Knowledge matters
Friday, October 2, 2009
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The last sentence of the blog post “Knowledge Matters” on the Everyday Sociology Blog reads, “Do you think there is an objective way to decide what knowledge matters [emphasis author]?”
Yes, there probably is, but the system of determining what matters would have to be malleable, and be subject to change (as the author suggests American curricula have during the last half of the 20th century).
First, you would need a clear goal for education. Is it to socialize children so they are better able to interact with others? Is it to learn skills and knowledge needed to get a job? Is it to become wise? To learn and abide by the rules of society? Or a combination of these and other objectives?
Being as literal as possible, the point of education is for the student to achieve a set of different goals. So you would have to pick the goals. Already we’ve gotten ourselves knee-deep in something, because we went from trying to outline a single goal to outlining many goals. Fair enough. Which goals are the most important? Well, that would depend on many different factors, such as where you lived, who you interacted with, and where you may reasonably find yourself living throughout the course of your life. So now we’ve got many goals, and those goals are influenced by many factors. So who picks the goals, anyway, and which factors should be considered in deciding the curriculum and which should be ignored? Who gets to make that decision? Is it the parents, or the trusted professionals? What kinds of qualifications should these professionals reasonably expect to have met before they make such decisions? How about the parents?
So we have many goals, many factors, and no judge to sort anything out. Reasonable it would be to expect the collective society to make the call and act as judge, but reasonable creatures we are not. Humans (collectively or individually) often make decisions based off of poor information or bias, such as those parents who were fervent in their opposition to having their children be addressed (live via telecast) by President Obama. What information were they using to determine that whatever would be in the speech would be akin to socialist indoctrination? You would think to only use deduction (nationwide, highly monitored public speech = bad time to deliver a calculated message touting the benefits of an anti-capitalist society) to understand that whatever was in the speech itself would probably be benign. But these parents used what Stephen Colbert likes to call their “gut” to make the decision for them.
So it is for a comprehensive outline determining what education “matters” and what doesn’t. We want all of our kids to be Ivy League-ers. Why? So they can land a high-paying job. Why? So they can have financial security. Why? Because, in our gut, today’s American culture equates monetary wealth with happiness. So I have to change my original response: No, there’s probably no objective way to decide what knowledge “matters,” because the system of determining what matters and what doesn’t is flawed.
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