Education and Ignorance: Between the Noun of Knowledge and the Verb of Thinking
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Education and Ignorance: Between the Noun of Knowledge and the Verb of Thinking Tomasz Szkudlarek1 · Piotr Zamojski1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage (Prometheus 26 (4): 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of possession of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher’s ignorance conditions the student’s appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger’s discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion. Keywords Ignorance · Knowledge-based society · Thinking · Education
Preliminary Remarks The connection between ignorance and education, traditionally construed in the framework of the Enlightenment crusade against ignorance, has been invigorated in recent years by numerous references to Jacques Rancière’s provocative book where teacher’s ignorance is seen as a condition of emancipatory education, and where inequalities between students’ intellectual capacities should be ignored rather than turned into a target of pedagogical * Tomasz Szkudlarek [email protected] Piotr Zamojski [email protected] 1
University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk, Poland
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T. Szkudlarek, P. Zamojski
intervention. According to Rancière (1991), the teacher’s ignorance conditions the student’s appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? We will refer to this Rancièrean position later in the paper. However, there is one more context in which ignorance has been discussed and which we want to emphasize. Originally, it appeared in the debates on knowledge economy that highly influenced the tone of educational debates and the blueprints of education policies in recent decades. In that particular iteration, knowledge is seen as capital, and restrictions in the access to knowledge, which one may call the production of ignorance, like patent policies or the enforcement of intellectual property
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