We live immersed in a kind of cognitive egocentrism that makes us believe we are the architects of the untamed. We have convinced ourselves that the universe is a kind of soft clay waiting for the approval of our synapses in order to acquire meaning. And yet, all it takes is a closer look to sense the deception: no, no, reality is not constructed; it is discovered. However much the prevailing dogma insists on dressing the learner in the hard hat of a knowledge worker, the truth is far more modest, or perhaps much more imposing.
The invented neighborhood and the imposed ground
To understand the muddle, it is worth remembering that human beings inhabit a double reality that surrounds them simultaneously. On the one hand, we move within social reality, that fabric elaborated and built through human interactions. This realm is indeed modifiable: it changes through daily contact, convention, and agreement, allowing the individual some margin of maneuver to transform it.
On the other hand, surrounding everything, nature emerges. It is the great imposture for radical constructivism, because it was there when we were born and will remain exactly there when we are gone. It is an entity that inevitably extends beyond the individual. While the social neighborhood can be renegotiated, nature imposes itself. And in two paragraphs we will speak of the destruction of nature caused by the narcissistic behavior of the human creature.
But let us talk about learning: the observer who labels, but does not create
Before nature, the learner’s task is not that of a creator, but that of an explorer. What the subject does is learn, or apprehend, reality as it is. We can, of course, make a tremendous cognitive effort to categorize it; we can give sophisticated names to things, classify them into conceptual folders, and archive the cosmos in academic theories. But let us not fool ourselves: that altered reality, or simply named reality, continues to exist beyond the individual.
The individual can only observe it and discover it. The act of learning is based, above all, on that discovery. We can alter the physical environment, of course, often through abusive behaviors that destroy it, but destroying a forest is not the same as having invented photosynthesis. To modify is not to construct.
Constructivism? An interior move
So, what exactly are we doing when we believe we are “constructing” knowledge? The answer brings us back to the mirror. Constructivism has an insurmountable biological and conceptual limit: it never reaches beyond the way the brain or mind organizes information within itself.
All that pompous architecture of learning is nothing more than an internal ordering system, a storage method designed so that our mental schemas do not collapse before the immensity of the outside world.
Confusing the organization of data inside our skull with the construction of external reality is like believing that the librarian wrote all the books on the shelves simply by virtue of having arranged them in alphabetical order.
In other words, when someone tells me that knowledge is constructed, I understand it more as a slogan than as a statement. Ultimately:
- Reality is not constructed, but discovered.
- In the social dimension, that discovery allows us to modify the board through interaction.
- Before nature, all that remains to us is observation.
- And constructivism is not an ontology; it is mental interior design.
The world was already fully furnished when we arrived, so our only task is to learn to apprehend it — and to switch on the light so we do not stumble over the corners.