A State of Abstraction: Knowledge and Contingency

Abstract

It is conventional to start with an Abstract; perhaps some readers never get beyond it. Sometimes it seems we need little more: after all, the Abstract gives you the essence, the gist, filleted of examples, allusions and other distractions. We start here not with an Abstract but with the idea of abstraction in a different but related sense, and connect it with the way that a kind of knowingness has come to take over education, at least in the contexts with which we are personally familiar. It seems it is not enough to know, in many of the educational systems of the west: we are also to know that we know. Pupils and students are enjoined not merely to learn, but to learn how to learn: to reflect on their own processes of learning, and develop metacognitive skills and strategies.¹ The following statement, from a Teaching and Learning Research Programme under the auspices of the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) is symptomatic:

As knowledge now advances rapidly, raising educational standards means that at school pupils need not only to learn but also to learn how to learn as an essential preparation for lifelong learning. To support this, teachers need to know what they can do in their classroom practice to help pupils acquire the knowledge and skills of learning how to learn.

‘Imagine abstract man, without the guidance of myth — abstract education, abstract morality, abstract justice, the abstract state…’

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy § 23)