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Myths about Knowledge |
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Myths about Knowledge |
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Contents TEACHER
THINKING EDUCATION
MYTHS
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"We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge." ~Rutherford D. Roger The word knowledge is central to education. People often assume that everyone "means" the same thing when they use the word. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Beliefs about the nature of knowledge—about what it is, where it comes from, and how people acquire it—abound. Those beliefs are fundamental to the way education works. Therefore, we must question what curriculum designers, teachers, parents, or students really mean when they use the word knowledge. John
Dewey (1) suggested the word knowledge
has several meanings. First, it is the result of one individual’s process of
inquiry. Assuming the inquiry has been competent and sufficient, the
conclusion—the knowledge—is trustworthy. For example, archaeological evidence
shows that early man had a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and its relation
to weather. The first human who noticed that connection "created" that
knowledge. A
second meaning of knowledge—one that
often supersedes the first—arises when a significant number of individual
inquiries result in the same conclusion. People generally accept such a conclusion
as more
significant—more “true” than the inquiry of a single person. This Knowledge (with a capital K) takes on a life of its own outside of the
individual processes of inquiry that generated it. From there, it is a small step
to perceiving this Knowledge as true
in some absolute way—apart from the minds that conceived it. In this view of Knowledge, the cognitive processes—the inquiries—that created the Knowledge are ignored. Rather than viewing Knowledge as a total package—inquiry plus the products of that inquiry—the products become answers devoid of questions and removed from the contexts in which they were developed. They become objective “truth.” Objectivist
Beliefs About Knowledge This “objective” truth
is what many educators believe they must transmit to students. Objective literally means “apart from the human mind.” Newton’s Laws of
Motion and other “laws” of nature, Euclidean Geometry, the rules of grammar,
and other items in the content standards identified by many states or in
the "essential knowledge" lists identified by some theorists, are Knowledge
in this sense. These "knowledge objects" are taught—or more
accurately, transmitted—with little concern for where they came from and why.
What effect does this deliberate separation of product from process have on
teaching? In
The Courage to Teach, educator Parker
Palmer identifies four elements of what he calls the “objectivist myth of
knowing”:
“Objects
of knowledge…reside ‘out there’ somewhere, pristine in physical or
conceptual space, as described by the ‘facts’ in a given field.” “Experts
[teachers] are people trained to know these objects in their pristine form without
allowing their own subjectivity to slop over onto the purity of the objects
themselves.” Amateurs
[students] are those who do not presently possess these objects. They must depend
on experts for objective or pure knowledge of the pristine objects. Baffles
allow objective knowledge to flow downstream while preventing the subjectivity of
the amateurs to flow back up—possibly contaminating the intellectual purity of
the objects. (2) Notice the metaphors contained within this view.
In the school context, the experts decide which of these Knowledge
objects the amateurs should possess. They then dispense the chosen objects whether or not the amateur wants them. The
baffles in Palmer’s model represent
the efforts of objectivists to keep the knowledge free from subjectivity. Students
are not allowed to probe knowledge for weaknesses lest they somehow damage it.
They are rarely permitted to engage in the same process of inquiry that yielded
the knowledge in the first place. When this is
permitted, as for example, in a science “experiment,” the expert carefully
guides the amateurs so that they follow closely in the steps of the master. “All
visitors must stay on the path.” Objectivist
educators consciously or unconsciously accept the definition of objective
as “apart from the human mind.” There are those who reject the argument that
the categories by which we conceptualize the world and our experience are products of the mind. For them, the categories actually exist in nature,
waiting for the perfect human mind to discover them. Objectivists work toward the
attainment of this perfect mind that will eventually learn to abstract the true
essence of nature as it exists “out there.” Many
teachers have been caught up in the objectivist myth. They have for so long
experienced Knowledge as something given to them
by their teachers that they assume they must now give to their students in the same way. The adherence of those teachers to the
objectivist myth is mindless
in the sense that it is unexamined. According to Palmer, “In
the objectivist myth, truth flows from the top down, from experts who are
qualified to know truth…to amateurs who are qualified only to receive truth. In
this myth, truth is a set of propositions about objects; education is a system for
delivering those propositions to students; and an educated person is one who can
remember and repeat the experts’ propositions. The image is hierarchical,
linear, and compulsive-hygienic, as if truth came down an antiseptic conveyor belt
to be deposited as pure product at the end. “There
are only two problems with this myth: it falsely portrays how we know, and it has
profoundly deformed the way we educate.”(3) Palmer
points out that although many classrooms maintain this image of teacher, students,
and subject as separate entities, “…I know of no field—from astronomy to
literature to political science to theology—where the continuing quest to know
truth even vaguely resembles this mythical objectivism.”
If you would like to read more on traditional beliefs about the role of teaching, you may wish to order Teaching in Mind: How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education. This discussion is continued in Chapter 10. References 1 Dewey, J. (1939). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt Rhinehart & Winston, 8. (Return to article) 2 Palmer, P. (1998). The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 100-101. The diagram is adapted from Palmer's book with his permission. (Return to article) 3 Ibid, p 101.
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Bits of Knowledge are categorized as objects.
