NOTES
- This contribution was prepared as a “conversation piece” for a conference of teachers, administrators, and students sponsored by the Ontario Teachers' Federation.
- Here, the term “knowledge claim” refers to those statements and sets of statements which are the products of disciplined enquiry and which are commonly collected and organized in textbooks. The following is a list of the more common ways of packaging knowledge claims: facts, concepts, definitions, principles, generalizations, laws and theories. Construct other packages according to your persuasion.
- Doubters will be interested in a recent study by Marshall Herron. Herron did a philosophical evaluation of the knowledge claims in three textbooks, textbooks that took millions of dollars and many man-hours to produce. He found that these books told fewer lies than most. Herron then interviewed a highly selected group of teachers especially trained to talk the “new” textbook language. They did not so talk. In short, even in a situation where the written knowledge claim was somewhat adequate, the claims that filtered through to students amounted to the same old lie. (Herron's study is reviewed by Ian Westbury in Volume 40 (1970) of the Review of Educational Research.)