Mathematics as the Metaphysics of Education: A Misplaced Foundation

The notion of learnings, which has assumed a currency in educational discourse over the last decade, appears to be based in a scientific materialist world-view. By transforming processes of learning into material entities in this semantic turn, it is possible to advance a discourse about the results of schooling without considering what the processes of learning and educating are. The transfer of learning to entities serves the current ideologies of quantification and the language of mathematics in education. By using Alfred North Whitehead's notion of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, this paper reviews how the notions of "learnings" and the quantification of education are a function of high-level abstractions that do not reflect the immediacies of learning.