Abstract
This chapter provides the conceptual framework for the transformative quality of knowledge to challenge the dominant discourses restricting freedom to form alternatives to capitalistic development. A passage about truth in the RigveD, which is one of the most ancient texts in the world, helps explain the paradox of “truth as knowledge”. Truth, while taking many forms, ultimately must be understood and owned by the knower as the one reality. The Indian concept of tri-vid helps to construct this theory of transformative knowledge. Emphasising the need to take the ownership of one’s knowledge to find truth, it presents knowledge as the truth of the knower, and not the passive consumption of someone else’s truth.
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Notes
- 1.
In Sanskrit, Ekam means “one”, Sad, means “that”, vipra means “the wise” or “Brahmins”, and vadanti means “to describe”.
- 2.
RigveD Yajur veD, Arthava veD, and Sam veD are considered India’s most ancient classic texts. VeD or Veda means “knowledge”, and this knowledge in the VeDs is called Sruti, meaning “heard” directly, and was then kept going in hymns through generations in the oral form. These hymns were then compiled in the written form much later towards the seventh century CE.
The RigveD—Book 1.164.46 says: “ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti agnim yamam matariswanam ahuh”, “sad” here, refers to God, who is one, but can be described in various forms.
Sad is also taken to mean SaT- truth.
Upanishads are called Vedanta, the gist of these VeDs. They are full of stories to teach, explain, and clarify the message that VeDs give.
“To what is one, the poets give many a name. They call it Agni, Yama, mAtarisva.” Bhagavad Gita chap. X. 41. The Opulence of the Absolute Relation to the Vedas: Rhg Veda. The Principal Upanishads . (Radhakrishnan 1953, p. 43)
- 3.
This exploration of mind and the super-consciousness has been universal and part of every culture in every knowledge tradition. Indian Vedic understanding of Brahman is found in Greek thought, too. As Ganeri (2001, p. 15) quotes from a seventeenth century historian Bernier:
You are doubtless acquainted with the doctrine of many of the ancient philosophers concerning that great life-giving principle of the world, of which they argue that we and all living creatures are so many parts: if we carefully examine the writings of Plato and Aristotle, we shall probably discover that they inclined towards this opinion. This is the almost universal doctrine which is held by the sect of the Suùfïs and the greater part of the learned men of Persia at the present day.
- 4.
The three stages of knowledge formation are objectification, subjectification, and rationalisation (Moshman 2014, p. 9).
- 5.
However, the debate regarding truth or knowledge as jhnna being its own justification has been a matter of discussion in most knowledge traditions. For example, in Indian thought “Is jhnna self-revealing (svaprakasa) or revealed by another (paraprakasa)?” (Mohanty 1979, p. 3) has troubled scholars for centuries.
- 6.
Atkins 2012, p. 9.
- 7.
Yes, Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” (cited in Fieser 2009, p. 172); hence, our own existence we don’t doubt, but the question that arises in this mind that is capable of thinking is, then, “Who thinks?” (such are the questions that have been dealt with in Indian Vedanta. For example, in Kena Upanishad meaning—Kena—by what or by whom?—“who sees, who thinks, who speaks”, that is the constant questioning that goes on in the human mind about the human body and what or who dwells in it).
- 8.
Knowledge is a “plastic and plural phenomenon originating in subjective, inter-subjective and objective worlds it seeks to represent” (Jovchelovitch 2007, p. 110). Or, as Dewey explains, “Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is then the process by which an individual draws on what is in storage” (Dewey 2001, p. 342).
- 9.
“[S]omething purely internal, subjective, psychical” (Dewey 2001, p. 342).
- 10.
Moshman 2014, p. 11.
- 11.
Fieser calls this the “skeptic’s thesis”; “We know with certainty that we cannot know any belief with certainty” (2009, p. 174).
- 12.
According to a Russian philosopher, and scholar, “And this conformity between our simple ideas and the existence of things is sufficient for real knowledge” (Lektorsky 1980, in the introduction to his book Subject Object Cognition).
- 13.
Motivation rather than passive reception, or “passive reactions that approximate or constitute mere reflexes” (Sosa 2015, p. 252).
- 14.
Descartes (as cited in Atkins 2012, p. 11) says:
When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we formerly knew, or from what we supposed that it ought to be, that causes us to wonder and be surprised; and because that may happen before we in any way know whether this object is agreeable to us or is not so, it appears to me that wonder is the first of all the passions.
- 15.
For example, in primitive cultures, the same process has taken place to understand the world around them (Horton 1967).
- 16.
As per this understanding, theory cannot be understood as “a rational edifice built by scientists to explain human behavior [but as] sets of meanings which people use to make sense of their world” (Cohen et al. 2007, p. 10). It is a set of “mental representations which allow members of specific language and culture groups to conduct identification, comprehension, inferencing and categorization along similar lines” (Pavlenko 1999, p. 211).
- 17.
Davidson 2010, p. 250.
- 18.
Talking about a society’s collective consciousness, Durkheim writes:
Collective representations refer to the habitual, taken-for-granted and homogeneously shared beliefs, sentiments and ideas held by a community. They are pre-established in relation to individuals (by tradition, custom and history) and accepted without scrutiny; they override individual consciousness and provide the moral framework against which all members of the community act. They are re-enacted in all kinds of social ceremonies, institutional practices and rituals of a society. (as cited in Jovchelovitch 2007, p. 44)
- 19.
“The idea of a society’s collective consciousness … what holds people together and what shapes the ways in which individuals think and act” (Durkheim cited in Jovchelovitch 2007, p. 44).
- 20.
Brahma 1993.
- 21.
Kant as cited in Lektorsky, 1980.
- 22.
“[I]ncluding knowledge about normative matters of truth and justification that concern what we ought to believe” (Moshman 2014, pp. 4–5).
As Mohanty (1979, p. 3) explains, “The realism-idealism issue—the question whether there are things external to the knowing mind or, more radically, whether all objects of knowledge exist independently of their knowledge”, these debates have been part of Indian thought for centuries.
- 23.
Not only the Western tradition of thinking, which is known to be, let us say, from Aristotle to Descartes, but the ancient philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent, along with those which flourished in the East, have pondered over this question of knowledge, truth, and justification (Mohanty 1979; Kapoor 1994; Ganeri 1996).
- 24.
As a critique of “knowledge of the dominant West” Shiva (1993, p. 10) writes:
This invisibility is the first reason why local systems collapse without trial and test when confronted with the knowledge of the dominant west. The distance itself removes local systems from perception. When local knowledge does appear in the field of the globalising vision, it is made to disappear by denying it the status of a systematic knowledge, and assigning it the adjectives ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific’ . (Shiva 1993, p. 10)
- 25.
Jovchelovitch 2007, p. 122.
- 26.
From the ancient philosophers till today, for example, from VeDs and mimansa—debates and discussions in different schools of thought in India to Western philosophy, questions such as “what is truth, what is wisdom, what is right, what is morality, what is an ideal life” have continued (http://philindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Metaphysics_sm.pdf).
The question which arises from this discussion for my project is this: If knowledge is a social construct and requires a language, then why and how only “the knowledge of the dominant West” (Shiva 1993, p. 10), for example, Western philosophy (Ganeri 1996; Radhakrishnan 1947) and “normal science” (Kincheloe and McLaren 2002, p. 113), seems to be considered worthy of being higher knowledge.
- 27.
Participated directly in “Intellect, an eternal mental act whose content is ideas” (Dancy et al. 2010, p. 549).
- 28.
“[E]fforts to reintroduce the ‘discipline’ of the market on global economies” (Kincheloe 2008, p. 24).
- 29.
Gramsci 1971.
- 30.
Gramsci (1971) developed the concept of hegemony to explain the subservient consensus of political and social domination of the bourgeois by the working classes in his society. Hegemony is “through consensual social practices … social forms … social structures … [that] the powerful win the consent of the oppressed with the oppressed unknowingly participating in their own oppression” (McLaren 2003, p. 76).
- 31.
As Meusburger et al. boldly state: “Neither the scholars of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance nor the natural scientists of the nineteenth century nor the pundits at the think tanks of today shied away from allying themselves with power to some degree in order to promote their scientific ideas, ensure their livelihoods, or assume a position of influence” (Meusburger et al. 2015, p. 3).
- 32.
Echoing Ranciere’s argument regarding the division between the elite and working class people (Pelletier 2009, p. 6), it can be seen that a division exists between “those able to see ‘truth’ and those only able to see appearances; [in] a society in which people cannot ‘be’ in any other way than is ‘proper’ to their place”.
- 33.
As the renegade economist from Adelaide, Australia, economist Stephen Hail (2017) claims the issues the world faces are due not only to
The persistent and successful promotion and pursuit by the Right of a particular way of organising the economy and society, starting in the 1950s, but with sustained success only since about 1980” [but also] “The craven submission and surrender of the establishment Left, which has more or less en masse accepted the disastrously misleading frame used by the Right for generating and evaluating policy proposals. The tame co-operation of journalists and other commentators in what has now been a long period in which the public have been gradually brainwashed into thinking there is no alternative to what has become known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism Doesn’t Work. And We Can Prove It. Available from https://renegadeinc.com/neoliberalism-doesnt-work-can-prove/.
- 34.
Ability or knowledge (Gossner 2010, p. 95).
- 35.
“‘[O]rdinary’ citizens apparently are also robbed of the ability to rationally enter into discourse about modern science and technology and its social consequences” (Meusburger et al. 2015, p. 3).
- 36.
Wenger 1998.
- 37.
- 38.
“[T]hose who are controlled by direct concern with things and those who are free to cultivate themselves” (Dewey 2001, p. 342).
- 39.
Knowledge can be organised in different categories; information, mental procedures, and psychomotor procedures of knowledge (Marzano and Kendall 2007, p. 23).
- 40.
“This divide seems to be repeated amongst academics”, Wright J. (2008, p. 2) at the AARE President’s Address 2007 has said that “Amongst staff at my own institution there is something of a marker between those who ‘do theory’, mostly social and cultural theory and those who see themselves as more down to earth, their work more connected to practice”.
- 41.
This means those who come from already privileged classes and can build on their cultural capital are privileged, whereas those who come from marginal classes and lack the cultural capital required for success in the system, are disadvantaged.
According to Aronowitz, “the most important factor in the intellectual decline of higher education is the disappearance of opportunities to explore knowledge domains whose only attraction is that the student’s curiosity has been piqued, and of occasions for reflection on self and on society” (2000, p. 159).
“In the name of ‘relevance,’ many reformers accept the trend toward a more vocational curriculum. … While some trumpet multiculturalism as the key to revitalization of a tired faculty and an outmoded curriculum, few multiculturalists challenge the main drift of higher education toward intellectual downsizing” (Aronowitz 2000, p. 163).
Greene (1993, p. 215), who wrote in the early 1990s about social exclusion and inclusive curriculum, ponders over the marginalisation of children of certain background in the school curriculum, which she equates with “pestilence”. She declares that, for a conscientious and critical educator, it is not possible to forego the “awareness of the savagery, the brutal marginalizations, the structured silences, the imposed invisibility so present all around” (1993, p. 211). Her argument for marginal students’ inclusion in the curriculum is that she believes “they can open new perspectives on what is assumed to be ‘reality’, that they can defamiliarize what has become so familiar it has stopped us from asking questions or protesting or taking action to repair” (p. 214).
- 42.
- 43.
“Underlying the social psychology of knowledge encounters is thus a dual and interrelated problem: communication with, and representation of, the other” (Jovchelovitch 2007, p. 110), affecting “the positioning of the knowers in the social fabric and their ability to have their knowledge recognised” (Jovchelovitch 2007, p. 122).
Scholars bemoan “the lopsided academic relationship between the west and the developing countries ” (Kanu 2005, p. 512), “the vertical disparity and the unequal distribution” (Gunaratne 2010, p. 474) of intellectual labour between the Anglophone theorists and the non-Anglo data mines (Appadurai 2000; Alatas 2006).
- 44.
“[T]he world has been a congeries of large-scale interactions for many centuries” (Appadurai 1990, p. 1). While speaking about “Disjuncture and difference in global cultural economy”, Appadurai points to “a permanent traffic in ideas of peoplehood and selfhood”, creating “the imagined communities” (Anderson as cited in Appadurai 1990, p. 2), made up of “the scapes” of imagined and overlapping flows of people, ideas, money, technology and images across the world.
- 45.
Indian thought from the Indian treatise of logic, Nyaya-sùtra is one of such examples of Indian knowledge of logic. However, Nyaya-sùtra was ridiculed by Europeans for being messy, unmethodical, and illogical, which as Ganeri, while commenting on the Eurocentric attitude towards the knowledge of those who were non-European and colonised, comments, could have been “the negative reaction of many British and German logicians and historians of philosophy to the idea of an origin of logical inquiry other than Greek” (Ganeri 1996, p. 67).
- 46.
Not considering Indian knowledge to be rational, logical and at par with the Greek “logical enquiry”, Indian scholars have themselves categorised Indian thought to be only spiritual “stimulated by the problems of religion, subjective, speculative, and synthetic” (Ganeri 1996, p. 1).
- 47.
In Lord Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 to the Directors of the East India Co., in which he belittled and ridiculed indigenous cultures and language, he beseeched that, in the interest of the British,
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. (Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay, dated February 2, 1835)
As a result, “the teaching of English was taken out of the Sanskrit College and the Madrassa and confined to institutions devoted to studies entirely conducted in English. The grounds for doing so was the charge that the young men learned nothing in the native seminaries and failed to speak English fluently because they had to divide their time between the three languages” (Viswanathan 1989, p. 42).
Kapoor questions this dependency by introducing Indian literary theories as mentioned earlier; he writes,
We believe that the Indian university scholarship, which right now is in disjunction with the concerns, constructs and methodologies of traditional scholarship will have to reorient itself and relocate itself in its native and inherent context. This alone will end the debilitating subordination of the English educated Indian mind. And then alone the new muted Indian voice will begin to be heard with respect. (Kapoor 1994, pp. 9–10)
There are scholars who are working on opening up space for “alternative voices” to emerge (Keim 2011, p. 127). They provide reasons for doing this and a way to engage with non-Western theorising.
- 48.
- 49.
- 50.
It was believed that “The great end of Government should be, not to teach Hindu or Mohammedan learning, but useful learning” (Kejriwal cited in Ganeri 1996, p. 14, footnote 5).
- 51.
Kapoor 2010.
- 52.
“The ‘system of 500 years’ (Modernity or Capitalism)” (Dussel 1998, p. 69).
- 53.
Countries such as India, where socialism was the driving ideology of its freedom fighters, are today in the grip of the most divisive capitalism, and then China where communism has converted “into a most exploitative kind of capitalism” (Santos 2008, p. 247).
- 54.
For example, the modern “phenomena of biopiracy through which western corporations are stealing centuries of collective knowledge” (Shiva 1998, n.p.). See also Editorial to Between the Washington Consensus and Another World: Interrogating United States Hegemony and Alternative Visions (The editors 2008), Politics & Society, 36(2), 63–168. DOI: 10.1177/0032329208316572.
- 55.
Capitalism is “not only an economic system but a cultural system as well. It ‘penetrates’ to the heart of a people’s common sense, so that they see the existing world as the world ‘tout court,’ as the only world. Capitalism becomes hegemonic” (Apple 1992, p. 128).
- 56.
“So-called Western knowledge is a relatively recent phenomenon, first spread through colonization and then through globalization. Anchored in classical Greek thought, the dominance of Western knowledge has resulted in nonattention to, if not outright dismissal of, other systems, cosmologies, and understandings about learning and knowing” (Merriam and Young 2008, p. 72).
- 57.
Greene (1993, p. 215) argues that, “If pestilence in our time can be identified with exclusion and violation and the marginalization of certain human beings, I would hope to see more and more teachers willing to choose themselves as healers, if not saints”.
- 58.
Meusburger et al. 2015, p. 2.
- 59.
Alatas (2006), raising the same point of non-Western scholars’ neglect of non-Western sources of knowledge, bemoans that non-Western theory is “truly dead, as history”. Chakarbarty (2007, pp. 5–6) also argues that:
Past European thinkers and their categories are never quite dead for us in the same way. South Asian(ist) social scientists would argue passionately with a Marx or a Weber without feeling any need to historicize them or to place them in their European intellectual contexts. (Chakarbarty 2007, p. 5)
- 60.
Western epistemology is dominated by what many would now call the “ideology” of natural science. The central feature of this epistemology is its insistence on what we might call the “purity” of knowledge, knowledge uncontaminated by human subjectivity and mediated by disengaged scientific reason. Such reason reveals a world that is, as Weber said, “disenchanted”, denuded of spirituality, or indeed any meaning or telos (Miri in UNESCO 1996, p. 164). As Haigh (2009, p. 280) puts it, “a deeply embedded, largely subconscious, cultural preconception that only the Western tradition is normal” means refusal to accept alternatives which stem from traditions different to Western knowledge traditions.
- 61.
UNESCO stands for the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
- 62.
OECD stands for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: member countries (there are 28 such countries, including Australia, United Kingdom, United States of America, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Spain, Japan and Korea).
- 63.
Leading to the privatisation of indigenous knowledge by Western corporations. Bannerjee (2002, p. 14) argues that, “Far from ‘levelling the playing field’, the intellectual property rights regime constructs problems and applies solutions in a way that acknowledges ‘diversity-rich but cash-poor’ countries only if they accept privatization of their commons as well as their knowledge.”
- 64.
- 65.
Kumar 2003, p. 16. “This kind of development implies that some cultures are backward and lower and that others are advanced and higher. Value judgements are made”.
- 66.
Epistemic agency, according to Sosa (2015, p. 4), is about “normativity, freedom, reasons, competence and scepticism”.
- 67.
With the triumph of Western capitalism in the postmodern world, and neoliberalism, development, and the free market being worshipped with a religious fervour, “a new Holy Trinity has been erected consisting of competition the Father, efficiency the Son, and market place, the Holy Spirit” (Saul as cited in Sivaraksa 2009, p. 36).
- 68.
Do we live in an “information age” or a “knowledge society”? While information is a knowledge-generating tool, it is not knowledge itself, it is a commodity, something generated for a purpose, to be bought and sold (UNESCO 2004, p. 19).
- 69.
Brookfield 2005.
- 70.
Contemporary forms of alienation are evident in the ways adults develop a “marketing orientation” to life and see the development of identity as equivalent to assembling and marketing an attractive “personality package” (Brookfield 2005, p. xiii Preface).
- 71.
“Global advertising is the key technology for the worldwide dissemination of a plethora of creative, and culturally well-chosen, ideas of consumer agency. These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser” (Appadurai 1990, p. 17).
This hegemony has been exacerbated in our twenty-first century, with technical advances in media, advertising, and politics news. Social media platforms have taken over serious journalism, with a plethora of fake news.
- 72.
In their consciously accepting “subject positions offered by this discursive condition” (Takayama 2011, p. 449).
- 73.
Connell’s notion of global theory, or a “dirty theory”, (2007, p. 224) includes both Western and non-Western ideas.
- 74.
Rancière (2009) describes how “play, inventory, encounter and mystery”, the four strategies used by a critical artist, are used for making a political statement which arises from spectators’ encounter and interpretation of the art work.
- 75.
Rancière 2009.
- 76.
A critique “does not, in and of itself, help to transform intellectual attitudes and situations”, it requires the spectator to become an agent of his or her transformation (Rancière 2009, p. 45).
- 77.
I refer to Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991). This book claims that equality is not a goal, but a starting point for any interaction, especially in an educational context, both master and pupil start at the same point, “ignorance of inequality”.
- 78.
- 79.
“Ontology” refers to the character of the world as it actually is (Hall 2003, p. 374), “Epistemology” is defined as “the study of what we can know” (Hall 2003, p. 373, footnote no. 1). Methodology refers “to the means scholars employ to increase confidence that the inferences they make about the social and political world are valid” (Hall 2003, p. 373).
To make an investigation, such as research, according to this paradigm, a researcher needs to ask the following three types of questions:
Ontological question: “the form and nature of reality and, therefore, what is there that can be known about it?”; Epistemological question: “what can be known”; and Methodological question: “how can the enquirer go about finding out whatever he or she believes can be known”. (Guba and Lincoln 1994, p. 108)
Montuori, in his foreword to Edgar Morin’s On Complexity, writes: “The question is not just what we know, but how we know, and how we organize our knowledge” (2008, p. xxvi).
He quotes Morin, who writes about how knowledge about knowledge is itself changing, moving not stable:
Does knowing that knowledge cannot be guaranteed by a foundation not mean that we have already acquired a first fundamental knowledge? And should this not lead us to abandon the architectural metaphor, in which the term “foundation” assumes an indispensable meaning, in favor of a musical metaphor of construction in movement that transforms in its very movement the constitutive elements that form it? And might we not also consider the knowledge of knowledge as a construction in movement? (Morin cited in Montuori 2008, p. vii)
- 80.
- 81.
For example, as a “a set of basic beliefs … a worldview that defines for its holder the nature of the world” (Guba and Lincoln 1994, p. 107).
- 82.
The knowledge thus received is mostly distant from the ordinary, lay person’s reach and understanding, and can dominate their perception of reality (Pelletier 2009, p. 3).
- 83.
In adult education, art can be a medium to bring transformation “through providing opportunities for people to have powerful and estranging aesthetic engagements. … it can temporarily take people out of everyday reality and then allow them to reenter it with a newly critical perspective (Marcus cited in Brookfield 2005, p. xiii, preface).
- 84.
- 85.
This Aryan invasion theory emphasised the difference between Dravidian and Aryans, with Dravidians, darker Indians, living in the South to be the indigenous (or earlier comers) and Aryans, the lighter colour, invaders and a foreign race (Feuerstein et al. 2001, pp. 140–160).
Dr. Ambedkar, who was a great freedom fighter and the founding father of the Indian constitution, has written in his book Who Were the Shudras? that there is no evidence of Aryan invasion put forth by Rig Veda, which is the final authority over this matter.
It is built on certain facts which are assumed to be the only facts. It is extraordinary that a theory with such slender and insecure foundation in fact should be have been propounded by Western scholars for serious scholars and should have held the field for such a long time. In the face of the discovery of new facts … the theory can no longer stand and must be thrown on the scrap heap. (Ambedkar 2014, chap. V, sect. x)
Knapp, who refutes the Aryan invasion theory, writes:
Prof. Witzel of Harvard who had been a proponent of the Aryan theory has been believed to have finally said, “nobody in the right mind believes in something like Aryan Invasion Theory”. (as cited in Knapp 2012, p. 3)
- 86.
“Rig-Veda unquestionably speaks of a mighty river—Sarasvati (she who flows)” (Feuerstein et al. 2001, pp. 89–91).
- 87.
“For example, the Rig Veda cannot be considered a work of an invading newcomer, but a product of a mature culture” (Feuerstein et al. 2001, p. 160).
- 88.
- 89.
Since VeDs, Upanishads, and other classic literature in India were in Sanskrit langauge, Sanskrit remained sacred and was only used by those who were educated, or from religiously dominant classes, such as Brahmins.
- 90.
Vivekananda Swami (1893). Ideal of Karam Yoga, Volume 1.
- 91.
“There is an unaccountable factor of brute discord inherent in the universe which always obtrudes perfection and reason in every human and cosmic enterprise” (Ram 2005, p. 66).
- 92.
“[C]enter of a social system is the place from which the rest of the social system is ruled, guided, and coordinated. The center is a point of reference and orientation, it provides perspectives and worldviews on how “the other” should be seen (Meusburger et al. 2015, p. 20).
- 93.
Even a critique “does not, in and of itself, help to transform intellectual attitudes and situations … [because] politics is not the simple sphere of action that follows an ‘aesthetic’ revelation about the state of things” (Rancière 2009, pp. 45–46). There is a need to do more. Postcolonialism has also been considered to be restricted by its limitation of just being a critique, or for being just a starting point (Luke 2005).
Critical thinking, as a capacity to reflect and review can bring transformation (Brookfield 2005).
- 94.
Rancière 2009.
- 95.
“The task of pedagogy is to encourage the surplus—the elements of the canons that transcend the sacred texts by putting them in their historical context and into the debates that formed them” (Aronowitz 2000, p. 170).
- 96.
Badiou (cited in Atkins 2012, p. 10) commented on the purpose of education and the pedagogical function of art:
Art is pedagogical for the simple reason that it produces truths and because ‘education’ (save in its oppressive or perverted expressions) has never meant anything but this: to arrange the forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them … the only education is an education by truths.
In a keynote address to the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, Grundy has said: Discourse involves relationship. Crucially, for a worthwhile curriculum, it involves the relationship between teacher and student. But wait, there’s more. The discursive relationship, according to Freire, challenges the fundamental power relationship of teacher and student. He advocated that, not only do teachers need to engage in discourse with their students to construct knowledge (rather than delivering it), teachers need also to learn from their students. (Grundy 1999, p. 6)
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Handa, N. (2018). Truth is Many in One. In: Education for Sustainability through Internationalisation. Palgrave Studies in Global Citizenship Education and Democracy. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50297-1_3
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