Talk:Knowledge is Power





Comment 12/21/08 by David Moursund
I have recently completed a modest amount of revision of the Knowledge is Power document.

In an email conversation with my colleague Mark Gall, he wrote:


 * I spent most of my career thinking about teachers. Now I think about knowledge—what is knowledge? And what knowledge is of most worth?


 * I had tea with my friend Ken Duckworth the other day. (He worked in Education Administration here many years ago.)  As we talked about knowledge, we found how political it is.  For example, I asserted that people should know a lot about their bodies, about health and disease, about prevention and medical treatment.  As you start thinking about these topics, you realize that different groups (AMA, the health insurance industry) have a stake in what kinds of knowledge people should be carrying around in their heads.  For example do they want people to know about medical malpractice and how to initiate a lawsuit?  Do they want people to know about different kinds of surgeries and their success rate?  Do they want people to know how health and disease are handled in other countries?


 * Knowledge is a dangerous subject. It’s much easier to talk about teachers, teacher accountability, and basic skills.

I responded to his email by quoting from http://www.govexec.com/archdoc/0696/0696s6.htm:

"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."


 * When Allen Dulles, the founding father of the Central Intelligence Agency, had the above biblical quotation (John 8:32) chiseled on the entryway of the agency's McLean, Va., headquarters in 1962, it was almost as if he was foretelling the outcome of the Cold War. How could he have known the Russians and East Europeans would learn hard truths about the political failures, economic deficiencies and military misadventures of communism?


 * Yet Dulles' selection of those words to hallow CIA's halls would surely not be a fitting testimonial to the wisdom of CIA and the intelligence community in foreseeing the fall of communism. The agency's dismal record in that regard is not in dispute. During the 1980s, the CIA and the intelligence community openly aided and abetted the publication of an annual edition of Pentagon hype known as Soviet Military Power, which consistently reached the same conclusion: The Soviets would do whatever was necessary and spend whatever was required to maintain a dominant military posture.


 * True, the intelligence community did report on the deteriorating Soviet economy and declining oil production in the late 1970s, and acknowledged the USSR's faltering military performance in Afghanistan. But these notions didn't go over well in the 1980s, a decade devoted to increased U.S. defense spending.


 * More recently, the CIA's own assessment of the damage resulting from the Aldrich Ames spy scandal confirmed that the CIA and the Pentagon were influenced by tainted reports and Soviet disinformation between 1985 and 1994 to overestimate Russian military capability. This "had a substantial role in shaping the debate" in those years, current CIA Director John Deutch told Congress last year. [Bold added for emphasis.]

I commented that it seems to me that many of us have so much disinformation (or, put another way, incorrect knowledge) about education that we make poor and even incorrect decisions frequently in our professional work, and that same holds true for parents.

His response was:


 * Thanks for the Dulles/Soviet story. It illustrates my point about the centrality of “knowledge” (how to create, how to represent it, how to validate it) in human affairs.


 * It seems to me that educators should be knowledge experts primarily.

For me, this was an interesting and useful email conversation. It seems to me that the various stakeholder groups provide a huge amount of disinformation in order to promote their own special interests. I found the Wikipedia article on disinformation to be quite enlightening.

Comment by Dave Moursund on 8/25/07
Knowledge is power is a great topic for discussion by teachers and learners. Parents and teachers may well be surprised by their children and students insights (or, lack of insights) into this topic.