The View of Knowledge: An Institutional Theory of Differences in Educational Quality.

• Author: Henrekson, Magnus

In all developed countries, children are required to attend school until they have reached the age of about fifteen. This requirement is justified because basic schooling is beneficial not only to the individual but also to societal development. Indeed, an educated population is a necessary condition for a wide range of key modern values and institutions that benefit people at large, including democracy, human rights, technological innovation, and economic growth. (1) Hence, education may be seen as a public good, comparable to an orderly judicial system, mass transportation, and a robust national defense. Yet it is not simply the number of years that children spend in a school system that produces the many benefits associated with education; students may spend many years in school without contributing to the common good. The crucial factor is rather the quality of the education they receive--or, put in other terms, the ability of a school system to impart knowledge and skills. (2)

If a quality education is a cornerstone of the good society, however--especially a democratic society--then democracy has recently been presented with many troubling signs. As of 2018, for instance, China ranked first in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in reading ability and mathematics and science proficiency, and the so-called benign dictatorship of Singapore ranked second. The United States, meanwhile, ranked only twenty-fifth. Several other Western countries have also experienced deteriorating educational performance, as measured by PISA scores and comparable international tests, in recent years. This apparent decline in educational quality raises the specter that democratic societies may stagnate while China and similar dictatorial, or quasi-dictatorial, states build on their educational prowess to advance their social vision.

What accounts for the shortcomings of education in Western democracies? In this essay, we argue that the single most important institution for the functioning and development of any school system is the embraced view of knowledge. (3) We define "view of knowledge" in terms of the Polish philosopher Ludwik Fleck's ([1935] 1979) concept of "thought style," which inspired the U.S. historian of science Thomas Kuhn's (1962) concept of "paradigm." Thought styles are manners of thinking that link the members of a particular social unit--a "thought collective," in Fleck's terminology--and determine how they interpret phenomena relevant to their interests. We regard views of knowledge as thought styles that shape how individuals who belong to different thought collectives within the field of education--scholars, pedagogues, and policymakers--understand what knowledge is and what formal schooling can and should do to help students acquire it.

The view of knowledge, whether stipulated or merely implicit, is the fundamental institution of the educational system, and this is where scholars and policymakers should look to understand the success or failure of schools, rather than to indirect and ultimately less significant factors, such as the attractiveness of the teaching profession.

In the first two sections of this essay, we outline the two main conflicting views of knowledge in terms of the Weberian concept of "ideal types." Max Weber, the German sociologist, wrote: "An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct" (Shils and Finch 1949, 90). In other words, the views of knowledge described here should be understood as the ends of a dichotomy.

During the period of educational modernization in the West and in Japan from the mid-1800s onward, it was taken as a given that objective knowledge specific to various fields exists, that it is accessible through systematic study directed by competent teachers, and that it serves as a precondition for the development of important skills.

We call this the "classical" view of knowledge, though it is consistent with modern scientific research. It is still predominantly accepted in Asian societies. Many school systems in the West have come to embrace another view, which considers knowledge claims to be subjective and ultimately nontransferable from teacher to student. The emphasis is, therefore, on self-directed learning of content that students themselves deem relevant to their schooling and training in critical thinking, a skill that is assumed to be generic in nature and divorced from the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge. (4) We call this the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge.

For us, it is clearly the classical view of knowledge that gives rise to favorable outcomes in the school system, whereas the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge leads to educational failure. A scope condition for this theory is that our criticism of usage of the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge is limited to elementary education; in other contexts, including higher levels of education, postmodern and social constructivist thought may bring valuable perspectives.

In the third section of the essay, we take the decline of Sweden's school system as a primary example of how a move from one view of knowledge to another affects the chances of producing high-quality education. The final section considers the implications of our argument for the future of Western education.

The Classical View of Knowledge

Our species, Homo sapiens, would not have been able to dominate earth if our innate ability for learning had not been extraordinary (Henrich 2016). However, if we have such natural talent for learning, why do we make people spend so much of their youth in classrooms? According to adherents of the classical view of knowledge, there is a straightforward reason, although it was only intuited for a long time rather than clearly formulated and empirically tested, as is so often the case with human innovation: Formal education is a technology developed and applied to compensate for what the human mind is innately able to do only poorly.

One does not need to attend school to learn how to walk, run, play, recognize the objects and the people one depends on, speak well enough to function within the family and among close neighbors, or immediately tell how many items there are in a set of up to four (Henrich 2016). Learning and perfecting such skills is typically done seemingly effortlessly and found enjoyable by children because they are biologically primary tasks. In other words, the human brain is designed to spontaneously learn to perform these tasks. However, learning to master knowledge and skills such as reading and writing, arithmetic, and science is a very different matter (Pinker 2002). Those kinds of knowledge and skills are biologically secondary in nature, because they are not normally applied in the everyday life of a child and in any case were discovered only recently in the history of our species. As a result, an innate talent to acquire them in the same effortless way has not yet evolved--if it ever will (Geary 2007; 2011).

Attaining biologically secondary knowledge and skills requires deliberate practice, and because it does not come naturally to human beings, the learning process is not always pleasurable. (5) On the contrary, we learn, for example, a mathematical skill only with great effort, and we must repeat and repeat this new skill before it can become automatic and second nature. We can then use it to learn a more advanced skill in the same area, and so on. In the classical view, the purpose of schools is to provide an arena for the acquisition of such hard-won, biologically secondary knowledge and skills. As the Australian educational psychologist John Sweller writes, "We invented schools in order to teach biologically secondary knowledge because, unlike primary knowledge, it is unlikely to be acquired without the functions and procedures found in educational establishments" (2016a, 293).

Particularly important in this context, according to the classical view, is the teacher's explicit instruction in the attainment of biologically secondary knowledge and skills, and his or her encouragement of students to practice with diligence and perseverance. (6) The reason is that humans "have evolved to learn [biologically secondary information] from others" (Sweller 2016a, 300). Because our ability to do so is a biologically primary skill that is lacking in most other animals, explicit instruction is considered by far the most natural and efficient teaching method. (7) Cognitive load theory, conceived by Sweller, suggests that the alternative model for learning, in which novice students are expected to find and rehearse biologically secondary information themselves, leads to the working memory quickly becoming overloaded (Sweller, Ayres, and Kalyuga 2011). (8) As a result, one summary explains, "focus is lost, the mind wanders, and the task is abandoned" (Dehn 2014, 497). Disturbance of the working memory can also arise from perceived threats to safety (Ingvar 2017; Lee, Lee, and Kim 2017), which is why the classical view of knowledge emphasizes the importance of structure and peace in the classroom for achieving successful learning outcomes, with the teacher as a social leader and norm-setter.

The terms knowledge and skills are deliberately combined in this account because, in the classical view, they are tightly interwoven. This belief is supported by research showing that skills, in fact, are dependent on domain-specific knowledge. As the U.S. educationalist E. D. Hirsch, an emblematic exponent of the classical view of knowledge, notes, "The domain specificity of skills is one of the firmest and most important determinations of...