Dictionary of British Education
Knowledge is often contrasted with skills, and with attitudes and values, but this is sometimes unhelpful because knowledge overlaps with both those categories. Another distinction is between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, the former being more closely connected with skills. A related issue is how human beings acquire knowledge. This was Piaget’s major interest and formed the basis of his work on stages of development. The conventional pre-Enlightenment view of knowledge was that all knowledge was created by God and only discovered by human beings through the use of their reason. Traces of that view survive in some popular attitudes to education which tend to regard knowledge as a commodity to be collected by a pupil.
Post-Reformation science encouraged a move away from a unified view of knowledge to a sub-division of knowledge into science, theology, law, and so on.
In the twentieth century the educational argument about knowledge frequently centred on the relation between the structure of knowledge and the content of the curriculum, particularly the subjects. In the USA, Phenix conducted influential work on ‘realms of meaning’; in the UK, Hirst’s ‘seven forms of knowledge’ approach was much discussed. The sociology of knowledge is concerned with the idea that the perception of reality is filtered through cultural constraints which differ from one society to another; and also that within any society an individual’s view of knowledge and reality is related to his/her own social position. These ideas have generated a good deal of productive criticism, but they can also lead to an extreme form of relativism—the idea that one view of reality is as good as any other. In education, particularly in studies of the curriculum, the danger exists of moving from the recognition of class-based tastes and prejudices to statements that the whole of school knowledge is merely ‘bourgeois’. Some Marxist writers such as Gramsci, however, saw that the future of education had to be concerned with making available to everyone those kinds of essential knowledge which had been part of elite education in the past. (See also academic, culture, disciplines, encyclopaedism, essentialism)
This is the complete article, containing 346 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Knowledge
