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8/9/2019 Ernesto Trevio Ronzn - Education and Knowledge Society
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Education, alchemy and the advent of societies in dispute for
knowledge
By Ernesto Trevio Ronzn1
In the following paragraphs I use the notion of alchemy as proposed by
Popkewitz (2004) in a somehow free way to present ideas about education,
knowledge and the coming of the so called, knowledge societies. For a start, I
find the notion of alchemy useful because it allows casting light, in a quite
heuristic way, over some processes implicated in any idea of production,
organization, validation and use of knowledge; also because its very closely
related to the notion of over-determination (Althusser-Laclau) which speaks of
things in terms of impurity, that is to say, allows for thinking in terms of the
presence of some things in others by the effect of circulation, continuity,
transference. If we take both notions to think about the way in which
knowledge, and particularly scientific knowledge has been produced, used and
presented to society during the last two centuries, what we found is that
aspirations like neutrality, certainty or even the idea of the ultimate
specialization reveal themselves as impossibilities.
1This paper was written as a reaction paperfor the Seminar:Reform and Change in Curriculum, Fall
2009, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mail: [email protected]
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Is not that knowledge doesnt provide some good explanations, or that
there are no highly specialized fields of inquiry; it means that no field of inquiry
can be thought as if existing outside of a web of relationships which implies
power, interest, aspirations and the deploy of asymmetrical forces. Knowledge
and its results are not out of ethical-political inquiries and are not
uncontaminated compartments of life; are not a perfect, unified and planned
machines of thinking but imperfect machines trying to make sense embedded
in a web of economical, cultural, historical issues. This we know also through
the work of Bachelard, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Habermas, Foucault and is
important to problematize the current changes in the very notion of knowledge.
If we use the idea of alchemy to think about the idea of knowledge
society, we find interesting things. The notion of knowledge society is been
used in Mexico and Latin America as a way to describe an explicit state of social
development where knowledge, particularly in the form of scientific and
academic knowledge, will be available for all member of society (this would be
different from the economic and scientific senses in which its been used
particularly in Europe or Japan). In the Latin America region, knowledge, with
all its supposed virtues (certitude, rigor, precision, lack of self interest) would
be the base for the construction of an ideal society: democratic, free, equal,
progressive, economically successful and ecologically sustainable. A kind of
society where citizens will be long-life learners armed with the tools of
technological, mathematical and scientific literacy, embracing the liberal and
democratic ideals. To give life to this aspiration, different domains of
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experience have been summoned so that every sort of knowledge, not only the
scientific one, can be included (knowledge as thought in current global
initiatives also includes the so called traditional, practical and heuristic
savoirs).
In order to secure its social relevance, all of these knowledges are been
seeing as objects of register, scrutiny, measurement, evaluation and validation
whether for purposes of copyright, cultural brand or employability. In this
pursuit, we are trying to encompass elements coming from the field of the
cognitive science, the theories of administration of knowledge and information,
the theories of technological change and economical development, and even the
cutting edge sciences (biochemistry, genomics)whether we understand them or
not. So, we are trying to put in motion a combination ofknowledge about
knowledge and several sorts of knowledge to come out with the ultimate set of
mindsets and policies to give life to a society which by definition can only be
just, free and democratic.
In the education realm, teachers and researchers are being encouraged
to act as 21 century groundbreaking alchemists, working with knowledge,
standards, principles and ideals coming from different areas of knowledge to
create something shiny, brilliant and valuable for the present and future,
individuals, societies and cultures based on the valuing of knowledge, the most
basic common good and unlimited resource. In a very unusual way,knowledge
provides the symbolic material for a new epic not about the past, but about the
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future, knowledge, before a good for the elites, emerges now as an open
resource for the multitude.
However, the way in which some governments including the Mexican
, organizations, firms and individuals have been encouraging the production
and dissemination of knowledge in the last years is incompatible with the
romantic ideal image of a society based in knowledge as a democratic, inclusive
or thoughtful society. Because on the one hand, current knowledge societies
also nominated in plural-- have produced effects, dissonant metaphors, where
knowledge has become a commodity, a precious thing in dispute and a new
criteria for social organization, particularly in those regions and economies
where is the blood that gives life to machines of production of wealth (from
pharmaceutical, food or metallurgical enterprises, to business, technology and
education markets), and which are becoming the ruling model for countries like
Mexico. In those places, the value given to knowledge as a strategic asset is
producing effects of abjection throughout the social fabric: at the same time,
many individuals are encouraged and aspire to be included in the new stage of
development based on knowledge, and many are been kept in the in between, in
the transition, or simply out of it because they lack the will, the predispositions,
the abilities, the contacts or the resources to be included or to include
themselves in the dominant patterns. This is one of the many effects of what I
call the emergency of the societies in dispute for knowledge (Trevio, 2009).
On the other hand, something else is happening, although doing
alchemy is for the most part something coextensive to any idea of thinking, the
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shiny objects that we are producing with the substances and compounds that
we are melting in the bowl of the knowledge society (like the cutting edge
theories on cognition, economics, information, administration, social change),
in the most advance countries and in our very own not so advanced ones,
are not gold at all, and the recurrent global economic crisis have shown it
somehow. Because the cultures based on knowledge that we are suppose to be
building through education, laws, labour and scientific structures are not
encouraging the so promised reflective, scientific or critical thinking citizenship
and society. By answering to the most basic questions of employability,
financial development and the sort, the current forms of knowledge society
have taken the most simple shape of a post-capitalist arrangement, where, for
instance, the most part of the jobs do not require, and do not encourage an
epistemic or a thoughtful culture or mind. In this version, just a few of the
workers can be highly specialized workers, researchers or developers, the rest,
with our four or more years of higher education, will only be able to occupy a
place in the long intermediate and volatile chain of employability in the services
sector with a very rare possibility to think beyond that. Yet, the promises
inhabitating notions like innovation help to manage the triviality that comes
out of our complex ideas about the knowledge era, and to calm the uneasy
feeling whispering to us that our experiment is producing an unstable
compound that could lead, for a start, to a social wide deception regarding
knowledge, and by the way, a deception not that much new because we already
had a version of this after the Enlightenment.
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During the last three years my main concerns have been circulating
around the idea of knowledge in the fabrication of a new image for higher
education. This is an anthropological, political and educational concern, to say
it somehow. Anthropological because, although knowledge whether
structured in the form of systems of thought or not has been basic for all
societies, it is in the contemporary ones where it acquires a central value. And is
in our societies where we have an exponential production ofknowledge about
knowledge informing our conversations about technology, science, economics,
education, politics, culture, nature. Its a political concern because for me,
although historically is impossible to think about knowledge outside of a
particular web of power, we live in aform of time where politics are named out
loud,politics of knowledge: lines of reasoning crossing spaces trying to govern
the production, socialization and use of knowledge, producing several effects of
governmentality, disrupting some old sediment and producing new ways of
subjectivation and liaisons. Its an educational concern because education is
the formal space that, at least since the illustration, has been in charge of the
production, conservation and socialization of knowledge and today appears in
the middle of every single reflection about society. But is mostly an educational
concern because education deals with the fabrication of subjects, and this
involves the inescapable dimension of the ethic/political ethos which cannot be
reduced to a problem of technical instrumentation, as it is presented in the
dominant approach in current educational policies. Education in the knowledge
society, in the version Ive been analyzing, is operating as an exclusionary
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system because of bad combination of knowledge, knowledge about
knowledge, and politics of knowledge. Apparently, we are doing a very lousy
job as alchemists apprentices with the complication that when the experiment
malfunctions there will not be a master alchemist to fix it.
References
Popkewitz, Tomas (1998) Struggling for the Soul: The Politics of Schooling andthe Construction of the Teacher, New York, Teachers College Press.
---------- (2004) The Alchemy of the Mathematics Curriculum: Inscriptionsand the Fabrication of the Child, American Education Research Journal,Spring 41 (1): 3-34.
---------- (2008) Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform, New York,Routledge.
Trevio, Ernesto (2009) Horizontes de transformacin de la educacin superioren Mxico frente al advenimiento de las sociedades en disputa por elconocimiento. PhD Dissertation. Mxico: CINVESTAV.