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Neuropragmatism takes seriously Dewey's admonition that to solve the problems of philosophy we have to put the cortex in the brain, the brain in the nervous system, the nervous system in the organism, and the organism in nature.¹ Further, we have to treat these items not as marbles in a box but as events in a historical process. This chapter is not going to solve all the problems of education. It does, however, present an approach to education which incorporates neuroscience and anthropology and presents a challenge to less holistic approaches by following Dewey's advice to contextualize. We proceed by arguing that neuroscience does have a role to play in educational theory when we set aside scientism and follow pragmatism's reconstruction of the role of science in society. We then offer an illustration of how neuroscience can be useful in thinking about education by challenging the approach to education implicit in Daniel Kahneman's recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow.² From there we move to a more holistic approach which employs anthropology and neuroscience to ground an apprenticeship model of education. We conclude with a discussion of some general implications of our apprenticeship model.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137376077_9

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