Abstract
Social- and virtue-epistemologies connect intellectual and moral concerns in ways significant for education and its theory. For most educationists, epistemic and ethical virtues are no longer dissociated. However, many political framings or operations of epistemic virtues and vices remain neglected in educational discourses. This article illustrates why a politicization of epistemic issues is relevant to education through reference to political performances of a curiosity typically considered educationally valuable. Curiosity bore political connotations from antiquity to late modernity whose exploration may add critical nuance to educational-philosophical conceptions of epistemic desire. This leads us to the main argument of the article, which is that such politicization helps us interrogate unqualified, uniform, and glorifying treatments of curiosity as an educational aim.
Highlights
The main argument in this article is that, against the unqualified endorsement of curiosity as an educational aim that is dominant in our field, we must interrogate curiosity politically
The solution to the utility problem by recourse to an education that closes the gap between epistemic and ethical concerns has been widely endorsed, without, encouraging the kind of politicization that would have excited curiosity about curiosity’s politics. Both trends in epistemology emphasize education, though differently: social epistemology still gives primacy to educational transmission of knowledge, while virtue epistemology is more oriented to the virtuous self rather than to epistemic content
It should lead us to uncovering the convenient epistemic restraint that the otherwise ‘curious’ learner displays about politically uncomfortable knowledge when he asks too few questions and fails to direct his curiosity to thorny or ‘bloody’ issues
Summary
The main argument in this article is that, against the unqualified endorsement of curiosity as an educational aim that is dominant in our field, we must interrogate curiosity politically This interrogation will heighten our awareness of how in some instances curiosity reflects politically undesirable framings and how an uncritical welcome of it in schools may perpetuate such framings. Sensitive epistemic restraint allows the kind of pause for thought that prepares us to ask different, more critical and ethico-politically pertinent questions than before The steps that this complex argument requires in order to take off are the following: first comes a preparatory stage of preliminary remarks that situate the main argument by placing it into a broader educational-philosophical context of tendencies that frame the educational reception of curiosity. Gleanings from curiosity’s conceptual history will reveal politicizations of it that make us more sensitive to diverse (i.e., positive and negative) operations of curiosity and to a qualified and cautious treatment of it along with epistemic restraint as educational aims
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