. But are we not here shifting from heavy
ontology to the virtual world of screens and avatars? At the least, the assumption that
visualizing your inner core would allow you to transcend your hardware is not
unproblematic, for it appears to posit an unquestioned virtual vantage point from where,
as if in some control room, a homunculus steers and corrects the workings of the brain by
means of some unexplained, if not magic, contrivances.
In this respect it seems that neuroscience potentially has a far greater effect than the old,
inevitably speculative psy-sciences. Just consider how Laurence Steinberg, on the one
hand, proclaims in a very balanced fashion that the relevance of brain science for policies
and laws concerning adolescents is far from straightforward, whilst, on the other hand,
claiming knowledge on brain development is important: because this is part of what it
means to be 15 (Steinberg 2009, p. 747). Is the problem here not precisely that neuroscience, through its claim to provide the meaning of being fifteen, actually risks taking
away from the adolescent the experience of the meaninglessness of being fifteen? That is,
at the risk of psychologising, is not puberty a privileged encounter with the fundamental
alienation of the modern subject that I hinted at in the introduction? In other words, being
fifteen in my estimation is not so much about the struggle involved with what it means to
be fifteen, but rather with the meaningless of being fifteen, or at the very least, it is about
struggling against all the meanings imputed by the vested authorities about being fifteen.
To take this a final and decisive step further, this might eventually be the ultimate lesson
of the booming neurosciences themselves. That is, if I as a 15 year old am told how my
brain functionsthis is the crux of neuroeducation as we have seen, everybody has to
knowis such a knowledge not in danger of producing the question: if what I feel, desire
or do is dictated by my brain, does this not leave me like the proverbial dog watching a sick
cow? In the end neuroscience itself reveals to us the fundamental alienation of the modern
subject, the ancient wound of meaninglessness. Neuroscience, potentially, eventually
presents us with a zero-level of subjectivity: neuroscience takes apart the psychological
entity we are imagined to be. Even if the radical conclusion, that there is nobody at home in
the brain (see e.g. Metzinger 2003), that there is no self (Churchland 2013) or no Ego
(Dennett 1991) is not always made explicit, the contemporary neurosciences are far from
reviving a fully fleshed out subject or a factual agency. But is this not the skandalon which
is above all obfuscated in the applied neurosciences themselves? In the end, the neurosciences, and especially the field of neuroeducation (structurally and inevitably?), succumb
to the temptation to know, finally, what it means to be fifteen, or more generally yet, what
it is to be human. And as everybody is interpellated to assume this knowledge, to look upon
oneself from the perspective of the neurosciences, this neurologisation brings into being a
new, although albeit this isnt necessarily made explicit, unified image of the human: the
homo academicus, the agent looking with sheer amazement at the colourful brain scans.
Consequently, what current critiques of neuroeducation risk overlooking is that the
(late)modern subject is the subject of the sciences: since modernity subjectivity cannot be
cut loose from the hegemonic discourses within Academia. Here we might have found the
ultimate couplet in our weak/strong series: strong neuroscience, weak subject (neurosciences implication in the end of the full and unified subject) and weak neuroscience, strong

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subject (the academic agent engendered by the neurological gaze being itself the blind
ground upon which that very gaze rests). In this way, merely debunking popular neuromyths and categorical mistakes in neureducation in an attempt to save neurology and put
forward a better, more pure form of neuroeducation (Howard-Jones 2008; Kraft 2012;
Schrag 2013), might fail to assess the foundational paradox underlying each science of the
human:16 it cannot but engender its own subject. A simple plea, then, to deneurologise
education so as to save psychology or pedagogy17 would fall into precisely the same trap.
Given that this paper has identified a fundamental mismatch between education and
neurology, between psychology and neurology, between nature and culture and, eventually, between subjectivity and science, the challenge might be to understand these gaps as
structural, and why not, as ontological and eventually material. This decentring of the
material might be precisely the very condition from which to rethink education.

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