Education, alchemy and the advent of societies in dispute for

knowledge

By Ernesto Treviño Ronzón1

In the following paragraphs I use the notion of alchemy as proposed by

Popkewitz (2004) in a somehow free way to present ideas about education,

knowledge and the coming of the so called, knowledge societies. For a start, I

find the notion of alchemy useful because it allows casting light, in a quite

heuristic way, over some processes implicated in any idea of production,

organization, validation and use of knowledge; also because it’s very closely

related to the notion of over-determination (Althusser-Laclau) which speaks of

things in terms of impurity, that is to say, allows for thinking in terms of the

presence of some things in others by the effect of circulation, continuity,

transference. If we take both notions to think about the way in which

knowledge, and particularly scientific knowledge has been produced, used and

presented to society during the last two centuries, what we found is that

aspirations like neutrality, certainty or even the idea of the ultimate

specialization reveal themselves as impossibilities.

1
This paper was written as a reaction paper for the Seminar: Reform and Change in Curriculum, Fall
2009, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mail: ernezto.tr@gmail.com
 Is not that knowledge doesn’t provide some good explanations, or that

there are no highly specialized fields of inquiry; it means that no field of inquiry

can be thought as if existing outside of a web of relationships which implies

power, interest, aspirations and the deploy of asymmetrical forces. Knowledge

and its results are not out of ethical-political inquiries and are not

uncontaminated compartments of life; are not a perfect, unified and planned

machines of thinking but imperfect machines trying to make sense embedded

in a web of economical, cultural, historical issues. This we know also through

the work of Bachelard, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Habermas, Foucault and is

important to problematize the current changes in the very notion of knowledge.

If we use the idea of alchemy to think about the idea of knowledge

society, we find interesting things. The notion of knowledge society is been

used in Mexico and Latin America as a way to describe an explicit state of social

development where knowledge, particularly in the form of scientific and

academic knowledge, will be available for all member of society (this would be

different from the economic and scientific senses in which it’s been used

particularly in Europe or Japan). In the Latin America region, knowledge, with

all its supposed virtues (certitude, rigor, precision, lack of self interest) would

be the base for the construction of an ideal society: democratic, free, equal,

progressive, economically successful and ecologically sustainable. A kind of

society where citizens will be long-life learners armed with the tools of

technological, mathematical and scientific literacy, embracing the liberal and

democratic ideals. To give life to this aspiration, different domains of

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experience have been summoned so that every sort of knowledge, not only the

scientific one, can be included (knowledge as thought in current global

initiatives also includes the so called traditional, practical and heuristic

savoirs).

In order to secure its social relevance, all of these knowledges are been

seeing as objects of register, scrutiny, measurement, evaluation and validation

whether for purposes of copyright, cultural brand or employability. In this

pursuit, we are trying to encompass elements coming from the field of the

cognitive science, the theories of administration of knowledge and information,

the theories of technological change and economical development, and even the

cutting edge sciences (biochemistry, genomics) whether we understand them or

not. So, we are trying to put in motion a combination of knowledge about

knowledge and several sorts of knowledge to come out with the ultimate set of

mindsets and policies to give life to a society which by definition can “only be

just, free and democratic”.

In the education realm, teachers and researchers are being encouraged

to act as 21 century groundbreaking alchemists, working with knowledge,

standards, principles and ideals coming from different areas of knowledge to

create something shiny, brilliant and valuable for the present and future,

individuals, societies and cultures based on the valuing of knowledge, the most

basic common good and unlimited resource. In a very unusual way, knowledge

provides the symbolic material for a new epic not about the past, but about the

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future, knowledge, before a good for the elites, emerges now as an open

resource for the multitude.

However, the way in which some governments —including the Mexican—

, organizations, firms and individuals have been encouraging the production

and dissemination of knowledge in the last years is incompatible with the

romantic ideal image of a society based in knowledge as a democratic, inclusive

or thoughtful society. Because on the one hand, current knowledge societies –

also nominated in plural-- have produced effects, dissonant metaphors, where

knowledge has become a commodity, a precious thing in dispute and a new

criteria for social organization, particularly in those regions and economies

where is the blood that gives life to machines of production of wealth (from

pharmaceutical, food or metallurgical enterprises, to business, technology and

education markets), and which are becoming the ruling model for countries like

Mexico. In those places, the value given to knowledge as a strategic asset is

producing effects of abjection throughout the social fabric: at the same time,

many individuals are encouraged and aspire to be included in the new stage of

development based on knowledge, and many are been kept in the in between, in

the transition, or simply out of it because they lack the will, the predispositions,

the abilities, the contacts or the resources to be included or to include

themselves in the dominant patterns. This is one of the many effects of what I

call the emergency of the societies in dispute for knowledge (Treviño, 2009).

On the other hand, something else is happening, although doing

alchemy is for the most part something coextensive to any idea of thinking, the

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shiny objects that we are producing with the substances and compounds that

we are melting in the bowl of the knowledge society (like the cutting edge

theories on cognition, economics, information, administration, social change),

in the most advance countries —and in our very own not so advanced ones—,

are not gold at all, and the recurrent global economic crisis have shown it

somehow. Because the cultures based on knowledge that we are suppose to be

building through education, laws, labour and scientific structures are not

encouraging the so promised reflective, scientific or critical thinking citizenship

and society. By answering to the most basic questions of employability,

financial development and the sort, the current forms of knowledge society

have taken the most simple shape of a post-capitalist arrangement, where, for

instance, the most part of the jobs do not require, and do not encourage an

epistemic or a thoughtful culture or mind. In this version, just a few of the

workers can be highly specialized workers, researchers or developers, the rest,

with our four or more years of higher education, will only be able to occupy a

place in the long intermediate and volatile chain of employability in the services

sector with a very rare possibility to think beyond that. Yet, the promises

inhabitating notions like innovation help to manage the triviality that comes

out of our complex ideas about the knowledge era, and to calm the uneasy

feeling whispering to us that our experiment is producing an unstable

compound that could lead, for a start, to a social wide deception regarding

knowledge, and by the way, a deception not that much new because we already

had a version of this after the Enlightenment.

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 During the last three years my main concerns have been circulating

around the idea of knowledge in the fabrication of a new image for higher

education. This is an anthropological, political and educational concern, to say

it somehow. Anthropological because, although knowledge —whether

structured in the form of systems of thought or not— has been basic for all

societies, it is in the contemporary ones where it acquires a central value. And is

in our societies where we have an exponential production of knowledge about

knowledge informing our conversations about technology, science, economics,

education, politics, culture, nature. It’s a political concern because for me,

although historically is impossible to think about knowledge outside of a

particular web of power, we live in a form of time where politics are named out

loud, politics of knowledge: lines of reasoning crossing spaces trying to govern

the production, socialization and use of knowledge, producing several effects of

governmentality, disrupting some old sediment and producing new ways of

subjectivation and liaisons. It’s an educational concern because education is

the formal space that, at least since the illustration, has been in charge of the

production, conservation and socialization of knowledge and today appears in

the middle of every single reflection about society. But is mostly an educational

concern because education deals with the fabrication of subjects, and this

involves the inescapable dimension of the ethic/political ethos which cannot be

reduced to a problem of technical instrumentation, as it is presented in the

dominant approach in current educational policies. Education in the knowledge

society, in the version I’ve been analyzing, is operating as an exclusionary

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system because of bad combination of knowledge, knowledge about

knowledge, and politics of knowledge. Apparently, we are doing a very lousy

job as alchemist’s apprentices with the complication that when the experiment

malfunctions there will not be a master alchemist to fix it.

References

Popkewitz, Tomas (1998) Struggling for the Soul: The Politics of Schooling and
the Construction of the Teacher, New York, Teachers College Press.
---------- (2004) “The Alchemy of the Mathematics Curriculum: Inscriptions
and the Fabrication of the Child”, American Education Research Journal,
Spring 41 (1): 3-34.
---------- (2008) Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform, New York,
Routledge.
Treviño, Ernesto (2009) Horizontes de transformación de la educación superior
en México frente al advenimiento de las sociedades en disputa por el
conocimiento. PhD Dissertation. México: CINVESTAV.