Knowledge

What I know today is different from what I knew yesterday, and will be different from what I will know tomorrow. WHen I was young I knew a lot of things for certain. As I get older I know less and less. However, the knowledge I have now helps me to navigate my world, and I cannot do without it. My knowledge is always transitional, moving from understanding to new understanding. Actually it is doing forwards and backwards in ways which I cannot appreciate till later.
Science is the same. Knowledge exists for others to try to disprove, or modify, in a never ending cycle. Scientific knowledge changes, often dramatically, when old frameworks get completely knocked down. Most don't think out of the box; some do, and change the box. Thomas Kuhn called it a paradigm shift. When everything that used to be believed is now disbelieved.
So what can I rely on as true? Quite a few things are beyond reasonable doubt, but what they might mean is a bit fluid. The only thing I can do is keep reflecting on them.
What does this mean for education? We spend most of our time telling children things that won't be considered true when they leave school. What we teach in primary school we have to revise in secondary school, and keep revising at GCSE, and again at A level, and again at university. We have to simplify, but do we really have to teach lies, knowingly? And then unteach what we have just taught?
On the question, what of all this is true, and how do we teach that in school:
I live (but quality of life is difficult to define)
I will die (but what then, what happens to "me").
Personally I come back always to justice as solid ground. It is an idea, I suppose, of selfless acting, something humans find difficult. It is not an emotion, that can get twisted in different directions, but a standard we can always return to.
Humans are always selfish in the sense of putting our own needs first. We will only become just if we can set this aside and put others first. All others. How to do this is the mystery.
Love is only secure if justice is embedded. That is, it ceases to be self-serving.
Hope is only secure if it is just.
So our critical base line has to be justice.
A child's education should start and end with this.
©Stephen Bigger 2008