How Knowledge is Understood and Valued in Education
What qualifies as knowledge can be a difficult idea to define and pin down. It can take endless different forms, and it’s deeply interwoven with our everyday worlds. I think that pretty much everyone, when asked, would come up with a different idea for what knowledge really is, but I would personally think of it as any kind of understanding of how the world (including the people within it!) operates, as well as how to move through it. Individuals can gain knowledge through their personal experiences or through exploration or investigation of the world, but a lot of the knowledge we absorb and use on a daily basis is passed along from others.
The question of what kinds of knowledge are valuable, and merit passing on to a new generation of learners, is one that’s at the center of any kind of education. But there’s also no one correct answer to this question, because education should never be one-size-fits-all. Nobody has the exact same set of knowledge as anyone else, and nobody can possibly have all the knowledge there is in the world. Therefore, the most meaningful education takes into account the framework of knowledge that students begin with, and works to expand it and make connections within it. It should also give individuals the knowledge they need and want to have, which absolutely isn’t the same for everyone. These individual differences stretch beyond just career choices, but as one example, a social worker and an astronaut need two complex, but incredibly different sets of knowledge, and require vastly different educations as a result.
Unfortunately, a lot of education systems do a bad job treating all types of knowledge with the weight and respect they merit. Knowledge, perspectives and systems of learning that fall outside of Western cultures are rarely spotlighted. In addition, skills that are deemed necessary for students to appear professional and well-educated (which often fall within the Western canon—for example, knowledge of “classic” literature) are prioritized over skills that might serve students better in the long term, such as financial education. Beyond being passed over in curricula, the knowledge held by students with minoritized identities is often invalidated in the classroom—for example, through the standards of what ways of speaking and writing are deemed “correct.” Even Hillary Swank’s character in Freedom Writers, who’s portrayed as the only teacher in the school who listens to and learns from her students, teaches grammar by “correcting” samples of her students’ work, written in vernacular, into academic English.
This exemplifies an important point about how knowledge is distributed in an educational setting: all of these issues are exacerbated by the white savior complexes of teachers. The common setup of white educators teaching mostly students of color aligns the power dynamics of the classroom (and education system as a whole) with dominant cultural power dynamics. As a result, the knowledge held by largely white authority figures (like teachers, but also textbook authors, curriculum makers, and so on) is seen as the knowledge that must be passed on to students, and is used as the standard on which students are evaluated. When the white savior dynamic manifests in the classroom, this is taken to even more of an extreme. As her students’ supposed savior, the teacher is especially expected to know better than them, because she believes that she will bring her students liberation by imposing her own knowledge onto them. As a result, she sees herself as the ultimate authority, and doesn’t pause to consider the value of her students’ own knowledge and experiences.
In contrast, a good educator should have humility. They should understand that, as with any teacher, there will always be important things they can teach their students, and many more that they can’t. They should work to give their students agency, offering them knowledge that they need and want to be equipped with, and they should teach their students systems for acquiring their own knowledge, so that they can continue to learn and grow beyond their classroom.
The question of what kinds of knowledge are valuable, and merit passing on to a new generation of learners, is one that’s at the center of any kind of education. But there’s also no one correct answer to this question, because education should never be one-size-fits-all. Nobody has the exact same set of knowledge as anyone else, and nobody can possibly have all the knowledge there is in the world. Therefore, the most meaningful education takes into account the framework of knowledge that students begin with, and works to expand it and make connections within it. It should also give individuals the knowledge they need and want to have, which absolutely isn’t the same for everyone. These individual differences stretch beyond just career choices, but as one example, a social worker and an astronaut need two complex, but incredibly different sets of knowledge, and require vastly different educations as a result.
Unfortunately, a lot of education systems do a bad job treating all types of knowledge with the weight and respect they merit. Knowledge, perspectives and systems of learning that fall outside of Western cultures are rarely spotlighted. In addition, skills that are deemed necessary for students to appear professional and well-educated (which often fall within the Western canon—for example, knowledge of “classic” literature) are prioritized over skills that might serve students better in the long term, such as financial education. Beyond being passed over in curricula, the knowledge held by students with minoritized identities is often invalidated in the classroom—for example, through the standards of what ways of speaking and writing are deemed “correct.” Even Hillary Swank’s character in Freedom Writers, who’s portrayed as the only teacher in the school who listens to and learns from her students, teaches grammar by “correcting” samples of her students’ work, written in vernacular, into academic English.
This exemplifies an important point about how knowledge is distributed in an educational setting: all of these issues are exacerbated by the white savior complexes of teachers. The common setup of white educators teaching mostly students of color aligns the power dynamics of the classroom (and education system as a whole) with dominant cultural power dynamics. As a result, the knowledge held by largely white authority figures (like teachers, but also textbook authors, curriculum makers, and so on) is seen as the knowledge that must be passed on to students, and is used as the standard on which students are evaluated. When the white savior dynamic manifests in the classroom, this is taken to even more of an extreme. As her students’ supposed savior, the teacher is especially expected to know better than them, because she believes that she will bring her students liberation by imposing her own knowledge onto them. As a result, she sees herself as the ultimate authority, and doesn’t pause to consider the value of her students’ own knowledge and experiences.
In contrast, a good educator should have humility. They should understand that, as with any teacher, there will always be important things they can teach their students, and many more that they can’t. They should work to give their students agency, offering them knowledge that they need and want to be equipped with, and they should teach their students systems for acquiring their own knowledge, so that they can continue to learn and grow beyond their classroom.
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