Knowledge and reality as educational tools of violence

Abstract

When we look at institutional education, we see that behavioural approaches to teaching still dominate in educational reality. From this perspective, learning is completely dependent on teaching, just as students are under the authority of the teacher. In a sense, this is a situation of a specific kind of symbolic violence. It has its sources in traditional ways of understanding education as a particular form of training produced in the school. But this is not the only reason. Another one is a tacit assumption about the correctness of naïve realism: the belief that we can obtain objective and universal knowledge of the external world. In this article I argue that this generates the situation in which students’ thinking is subordinated to the system. Such education kills free and critical thinking, as well as effectively blocking social change. In other words, the current public educational system is oppressive at its very basis, because of its epistemological assumptions. However, before we start changing educational practice we should first change our way of looking at knowledge. Here, I discuss selected controversies around the traditional model of knowledge and learning, as well as suggesting different paradigms of knowledge and education.