Are we rational beings with emotions, or emotional beings who rationalize?

I think mostly the latter: First, we develop a gut commitment to an idea, and then we come up with "reasons" to back it up.

In schools, there's the split over whether it's more important for kids to follow rules or explore. For reading, there's phonics versus whole language. In math, traditional algorithms v. come up with your own approach.    

Yesterday's Washington Post, has a story about parents in Virginia up in arms because their kids are learning math through investigation, rather than rules.
The kids' book series Junie B. Jones is enormously popular but also very controversial--the little girl is constantly breaking rules of all sorts, and she doesn't speak correct English: like real girls her age, she gets a lot of irregular past tenses wrong--"I runned" for example. (Ironically, many of her mistakes involve following the general rules of English instead of breaking them for irregular verbs the way grownups learn to do.) Many people think it's plain wrong to present a young reader with language or behavior that's incorrect, no matter how engaging and genuine.

People in both camps think of themselves as simply wanting their kids to grow up skilled in math and language, but nobody's very receptive to research "proof" when it goes against the grain. So we have the same divisions today that we had decades ago. Emotions still rule.