Abstract:
Whatever else education is deemed to be, it is incontestable that it at least involves the transmission of knowledge. Considerable time and effort is thus devoted to this task in our schools. Teachers are trained to be sufficiently competent with a body of knowledge peculiar to a specialized subject area, so that they something to transmit, presumably of relevance, to the students they teach. To make this happen, educational leaders have devoted considerable energy to ensure that knowledge is transmitted effectively in schools, and this task minimally requires that those who teach are proficient also in them science which governs purportedly the best methods of epistemic transmission. In what follows we argue that it is ironic, if not paradoxical, that leadership in education has focused so much on the transmission of knowledge that teachers are left with little, if any understanding of what 'knowledge' actually is. The reason we believe this is such an important question for educational leaders, and indeed for us all, is that whatever account is given of knowledge, it is clear that knowledge is not value-free. In what follows we shall argue that the dominant forms of knowledge and the modality of technology which are essentially reconfigured applications of them, are perniciously value-laden. This being so, we will have no philosophical sense of whether the knowledge we transmit does a service or disservice to the deeper goals and purpose of education. Once the philosophical rationale which provides the purpose for teaching is lost, so is the purpose of learning. Without grounding education in a philosophical framework of purposive principles, education becomes exploited by vested interests as the primary tool by way of which society unreflectively reproduces itself. Education, that is to say, is co-operatized and managerially regulated as an ideology of consumerism within which all relationships are ultimately commoditized for utilitarian, not humanitarian purposes. In the final analysis we remain in ignorance of whether what is taught in our schools is genuinely worth knowing. Once this occurs, we lose sight of the truth that what we teach has been reduced to a form of knowledge which, by its very nature, is fundamentally depersonalizing, disconnecting, self-fragmenting and alienating, and perhaps not worth teaching at all.