Smelly Knowledge

I am making a big historical jump here (although not necessarily a philosophical or narrative jump), but I am now reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and found this paragraph in a section of the book where she lays out her distinctions between work and labor (concepts I will return to later):

Viewed, however, in their worldliness, action, speech, and thought have more in common with each other than any of them has with work or labor. They themselves do not “produce,” bring forth anything, they are as futile as life itself. In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things–into sayings, of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfillment and… the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. (emphasis added; Arendt, 1998, p. 95)

Most of the time, we think of students learning something new as opposed to learning as a process of recalling or remembering (as Socrates also viewed learning). This idea of learning something new places the teachings as subject to the learner rather than having any objective place in the world.

I have had in my mind a critique of the concept of “inquiry learning” in science for quite some time–or at least how it is often carried out–and Arendt’s writings have given me a language to express it. In inquiry learning, students are expected to discover anew what is already known, but the idea that it is already known is often forgotten: by the curriculum, by the teachers, and of course the students, who probably didn’t know it in the first place. It is tacitly assumed that through their own observations students will experience perturbation and their cognitive structures will reorder themselves to make sense of their observations.

The scientific principles and concepts that the students are supposed to be discovering or recovering are removed from the arc of history and are often denied their transformation into a tangible state. Extending Arendt’s theorizing (as I read it), whatever students do uncover through science inquiry runs the danger of becoming a fleeting intangible and forgettable “thought” rather than “patterns of thoughts or ideas.”

Please do not misread this–inquiry-based learning is a great strategy for developing curriculum and for teaching. It is important, however, to place such inquiry within a tangible context and allow for the reification of ideas and thoughts in inquiry. This means more than just placing these scientific principles within the world of concrete things and phenomena (in which inquiry-based learning excels), but also remembering that the principles themselves are found within a larger historical context of human understanding and making explicit that the students are remembering what has been taught before.

References:
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.