Epistemology is a personal thing (I’m going to leave numbers alone here), but with the current Hirsch-fuelled push for knowledge in school curriculums/curricula, how one perceives knowledge is, and must be, important. I’m of the opinion that we don’t just teach knowledge to children – a posteriori, we develop their abilities to create knowledge in future known and unknown situations, a priori. I don’t just want explicit knowledge taught to them, I want them to develop tacit knowledge. We need children to develop motivation and curiosity into finding or creating, through reasoning, new knowledge of all kinds.  Because once their teacher has gone, we need them to be good at creating or sourcing knowledge and knowing that it is knowledge and not buzzfeed bunkum.

Yet, I’m not convinced we have really dug into our ideas about knowledge and its longevity. If children need some knowledge only for a GCSE assessment and never ever again then the experience of learning that knowledge needs to confer upon them some kind of transoposable habitus type advantage else what is the point of learning it? Habitus, is a Bourdesian term:

“…acquired, socially constituted dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.13)

and it does have limitations as it is not empirical evidence (it featured in the somewhat criticised EEF’s study on setting). Yet there are many times when we want to know about non-empirical knowledge – powerful knowledge even. The habits and tacit knowledge that people develop through being a part of society are still seen as important even if we reject Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.

Is extraneous knowledge actually part of successful habitus of powerful knowledge? Do we seek to locate it and thus it drives an innate curiosity which develops our ability to develop tacit knowledge? Knowledge of the powerful does seem to be the ability to challenge and locate the knowledge that is being presented as well as knowledge which others can’t easily seen as readily powerful (ballet, plays, etc.)  – something Bernstein has inspired quite a bit of work around. I once read Don Quixote simply to understand an intertextual reference in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Should we all understand when someone is tilting at windmills? Or are we reinforcing the cultural elitism of this sort of ‘knowledge of the powerful’ by insisting on this?

One of the things I wrote about in my book was rapid knowledge acquisition and disposal. Disposable knowledge I called it. If you want to do something quite obscure in Office Word or Excel, just as a once off, with no need to understand how it works, you don’t go on a long in-depth course on Office. You simply google and youtube the knowledge, find some direct instruction, apply it, and then forget it. If you need to know it again, you’ll google it again, get the direct instruction and achieve the outcome again. You use google as your long term repository of such specific knowledge and the direct instruction needed to access it for your needs. That to me is a really key skill for the modern world. It’s still based around knowledge, but it rejects rote learning, retention and the rest for some types of knowledge. It also suggests that direct instruction could be used in the wrong way as well as the right way. It really depends on why I need the knowledge. If I need the knowledge on a regular basis or I need to understand why and how the knowledge interacts with other knowledge then that is quite different. This is where key knowledge comes in – vocabulary, mathematical reasoning, foundational concepts and so forth.

I’ve also got issue with the verisimilitude of knowledge, to use one of my favourite Sherlockian words. That’s the truthfulness of the knowledge. In a post truth world, these are good questions to ask. I learn facts, but when I go to use them again later in life I have to check my understanding because the chances are that what I thought were ‘facts’ have shifted. A simple example would be ‘dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid.’ I would have to check the knowledge behind my fact every time I needed to use that as the ‘truthfulness’ of that ‘fact’ habitually shifts.

Facts are also contextual. Ask yourself: what were the years of WWII? At one level, you’ll say 1939-1945. However, a historian would say – ah, well, that’s a very European perspective. So facts change depending on the level or perspective of which you are studying them and we aren’t really debating that transition of knowledge from one level to another enough. It suggests we need to really think more about curriculums/curricula for KS3, 4 and 5 and how they connect.

I note the MP David Lammy’s outrage at the lack of black students in Oxbridge. Let’s be honest, it is not the knowledge they learn for the GCSEs and A Levels that are getting white, privileged and privately educated children into Oxbridge. There are many state educated children from a whole range of backgrounds that apply, don’t get in and yet have the same grades. The successful applicants must be learning some kind of knowledge not taught as part of the GCSE and A level curriculum. Even the schools with the strongest behaviourist approaches are not producing the knowledge being looked for here. What is that knowledge? How is it perceived by the interviewing tutors? I rather think it is more tacit knowledge than the explicit knowledge of the GCSE and A level assessments. Is it the subjectivity of the selection process or is it the poor design of curriculum in schools? Certainly others think the problem lies with schools not Oxbridge. 

One modern knowledge or skill, explicit or tacit, I am currently writing about as part of research, is that the modern student arrives with a transposable habitus of resolving problems through electronic social and work networking through multiple layers of privacy. If we meet a problem the first thing we do is employ our networks and communities to research and resolve the issue with the privacy setting adjusted depending on the type of problem to ensure we can get the level of criticality required. Even the highest cabinet ministers and MPs have WhatsApp groups to help them collaborate around problems like this. Reese-Mogg directly influences the Conservative party through his powerful European WhatsApp group. Collaboration is in the PISA test. Should we be teaching them knowledge about how to develop physical and electronic social networks to resolve problems? To understand how privacy can change the type of information being constructed? Is social interaction knowledge another domain that we need to develop in young people? And I mean physical social interaction not just electronic!

We also need to revisit the concept of ‘skill’ to reconcile the many contrary ideas currently manifesting around this area. We can teach the knowledge of grammar over and over, but it is not delivering quality composition. Originality, curiosity driven by extraneous knowledge, non-empirical knowledge, reader response and so forth are all shadowy areas in the notion of skill and the knowledge behind skill. When I read about the education systems we are supposed to be emulating, such as Singapore, then they all seem to be moving towards a model of developing skills and other non-empirical aims or virtues such as resilience or, something attracting funding in the UK, ‘character’, through a beefed up arts and outdoors curriculum with a reduction on the pedagogies of rote learning – we seem to be swapping curriculums (I’m going Amercian with this term I think) and pedagogies with those we seek to emulate.

What does this mean for teachers? It means before we head down the labelled ‘knowledge rich’  path that is currently vogue with some (and be warned, read: learning pyramids, learning styles, growth mindset, brain gym and every other clickbaitish educoncept that people cite repeatedly for a short period of time) there is a need to investigate the mapping (as Sue Cowley argues) and teaching of knowledge (as Debra Kidd explores) and the way knowledge interacts with the development of skill so that we can bring better criticality to the debate behind teaching knowledge in order to ensure that it is used effectively and with longevity. It is good to see the debate is moving, but there is still a need to develop some of the answers.