How Low Can You Go?

In previous blog posts I’ve talked about the ways in which collecting information is confused with gaining knowledge. Conflation of collecting information and acquiring knowledge is baked into the educational system in the U.S. and many other countries.

Learners who are seeking a satisfying pursuit of knowing as justified true belief will have to be prepared to swim against the tide.

To be sure, professional educators theoretically endorse “critical thinking,” but curricula are stacked against it. There is no room for reflection and critique and analysis because classes are packed with “content” and there is never enough time to “cover” it all. Any educator will tell you that “so much to cover—so little time” is the dominant paradigm that governs decision-making on every level from state curriculum committees to individual teachers trying to squeeze the curriculum into real classrooms.

“Throughout the modern-industrial era of print, learning has been based on curriculum subjects organised as bodies of content which are in turn based on work done in the disciplines (history, mathematics, natural science and so on). The primary object of learning was the content of subjects.”

Lankshear et al.

The fuzzy, non-committal words “content” and “material” are often a give-away that information is being dispensed and that learning involves, not the creation of knowledge within each learner, but the mere ability to remember what was dispensed.

Information retrieval is an exceedingly low bar for learning, but it is where much of the educational establishment sets the bar.

This emphasis on “content” is not a recent development. In the classic (1947) booklet, The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers says:

“Is it not the great defect of our education today. . . that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.”

A more modern (2013) critique is offered by Sir Ken Robinson:

(starts at 3:15; go to 7:40)

Without a doubt these defective educational systems have left their mark on would-be learners. My goal is to help you to achieve clarity about how you can rise above the system.

 “The knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness, and it gets in the way of good knowing.” 

Esther Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

 The simplistic view of knowledge-as-information is damaging in that it fails to cultivate our inborn curiosity and passion to know. This hunger is intrinsic to our humanity and to our desire to grow as individuals. Over time, a starvation diet of boring facts with little relation to our lives takes a toll and many people become agnostic about the possibility of personal transformation through learning.

“Good knowing” is a clear epistemology that motivates us with hope that we needn’t be stuck forever in our current state.

The first epistemic action step is to disentangle information from the process of thinking that produced the information. This confusion of products with process is buried deep in educational systems. Information (fact) is vital. You can’t reason without reasoning about something solid. But facts are the products of someone else’s thinking. Taking facts as mere givens to be reproduced will get you no closer to mastery of the thinking process that produced the facts.

Second, you must cultivate a disposition that asks questions. How do we know the evidence for this fact is reliable? What process of reasoning produced this fact? What other ideas need to be connected to explain how it would work? What are the implications and consequences of this idea? Questioning assumes interest and engagement on the part of the learner. Third, interest and engagement are based on a presumption that this learning will have value and that it can be put into practice in some way. Search for ways to put it into practice if your instructional system doesn’t expect you to practice it.

Here’s a quick comparison of defective knowing (first phrase) vs. knowing as justified true belief (second phrase) from two different philosophers:

• Gilbert Ryle: “know that” vs. “know how”

• Jerome Bruner: “learning about” vs. “learning to be”

“[Philosopher Gilbert Ryle] distinguishes ‘know that’ from ‘know how.’ Learning about involves the accumulation of ‘know that.’. . . Learning about does not, however, produce the ability to put ‘know that’ into use. This, Ryle argues, calls for ‘know how.’ And ‘know how’ does not come through accumulating information.”

Jerome Bruner captures the essence of standard educational practice as “learning about.” We “learn about” from news sound bites and Google searches as well as through textbooks and teachers. This kind of “learning” is typically shallow and temporary. Bruner counsels that we ought to “learn to be.” This indicates that we are changed because of the learning. Conceptual change in the brain is the essence of learning. This is real learning—deep and durable.

The more you can put the ideas you are learning into practice, the more value you will see in them and the more you will cement them through connecting them to other powerful ideas. Ideally every course you take, whether history, mathematics, science, or literature, is an opportunity to try on the thinking processes of each of those subjects (disciplines). Through a semester or two of trying on the thinking of one of these disciplines, you may find that it fits extraordinarily well. You may find you were made for it!

Real learning transforms the learner. In contrast, George MacDonald in his novel, Sir Gibbie, introduces us to a pretentious and difficult man, Thomas Galbraith, who is a lawyer and thus educated. However MacDonald observes about Galbraith:

“To know him was almost to disbelieve in the good of what is generally called education. . . . What truth he held himself, he held as a sack holds corn—not even as a worm holds earth.”

We can learn from this pithy analogy. Corn is easily lost from a sack through any small tear! Earthworms at least have earth pass through them and they process it, but it doesn’t stick around.

Learning should be a process of knowledge assimilation, an active process of digesting and appropriating truth much as our bodies appropriate nutrients from our food. “You are what you eat” parallels “you become what you ponder and grapple with.”

Esther Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing, (2014), p. 2

Lankshear, C et al. “Information, Knowledge and Learning: Some Issues Facing Epistemology and Education in a Digital Age,” J. of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 34, No. 1, (2000), p. 34.

Ryle and Bruner comparison in: Brown and Duguid, The Social Life of Information (2002), 120-121.

George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie, David Jack Translation, (2018), pp. 128-129.