In an era where the pace of social change is overwhelming, how could education be other than at its heart? Yet, as a discipline devoted to meaning, knowledge, and understanding, how else could it be other than in a state of crisis?

The words of the American columnist, Jane Bryant Quinn, come to mind: ''If you think you know what's going on, you haven't got a clue about what's going on.'' And if this kind of upheaval and confusion increasingly character-ises the late-modern world, then the question of how we educate our children to cope with, prosper in, or - perhaps - even change this world is the most difficult question imaginable.

Last night, I spoke at a seminar organised by West Lothian Council, whose anodyne title - Raising Standards by Improving the Quality of Teaching and Learning - would give no clue as to the importance of the event. Yet as its papers show, there is an enormous and fundamental international debate about the very basics of the learning process - from the role of the school in the community, right down to the level of synapse firings and cortex activity in young brains.

Such high-level considerations only become useful if they can provide some insight into the daily practicalities of teaching Scotland's children - class sizes, Higher Still, parental involvement, increased regimes of testing and quality assessment. It must also show how a deeper understanding of learning processes can help our children's educators to cope with this new, risk-laden, globalised world.

When we look at the science - cognitive, neurological, psychological - which backs up specific recommendations to teachers in these papers, we immediately face a very contemporary confusion. For if any area of science has been opened up to public contestation and debate these days, it's the science of the mind.

David Perkins, co-director of the prestigious Project Zero at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, speaks about ''teaching for understanding''. Kids can ''recite dates or push numbers around, but they do not see how it all fits together''. Perkins, an artificial intelligence expert, cites the insights of cognitive science - which shows, he claims, that ''the development of understanding depends on students' active engagement in solving problems that go beyond the information given, conducting inquiries''.

For example, a child may ''know'' Newtonian physics, and be able to apply the equations to textbook problems. But you display ''understanding'' when you can apply this knowledge to everyday life. Why do rugby prop forwards need to be so big? So that their inertia can carry them forward to make their tackles. You also really understand Newtonian physics when you can make predictions from it.

Perkins suggests a teaching framework that keeps the emphasis on learners ''thinking beyond what they already know'', exercising their cognitive capacities to the fullest. You teach about the Boston Tea Party, suggests the Harvardian scholar, rather than colonial tax policies, because the Boston Tea Party manages to dramatise these issues. You prescribe a ''goal'' for that study - why is the Boston Tea Party like or unlike other protests? What does being deprived of civil rights do to your state of mind?

The study is assessed in an ''ongoing'' way, judged according to criteria that the teacher and pupil have constructed between them, and not graded at the end of the course. Feedback and reflection, on a regular basis, is also deemed essential.

This is an almost Utopian vision of education - the schoolroom, in the words of one New York educator, becomes ''a workshop, a studio, a gallery, a theatre, a study, a laboratory, a field research site, a newsroom''. Its teachers are ''more like coaches, mentors, wise advisers, and guides'' than mere ''information transmitters or gatekeepers''.

There is, it must be said, a presumption of unlimited resources here. Wouldn't this process require a very low pupil-teacher ratio, so that textbook comprehension

and its ''performance for understanding'' could proceed at a reasonably intensive pace for all pupils? Yet this factor is

forgotten, in a wave of general neuro-

scientific enthusiasm. The child's brain that emerges from this conference is an organ whose potential for cognition is only limited by the ingenuity of the teaching method, as it becomes ever-more ''brain-centred'' and tailored to the mind-mapping of the cognitive scientists.

But it doesn't take the greatest amount of lay science reading to discover other paradigms of the mind that could orient education in an entirely different way. The evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker, is contemptuous of neuroscience's confidence that it can unleash human potential: ''Old ideas about child development - like children need love - are getting trans-lated into neurologese. Read to your children because it's good for their neurons.''

Pinker is much more realist about the inbuilt limitations of the human mind - not least because of the way that evolution has shaped our emotional equipment. The recalcitrance and darkness that a Darwinian view of human emotion highlights (gender difference, group loyalty, status instincts) is very much at odds with the ''balanced'' (or at least balance-able) self implicit in a lot of these papers.

The New Darwinian thought is a powerful and influential modern paradigm.

And one can imagine an entirely different educational system being built on its findings: one which, for example, found mixed-sex education pointless and destructive; which accepted that biological inequalities in intellectual ability were both inevitable and irremediable; and which was relaxed about hierarchical school structures, as long as this ''natural'' tendency could be ameliorated by counter-measures.

You could, of course, invoke a whole set of other psychological paradigms - Francisco Varela's embodied, ''holistic'' view of consciousness, Roger Penrose on how selfhood cannot be understood by computation - to justify how education might work on the human mind. But the main point is simple: even though one could not doubt the integ-rity of the scientist-educators in this Lothian seminar, their work cannot help being taken up as weapons and cudgels in Scottish debates over education.

And the fact it legitimates a tradition of Scottish ''child-centred'', ''social'' learning - which resists the curriculum-heavy, test-laden prescriptions of the past two decades of British government - is, for me, altogether too convenient a scientific fit.

This is, I'm afraid, one of the riskier elements of the risk society for educators: that an increasingly well-educated class of parents, surrounded by a fully-stocked sea of information, can quickly get to the expert knowledges brandished by those who educate their children. And, via columns like this, perused as they wait for their beloved to hammer out of the school gates, compare and contrast the alternatives. If we're in an age of confusion, then we should at least be confused about the right things.

Particularly when it comes to our children's education.