89 WCD as a (W(H)olistic Response 2 2.1 REDUCTIONISM IN EDUCATION The Western school and education system has become a leading force in the globalised world of the 21st century. Western education is respected for the good results it produces, noting that these are primarily technical, cognitively defined results. Indeed, its central focus is on measurable outcomes, and its core belief is that these outcomes can be controlled via proper insight into the process and management of its components (Bulterman & de Muynck, 2014). Given all this, the Western school system and education breathe the atmosphere of Western culture more generally. Images of school classes are often reminiscent of the factory environment that was the fruit of the Industrial Revolution, with students being tightly lined up as if the intention was to assign them an economically defined added value on the assembly line. ‘It’s not values anymore, but value that counts’, criticised Geurts (2012), who perceived commercialisation and technologisation as dynamics that ‘pushed the schools towards the factory’. In fact, what is considered valuable displays the traits of Western rationalism (Zhao-hua, 2006). Rationalism is a philosophical movement that places reason at its centre as the source of certain knowledge, ignoring revelation, tradition and experience as other sources of knowledge. In Western culture in particular, this approach has gradually gained ground. The driving forces behind this development were medieval scholasticism, the Cartesian revolution immediately following the Middle Ages and the interweaving of rationalism and empiricism during the 18th century Enlightenment. Scholasticism, wherein answers to metaphysical questions were sought through scientific analysis of sources, would become decisive for the Western school system and the associated subject classification, while the Cartesian revolution introduced an inevitable connection between rationalism, individualism (‘Cogito ergo sum’) and dualism (separation between thought and extension). The Enlightenment connected this to empirical science through an adage that became definitional for European and North American thinking: ‘Trust only your own eyes and reason’. Moreover, what the Western school and education system has become big on—in short—is analysis (Mazzocchi, 2006). Analysis is the decomposition of objects into their constituent elements to understand and put them into words. For example, medieval scholastics had the ambition of arriving at scientific proof of the existence of God through argumentative dissection (e.g. Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God). René Descartes worked on the critical dissection of certain knowledge, for which he closely applied his methodical doubt. Modern logical and empirical science has long been based on deductive
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