In the words of George Bernard Shaw, ‘beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance’, warns Dr Stephen Brown.
In 2018 I accepted the opportunity to make a keynote presentation at the African School Leadership Roundtable in Johannesburg. The topic was the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016) on schooling and education more broadly.
Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, coined the term to describe the current phase of technological advancement characterised by the fusion or interconnectedness of digital, biological and physical systems of the world in which we live. Expressions of this include innovation such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR).
In my presentation (pre-COVID 19), I posited that this revolution typified by technology would provide a range of provocations and disruptions to all parts of the education learning ecosystem. These included: the nature of knowledge and access, ownership, power relationship boundaries; assumptions, the pivotal role of social media, and validity; the speed and duration of learning; ethical practices; the need to invest in technology to bridge the digital skills gap; the role of the teacher in the educative process; the ever enduring challenge of balancing equity and excellence for all stakeholders; the need to embrace the liminal space afforded by emergent technologies and the continued importance of leaders who are learners, curious, and courageous in an ever increasing VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) or RUPT (rapid, unpredictable, Paradoxical, and Tangled) world. Despite the time lapse I believe that each of the themes and issues identified remain pertinent in the schooling sector today.
The purpose of this article is to explore further one of these – the contest about knowledge in the context of a post truth era and the implications for educators.
Marcus Aurelius (121 AD) noted that “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth”.
In my 2018 presentation I shared my observations about nature, curation, and the validity of knowledge. The rise of social media and digital platforms has led to an environment where information and misinformation can and does spread quickly.
The democratisation of information through such platforms has enabled anyone to become a content creator, diluting the influence of established traditional gatekeepers of knowledge such as universities and the need for refereed review of such information. One can be an author within a short period of time within 24/7 – 24 words in seven seconds.
The positive impact of this has been the rise of the practitioner scholar, current practitioners in schools who are providing perspectives and sharing their thoughts about the reality of leading, teaching and engaging in the sector. Albert Einstein noted the value of the practitioner voice in the discourse of education when he noted that “Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. You need experience to gain wisdom”.
Realistic and authentic voices from the field – the classrooms and school offices across Australia – need to receive much more acknowledgement in the policy debate and formulation cycles. From my observation, the policy development process is still predominately presided over by the traditional constituency, representative model with marginal representation or reflection of the nature of contemporary schooling reality.
Educators are enacting their practice in an era which has been dubbed a post truth one, typified by the prominence of influencers using a crafted narrative designed to evoke emotion and feelings at sometimes the expense of evidence and factual basis. Moreover, symptomatic of this era is the proliferation of misinformation and ‘fake news’.
The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increased ever more the speed of information generation and transfer. Such a disruptor like AI brings forth the need to debate about what is a teacher – a ‘font of all knowledge’? With an ever-increasing teaching workforce such mental models and hegemonic view of teaching need to be challenged. Simply, no one teacher just like no one student can be expected to know and do everything. Ivan Illich (1971) in his acclaimed work, Deschooling Society, explored the issue that remains and has been further amplified by VUCA or RUPT world – the nature of schooling and learning. A traditional battleground for the knowledge contest is curriculum provision expressed in artefacts and forms such as syllabus documents, time allocation and the promotion of certain approaches to its delivery.
The contest of and for knowledge again gives rise to the need to explore the traditional and entrenched model or approaches to schooling. We all find knowledge in different places and learn in diverse ways and circumstances. The trends in school refusal, home schooling, levels of engagement, specialist teacher shortage are just a few of the indicators that signal the need for such change and allied discourse.
About the author
Dr Stephen Brown is the Managing Director of The Brown Collective, focused on the formation of educational leaders and partnering with schools, networks and system to enable sustainable impact. The organisation reflects both his collective experience over 40 years in policy, strategy and leadership development – and that of the remarkable global network he has developed during this career.
