86. I'VE TOLD YOU BEFORE - On the Potential Deception of Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge, as any philosopher would tell you, is a tricky thing to pin down. For teachers there is the further complication of knowledge transfer. Given the assumption - perhaps wrong - that we do actually hold some knowledge that is worth sharing with our students, what is the best way to ensure that they can come to know this knowledge too?
Plato, through Socrates, offers one approach. Admit we know nothing and focus instead on asking the right sort of questions which might bring a state of shared ignorance - both our students' and our own - into a new state of shared understanding. Knowledge on this conception is something "out there" to be discovered and uncovered from our current muddled thinking and mistake. In the Theateatus, Socrates describes himself as a "midwife", there to facilitate the birth of truths from others but not necessarily pregnant with truth himself. Knowledge discovery is collaborative. Not necessarily a transfer, but a shared project facilitated, not dominated, by the teacher.
A different approach is that of "chalk and talk". A teacher stands in front of the class and lectures at them, perhaps accompanied by key ideas scribbled down on the once black, now usually white, board or PowerPoint presentation. Students listen, perhaps making their own notes, and the knowledge - if, indeed, that is what the shared information is considered to be - is literally transferred from one location - the mind of their teacher - into another - the mind of the student. The classic metaphor is of water being poured into a receptacle: the teacher the pourer, the student the jug. Our words to their ears.
Both approaches have their critics. Much of the criticism is the same. How do we guarantee that the students actually gain knowledge in this way? Two students may hear the same lecture, but do both students receive the information in exactly the same way? Likely not. But at the same time, what reason is there to assume that Socratic questioning will lead to the "right" answers (if "right" answer there be)? And if the outcome is to be inevitable, then isn't it just a long way to get there full of lots of wasted time? Why not just tell the students the information directly? The Socratic Q&A also holds the problem, like one of Plato's dialogues, of often being a transformative experience for only a handful of named characters. While, for sure, a few individuals directly interrogated may well give birth to one of Socrates' "truths" as a result of such a session, what of the passive onlookers who receive no such personal attention? How many follow a line of logic only up to a point before stepping off the train and letting it carry on to its destination without them?
I became fascinated in my early years as a classroom teacher that a classroom of students would become easily bored and restless if I stood at the front and lectured at them, yet would watch rapt and attentive if those same exact words came not from me, but from a Youtube video played to them of some other teacher, in some other school. Likewise, a visitor who came and asked them Socratic questions - from a trainee teacher to a special guest philosopher - would be remembered fondly in end of year student feedback whereas our own interactive discussions and their revelations would merely become part of the furniture - just a normal day in the philosophy classroom. Meanwhile, my own visits to other schools, as guest lecturer or to run a seminar, would be met with similar enthusiasm by students there, and comments from their teachers that their classes didn't seem as receptive to the same techniques when it was coming from them?
These experiences made me realise that there were further important considerations to be given when considering the transfer of knowledge: that being the relationship between the original knower and the person(s) with whom they wish to share, or mutually discover, that knowledge. Consider the well known example of the parental advice we all ignored only to hear again, coming from the mouth of someone else, and happily take on board. It wasn't necessarily that we didn't like our parents, or that we didn't trust our parents' good sense, it was just that we were sick of our parents always thinking they knew better when, so clearly, they didn't about so many things. Those thoughts, that relationship, affected our ability to properly engage with the information they were trying to share.
I see this often in school assemblies - those awful congregations of students and teachers that are neither educational lectures nor interesting dialogues. Rather, the assembly is a dull talk about whatever topic happens to be relevant that week (or pre-determined on an evergreen list of topics doled out across a rota between all those in the school responsible for giving such assemblies) whereby students sit silently waiting to be dismissed as speakers try their best to be inspirational to an audience who do not care at all. I have seen some fantastic assemblies in my time. Really well planned, well written, well considered pieces of oratory. Yet their impact, always, is nil. It doesn't matter what knowledge the talk is designed to impart or inspire if the assumption in the room is that we're all just killing time fulfilling a legal obligation. Ears, hearts and minds are closed.
The same is true in the classroom: covering a topic in a lesson, or even a series of lessons, does not mean that anything was actually learnt. Students might have heard you talk about a certain subject, answered all of your questions about it, but the supposed knowledge you intended them to gain from the experience remains stubbornly stuck in your mind while their thoughts remain untouched. "Has he not been told what was written in the scriptures of Moses and of Abraham?" asks Allah in the Qur'an, despairing at the need to have to reveal once more what had already been revealed to humanity in the Torah. The scene is familiar to any classroom teacher foolish enough to make the mistake of assuming prior learning happened simply because an attempt to transfer some knowledge had been made. Consider every year the range of results from the sorrowful to the sublime which come from cohorts from primary school to university given the same exact lessons and resources. Being potentially exposed to possible knowledge is simply not the same thing as actually acquiring that knowledge for oneself. And if the knowledge transfer is attempted in an environment where personalities clash, or motivations differ, then relationship obstacles are likely to abound.
The reason all of this bothers me, besides the potential for frustration in a classroom, is that all too often those in power - from the classroom teacher, to governments, to god - use the idea that they have "told us before" or that we "ought to know" something because it has already been "covered" as a means to denying people real information (even knowledge) exchange. If the relationship of knower to supposed transferee is asymmetrical and hierarchical, abuses can happen. A sleight of hand. For example, in the school context, to "do an assembly" on an important issue - sexism, homophobia, Black History Month, Israel/Palestine, etc. - is often an easy tick-box exercise to say as a school that you have "addressed" something or "covered" it with students, knowing full well that the same argument which is used to encourage teachers to work more interactively with their classes than the "chalk and talk" method offers (because active engagement is required for real learning to take place) means that the assembly will have little affect when it comes to imparting new ideas. The students will simply file out of the room after being talked to for a few minutes and get on with the rest of the day, unmoved. Frequently, I ask students at my own school what they remember about an assembly they had that morning, or the day before and they remember none of it. Worse, when passionate about some social ill, knowing no other route to getting their message out than what they have witnessed as the usual channels, they propose giving an assembly themselves to highlight the injustice they wish to raise awareness about. The school is always happy to allow it because, frequently, the assembly comes and goes without sparking a revolution.
Frequently, little changes.
Training, in a similar vein, can achieve the same thing in institutions. Take unconscious bias as an example. To say "all staff have been trained in unconscious bias" could mean that all staff have legitimate and comprehensive knowledge of what unconscious bias is, and strategies to avoid it in their work, or it could equally mean a video was played, or talk given, while staff looked at their emails and rolled their eyes.
Political manifestos are another good example. The political party stands for something, and voting for them will have certain consequences. The idea of the manifesto is for those beliefs and consequences to be made clear to the voting public, yet frequently manifesto promises are ignored and manifestos remain unread. On the flipside of the equation, those unseen promises laid bare between the pages of unread manifestos, if the party wins the election, may be claimed as the "will of the people" who gave the victors a "mandate" to enact them now that they are in power.
Local planning permissions play a similar game. A sheet of information is taped up on a lamppost somewhere in the hope it will be ignored. When the building work begins, if a resident is inconvenienced or takes issue with the changes being made they can always be told they had been "made aware" of the proposed project months ago...if only they'd been paying attention. This was parodied beautifully by the writer Douglas Adams in his classic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the plans for the destruction of Arthur Dent's house to make way for a bypass were on display in the local planning office "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'" - an idea later heightened when the Earth is unexpectedly lined up to be demolished by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass and the people of the planet are told "There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now."
Putting aside all the other numerous epistemological concerns about the status of knowledge claims themselves, the potential impossibility of knowledge, and how we might know that we know something at all, when the transfer of whatever we choose to call "knowledge" is so reliably unreliable that the obstacles to knowledge-transfer can be intentionally utilised by some to ensure epistemic injustices (the appearance of knowledge transfer with no real intention of knowledge being shared, leaving the intended recipient without the knowledge they have come for) it is vitally important that we learn how to watch out for signs that we are having knowledge "shared" with us merely for the sake of appearance and distinguish between true attempts at knowledge transfer and their merely superficial counterparts.
Author: DaN McKee
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