ignorance in education essay

Education and Ignorance: Between the Noun of Knowledge and the Verb of Thinking

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• Published: 29 March 2020
• Volume 39 , pages 577–590, ( 2020 )

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• Tomasz Szkudlarek 1 &
• Piotr Zamojski 1  

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In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage (Prometheus 26 (4): 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of possession of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger's discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion.

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Preliminary Remarks

The connection between ignorance and education, traditionally construed in the framework of the Enlightenment crusade against ignorance, has been invigorated in recent years by numerous references to Jacques Rancière's provocative book where teacher’s ignorance is seen as a condition of emancipatory education, and where inequalities between students’ intellectual capacities should be ignored rather than turned into a target of pedagogical intervention. According to Rancière ( 1991 ), the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos , a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? We will refer to this Rancièrean position later in the paper. However, there is one more context in which ignorance has been discussed and which we want to emphasize. Originally, it appeared in the debates on knowledge economy that highly influenced the tone of educational debates and the blueprints of education policies in recent decades. In that particular iteration, knowledge is seen as capital, and restrictions in the access to knowledge, which one may call the production of ignorance, like patent policies or the enforcement of intellectual property rights, are seen as the condition of securing the (economic) value of knowing.

The shifts and possible collisions between the various modes of ignorance relate to the rearrangement of the dominant understanding of education. The Modern imaginary, where ignorance was supposed to be overcome by the pursuit for knowledge through universal education and lead to social emancipation, has been displaced by the discourse of knowledge economy and its emphasis on skills necessary in the production of knowledge that contributes simultaneously to a distribution of ignorance. These interrelated shifts are in the background of our interest in using the lens of ignorance in the investigation into the relations between knowledge and thinking and how these affect our educational and political imaginaries.

Knowledge and thinking are at the core of what we know as education. As we will speak of them extensively further in the paper, it should suffice now to give a practical example to illustrate their somewhat problematic relations in today’s education driven by the market logic, where high-stakes testing has become the ultimate instrument of assessing its validity. In conversation with our students we have heard that some of them were given a peculiar piece of advice concerning their strategy of answering test questions in secondary school finals: if you do not know the answer to a particular question, do not think and proceed to questions you can answer right away; later will you have time to come back to those problematic ones. However anecdotal it is, this piece of advice points to a serious question of the status of thinking in education that seeks accountability and, therefore, must privilege the countable.

Another distinction that we speak about arrived in the process of writing this paper. Very quickly have we encountered a problem with some inconsistencies of language. The first part of our paper addresses the notion of knowledge, and here we speak of structures and borders, of knowledge seen as a product which has a market value, of politics (in the traditional sense of the word) and economy as the powers which define education in terms of investment. We speak of knowing that becomes reified, commodified, that is dreamt of as a “thing” that can be managed and exchanged for other things. In the second part we speak of thinking which, in fact, starts with things. But these things are thought of as interesting as long as they trigger processes: they make us think and such thinking dissolves the solid; it positions us in-between what there is; it reminds us of the very process of being as flowing through beings. Interestingly, the language of these two parts adjusts itself not to where they start, but to that towards which they aim: it “follows” them. In the first part it follows from processes (like learning) to objects, structures, exclusions and borders. In the second part, it departs from objects towards things and thinking, which brings us close to the very flux of being. The language of the first part of the paper is thus organised around nouns, while in the second part it oscillates around verbs.

A difficulty with theorizing education, we think, is that it cannot be narrated in one language. It has to speak both of structures and of processes, it has to shift between the solid and the liquid. In this respect, as we shall conclude, it operates close to what Rancière describes as the tension, or oscillation between “police” and “politics,” between what Laclau and Mouffe called “politics” and “the political,” and between what Heidegger called “the ontic” and “the ontological”. Remote as these distinctions originally may be, they all speak to the productive tension between that which “is” (like Heidegger’s beings, or the ontic) and the very process of their becoming: the Being of beings, or the ontological in Heidegger’s language. What really matters, and what always slips through our articulations and cannot be made clear, is the very relation between the two, “the third” in between. It is tempting to think that this is where education is positioned as the mediating possibility: in this particular case, between the noun of knowledge and the verb of thinking.

Knowledge—Ignorance

The way we think nowadays of the relations between knowledge, politics and education has been strongly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. Even though Foucault did not speak of education other than as of one of the many sites and practices (like instruction, examination, etc.) where disciplinary power grows to the status of the defining logic of the modern state, the position of education, broadly understood, in his theoretical constructions is far stronger. As Keith Hoskin ( 1990 ) once noted, “the operation of power—knowledge needs a third term: … can that term be other than an educational term?” (p. 52). Footnote 1

The current variety of the knowledge—politics connection is also strongly mediated by education. It has been informed by the discourse of the knowledge society and its preceding concepts, like the knowledge-based economy or the information society, and these notions refer to education with an unceasing frequency. The vision of the knowledge society is not clear, however. It connects vague concepts and metaphors that form an ideological structure which implies, roughly speaking, that the knowledge economy builds (or needs) a knowledge society composed of life-long learning individuals and organisations, that people’s knowledge and skills are valuable assets in such societies, and that the best way of providing for economic growth and social welfare is investing in their learning. In some manifestations of this discourse, human capital investment, as guided by the logic of competition, is balanced by investments in social capital; therefore, it is not only individuals, but also their communities, families and cultures that need investment, that learn, and that therefore “count”. In general, the links between knowledge, politics and economy are inevitably mediated by education, usually re-labelled (with important negative consequences, see Biesta 2006 ) as learning.

This discourse, including its educational component, is clearly dominated by economic rationality to the extent of “genre colonization” (Leitch and Roper 1998 ). However, it has its socially conscious, more spiritual and utopian dimension. This dimension has been expressed in the discourse of social capital, in future-oriented sociological predictions (for instance in Daniel Bell’s forecast that postindustrialism will promote policies oriented towards public good rather than towards cost reductions and economic rationality, Bell 1976 , as cited in Jessop 2008 ) and in such globally circulated documents as the famous UNESCO report written under the guidance of Jacques Delors ( 1996 ). The authors of this report speak about education as “the necessary utopia” believed capable of resolving tensions between the global and the local, the universal and the individual, between tradition and modernity, long-term and short-term considerations, competition and equality of opportunities, between the expansion of knowledge and the limited capacities of its being absorbed by individuals, and—last but not least—between the material and the spiritual (Delors et al. 1996 ). Fully aware of the pressure of economy and of the practical expectations educational audiences have of schools, the authors stress the social, the existential and the ethical as the remedies for the risks and damages brought by the rapid increase in knowledge production, globalization and economic uncertainty. And yet, in spite of its holistic and humanistic attitude, their report—on the rhetorical level, transmitted already by the reference to “treasure” in title of the book—subscribes to the economic rationality which it claims to transcend. This connection is made explicit in a parable the authors use to explicate the nature of “treasure” in learning. Using La Fontaine’s fable on a ploughman who buried treasure in his field to prevent his children from selling the land, they conclude that nowadays it is learning rather than laborious cultivation of land that counts. This transformation of treasure strictly reflects the transformations of capital in modern societies. Investment in land and labour were the factors of production in the classic economy. Delors’s economy is a knowledge economy that depends on the “collective ability to leverage what …. citizens know” (Neef 2009 , p. 5). Delors and his colleagues hope that learning/knowledge will lead from focusing on economic growth to human development (title of Chapter 3 of the report), as well as to a world society and democratic participation. However, economic rationality has costs.

The policies that are involved in this economically informed ideology include competing ideas of investing in people and their knowledges, on the one hand, and cost reductions on the other. As Western economies compete globally with cheaper states with lower wages and less abundant welfare provisions, in neoliberal policies it was cost efficiency rather than growing investment that in fact became the chief aim of reforms in the public sector, which still—in spite of the long-lasting efforts to “rationalize” it along the lines of “new public management”—caters to a vast segment of educational provisions. The dominant, globally promoted solution to this conflict is private investment to supplement deficiencies in public expenditures. For instance, the rapidly growing demand for higher education qualifications was met in many countries with liberalization of state regulations that facilitated the establishment of private, tuition-based higher education institutions. In Poland, for instance, about 300 such institutions were founded in the 1990s, and their demand for academic faculty was resolved by allowing university teachers in public universities to engage in “double full time” employment. Between 1990 and 2005, the number of tertiary education students increased five times, with a comparatively minimal increase in numbers of academic teachers—a 64% increase between 1990 and 2010 (Stankiewicz 2018 , pp. 180–181).

Apart from inconsistencies in the daily practices of the knowledge economy, like mixing the rhetoric of investment in human learning with permanent cost-reduction policies, there is a fundamental difficulty with how we understand the guiding notions of this ideological position: the concepts of the knowledge society, the knowledge economy, knowledge workers, and even the very concept of knowledge are far from clear, not only in theoretical investigations, but also in policy documents. For example, the call for proposals in the EU’s 6th Framework Programme Footnote 2 lists such research areas as “Improving the generation, distribution and use of knowledge and its impact on economic and social development”, “Options and choices for the development of a knowledge-based society” and “The variety of paths towards a knowledge society”. Further, in the section on specific objectives, we are encouraged to “examine the public and private good characteristics of knowledge and to better understand its functions in the European economy and society.” (FP 6 Specific Programme…, 2004 –2006, p. 7). In other words, we need to research and promote the development of a knowledge-based society, but we have no clear idea of what a knowledge society is.

The figure of the knowledge society appears to be, in this account, a rhetorical figure. In terms of Ernesto Laclau’s ( 2005 , 2014 ) theory, it is an empty signifier. In Laclau, the role of such signifiers is to provide ground for political identities in conditions of social heterogeneity, or the fundamental lack of defining logics which could guide attempts at the reconciliation of conflicting social demands. Because society cannot be construed by logical means (Laclau is critical of the Hegelian tradition, and of Marx in particular here; there is no historical logic or structural determination that would define the course of social changes), political identities must be construed rhetorically. Such notions as “nation”,”democracy””social justice” or “knowledge society” cannot be precisely defined, and it is precisely because of this impossibility that they can operate as integrating factors, uniting scattered and conflictual demands into hegemonic policies.

What this juxtaposition of the promotion of knowledge society with Laclau’s theory suggests is that knowledge, learning and education are apparently used as empty and hegemonic signifiers nowadays: they rhetorically create the foundations of one of the nowadays competing political totalities. The discourse of the knowledge society helps to give meaning to such processes as the loss of jobs in industry or the precarization of employment among large cohorts of higher education graduates (Standing 2011 ). It hides behind its elevated rhetoric the divisions and exclusions which build “really existing” knowledge societies. Every social structure is built of differences, and the construction of the knowledge society depends not only on the lines of knowledge production, innovation and learning, but also on the lines of knowledge exclusions. Knowledge can only be defined in relation to the lack of knowledge, to ignorance as its “constitutive outside” in Laclau’s terms, as that which defines its limits, and, thus, marks its territories. Critical theories have long spoken of the destruction, appropriation and exploitation of indigenous knowledges and of the exclusions from knowing, as well as of the narrowing domain of knowledge commons, which nowadays have to be purposefully reconstructed and kept alive as fringe, avant-garde projects of cultural alternatives. The humanistic dimension of this discourse—here represented by Jacques Delors’s report—obliterates such exclusions and subsumes the structure of knowledge inequalities, produced as such in the course of turning knowledge into capital, into the all-inclusive utopia of global learning for global citizenship.

To put it succinctly, the construction of knowledge in contemporary knowledge societies implies the operation and the construction of ignorance. It relates to the transformation of knowledge production and distribution from common knowing and curiosity-driven creativity, the results of which are shared in “knowledge commons,” to profit-driven and procedurally-controlled industrial knowledge production in enclosed domains, followed by protected ownership rights. If knowledge is to “count”, that is, if it should function as an advantage in market competition, it must not be accessible to anyone for free.

The capitalization of academic knowledge affects academic institutions in numerous ways, but its most general impact can be described as undercutting the classic idea of the unity between research and education. In a research project run in four European universities (Dahlgren et al. 2007 ), several aspects of such separation were identified. One illustration is a case reported by one of the students in a university in Poland. A part-time academic teacher, a psychologist also working in a private consultancy company, interrupted her presentation during class to announce that she could not give the students more details because that would constitute selling her knowledge too cheaply. Instead, she invited them to her private company, which provoked indignation on the part of the students. The interview providing this information was conducted in 2002, when such cases were scarce. In 2015, the same university changed the employment rules for its research staff, and all contracts were supplemented with clauses that prohibit employees from publishing research results and from including them in course content until an internal office decides whether they might be commercially valuable.

One of the hypothetical interpretations of such cases in the aforementioned research is that we are witnessing a shift in what can be called “institutional pacts” linking universities with their social milieus (European Commission 2005 ). The emerging pact would be split into two different traits, mediated by two separate “products” of academic work. Both relate to the construction of what Etzkovitz and Leydesdorff ( 1997 ) called a “triple helix” of relations between the world of academe and its political and business milieus. The first pact would link the university to industry on the corporate side, and it is mediated by knowledge production. The second pact would link the university to industry on the labour side, and this one is mediated by skills production .

This separation seems to be supported by more and more evidence nowadays, and its theoretical conceptualization can be found in Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to the knowledge economy. The classic account on the emergence of capitalist economy assumes that there were two necessary conditions to be met: the production of capital, and the production of the working class (Marx 1999 [1887]). The latter was based on the enclosure of common land and the eviction of “commoners,” so that they had no legal means of survival other than wage employment. The worker is, in this perspective, a person who has nothing but his/her hands to sell. It is often claimed that the current transformation of knowledge into capital involves a similar movement (e.g. Phillips 2005 ; Zeller 2008 ; Jessop 2007 ). The massification of higher education is aimed at the production of knowledge workers, and as such they do not have to be equipped with advanced knowledge, nor are they expected to have it by their employers. If today's economy is driven by knowledge production , its possession cannot be expected of its workers. What is needed instead is that they have the skills necessary for such production (Szkudlarek 2010 ).

In this respect, the knowledge economy and its correlate knowledge society emerge within a logic similar to that which guided the emergence of earlier forms of capital. Jessop ( 2007 ) describes the commodification of knowledge, including the resistance to its devastating effects, as following the same stages as those that could be identified in the process of turning land, labour, and money into factors of production and capital in earlier phases of capitalism. The current tendencies to, on the one hand, subordinate knowledge to measurable “impact factors”, to integrate it into the flow of monetary capital (knowledge-technology transfer policies), to expand the intellectual property rights regulations, etc., and, on the other hand, the emergence of the “knowledge commons” movement, especially in its more mainstream varieties, like open access publications, present exactly the same logic as that pertaining to the commodification of earlier forms of assets. Both these movements are part of the same political logic of knowledge capitalism and they clearly repeat earlier developments of the system.

In this context, the split between skills education and knowledge education in academic institutions should be read in a radical sense, as a condition of the construction of knowledge capitalism. Its development implies the production, distribution, and management of ignorance as the border of knowledge enclosures. As Joanne Roberts and John Armitage write ( 2008 ),

the knowledge economy is precisely rooted in the production, distribution, and consumption of ignorance and lack of information. What we are suggesting, then, is that the so-called knowledge economy is one wherein the production and use of knowledge also implies the creation and exploitation of ignorance. For not only knowledge but also ignorance now plays a main role in the formation of advanced global capitalism. (p. 345)

To put it differently, when knowledge, instead of being a common good that overcomes ignorance and enables emancipation and rationalisation of social relations, becomes a commodity that one can produce, sell, or purchase, it cannot be shared freely. It starts to be clear that some people have to stay ignorant about certain matters; that knowledge economy, and with it economically controlled education, is about distribution of who knows and who doesn’t know what, rather than about popular enlightenment. Education in Modernist sense, i.e. as acquisition of knowledge and the construction of emancipated peoples is being displaced by the knowledge economy’s emphasis on skills and the production of knowledge workers that are ignorant about that knowledge which makes market advantage possible. In other words, the functioning of a knowledge society and a knowledge economy requires making particular persons ignorant about things that concern them, in order to do business or implement a policy (cf. Proctor and Schiebinger 2008 ).

The Leap into Thinking

Ignorance, as the constitutive outside of the discourse of the knowledge economy and the knowledge society, is thus incorporated and managed by its very logic. It is included as excluded (cf. Agamben 1998 ). But does this mean, however, that the discourse of the knowledge economy and the knowledge society does not have an exterior that delimits its presence? On the contrary. What should draw our attention is the absolute absence of thinking within its limits. As not matching the structure of that discourse, thinking is removed from sight. This happens by conceiving knowledge and ignorance in terms of an opposition.

Being opposed, knowledge and ignorance refer to the difference between power to control and being excluded. In this instance, knowledge is an advantage, a desired feature of the subject, being decisive in determining its social, political and economic potency. Hence it is understood as something one possesses and manages: capital. Having knowledge means being aware of things and being able to control them, that is being able to perform the power that knowledge gives (cf. Bacon [ 1620 ] 2000 ). Being related to power, knowledge is an advantage that marks the superiority of its owner, both over the subject of knowledge, and over the ignorant.

However, lack of knowledge, as a state of not being aware of things and of not being able to control them, not only signifies those who are themselves under the control of others. Being ignorant means also being put in the position of being ignored, being not taken into account, being placed out of sight. In this instance, education is conceived in terms of enlightenment, as the move from ignorance towards knowledge, from inferiority towards superiority: the move of emancipation.

Of course this will never happen: nature itself makes sure of it; there will always be delay, always inequality. But one can thus continually exercise the principle of reducing it… (Rancière 1991 , p. 119).

Indeed, as expressed above, according to Jacques Rancière, setting in motion a practice based on the assumption of inequality leads not to the emancipation of anyone, but to the verification of inequality itself. Since having knowledge is an advantage, a property of a person (in both senses) that makes him/her superior to those deprived of it, education, as the move from ignorance towards knowledge, defines the relation between the master and the student in terms of subordination, as the relation between those who have knowledge and those who do not have it (yet). But such a relation, Rancière ( 1991 ) argues, is not emancipative, but reproductive: it reproduces the inequality which it assumes, by making education “an indefinite process of coming closer. Never will the student catch up with the master, nor the people with its enlightened elite” (p. 120).

Education can emancipate, but this requires a different assumption shaping the pedagogical relation: that we are all of equal intelligence. Only if we assume equal intelligence a priori, can it become true in educational practice. However, the equality of intelligence is verified through the performance of the equality of ignorance:

…whoever wishes to emancipate someone must interrogate him in the manner of men and not in the manner of scholars, in order to be instructed, not to instruct. And that can only be performed by someone who effectively knows no more than the student, who has never made the voyage before him – the ignorant master. (Rancière 1991 , pp. 29–30).

So it is the equality of ignorance that conditions the verification of the equality of intelligence (cf. p. 31), as it is the ignorance of the master that conditions the student’s appearance as Anthropos , the being who can be asked: “what do you think about it?” (p. 36). In such a way, the intelligence of the student reveals itself to itself, nurturing the experience of being able to (cf. Masschelein and Simons 2013 ).

But is this ignorance simply opposed to knowledge as not-knowing? On the contrary, the ignorant student knows her language, her trade, her tool, and their uses (Rancière, 1991 , p. 36, cf. p. 28)—what she lacks is the awareness of her intellectual capabilities. The ignorant master knows how to interrogate her students and judge their attention (pp. 29–31), but she does not possess the knowledge about the subject of the lesson. The equality of ignorance does not, therefore, mean an intellectual emptiness of not knowing anything, but it concerns something from the world that is to be examined; it concerns the subject of thought.

Ignorance—Thinking

Hence, Rancière not only indicates the link between intelligence, ignorance, and thinking, but he also points to thinking (using intelligence) as the realm in which the opposition between knowledge and ignorance falls apart, the realm in which what is understood as knowledge and ignorance is being displaced.

We believe that this displacement can be grasped with reference to the notion of inter-esse , and that it eventually points beyond the issue of emancipation toward the matters of concern or attention to the world. In order to make that clear, we will now turn to Martin Heidegger’s lectures on thinking ( 1968 ). According to him we think because “some things make an appeal to us to give them thought, to turn to them in thought: to think them” (p. 6).

So it starts with a thing. Naturally a thing is not an object. It is not made for use in our everyday trade and traffic (cf. Heidegger 1962 , p. 439), it is not functionally involved in [ Bewandtnis ] other objects (p.115), is not ready-to-hand [ Zuhandenheit ] (p. 98). An object [ der Gegenstand ]—something which stands over against (Heidegger 1977b , p. 162)—is an effect of re-presentation [ Vor-stellen ], which is being set upon [ stellen ] for ordering [ bestellen ] as standing-reserve [ Bestand ] (Heidegger 1973 , p. 87, 97; 2000 , p. 72, 83; 1977a , p. 17). An object is a resource not to think about, but to be calculated in our enterprises (cf. 1977b ).

By contrast, the thing refers to “anything that in any way bears upon men, concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter for discourse” (Heidegger 1971 , p. 174). So if objects are managed , things are posing questions . The thing gathers meanings of human concern; it focuses people’s attention not as a resource ( standing-reserve ), but as a self-standing and intrinsic part of their world.

Therefore the thing is thought-provoking ; it gives us to think (Heidegger 1968 , p. 4, 6); it is the beginning of thinking. In order to think one has to move from surrounding objects of daily disposal towards a thing calling on us to think (p. 115).

Heidegger writes:

“Thinking is thinking when it answers to what is most thought-provoking” (p. 28).

Originally this sentence says:

“Das Denken denkt , wenn es dem Bedenklichsten entspricht” (Heidegger 1952/ 2002 , p. 30). Footnote 3

This could be rendered literally as:

“Thinking thinks when it responds and corresponds to what is the most important to think about.”

First of all, we must acknowledge Heidegger’s leitmotif, ontological difference, turning us from being [ das Seiende ] towards Being [ sein ]. Thinking, in his argument, is not conceived of as a noun [ das Denken ], but as a verb [ denken ]. It is something that happens, proceeds, moves, and so it cannot be grasped with the help of intellectual tools delivered by a Western metaphysics that perceives what stands-still and is a result of something else, what is stable, closed, and can be calculated, ordered and managed – an object (cf. Heidegger 1973 , 2000 ). Thinking is not an object to possess. It is not an outcome that could be owned. It is not someone’s desired feature, a piece of capital increasing one’s possibilities in life. Thinking is a path, a way of being, one of which one can be deprived.

Let us repeat:

Thinking, therefore, is a response to a call of the thing to turn towards it in thought. Thinking is a response to something in the world that is thought-provoking, that gives us to think (Heidegger 1968 , p. 4). It is a relation to a thing that inclines us towards itself, touches and concerns us, as that which is the most serious [ das Bedenklichste ], what is most to be thought about. Therefore, thinking is a gift from the world that requires a kind of attention that is sensitive not to the attractiveness and functionality of objects, but to the seriousness and importance of the thing. Thinking requires being interested in the world; that is, it requires to be inter-esse : “to be among and in the midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with it” (Heidegger 1968 , p. 5).

To be interested does not mean to control, to manage objects (revealed in the ordering mode as standing-reserve), but to listen, to be attentive, to be near, to be in the neighbourhood (Heidegger 1968 , p. 12, 17; 1971 , p. 166, 177). Heidegger calls this attention as being drawn .

At first sight, such a way of being could be opposed to ignorance. Inter-esse signifies letting appear, being turned to, paying attention to, and not ignoring (the world or a thing). However, in such a case ignorance does not simply mean being unaware of things (as it was when ignorance was opposed to knowledge), but it also means not paying attention—which seems to be also the case of knowledge concerning objects in the realm of Enframing [ Ge-stell ].A technological mode of revealing the concealed, in which all that presents itself appears as an object (“objectness,” as Heidegger calls it; Heidegger 1977b , p. 163) is not inter-ess e. It orders the re-presentations of things as a standing-reserve of Ge-stell . Therefore, such knowledge is not interested in things, is not paying attention, that is, it ignores everything that does not fit its frame. Paradoxically, it could thus be called ignorant.

Does this mean that thinking is opposed to ignorance? On the contrary: ignorance makes the movement of thought ongoing. However, this movement requires ignorance to stem from inter-esse , that is, it requires ignorance to provoke the knowing being into being drawn by the thing of its interest.

In other words: thinking requires a play between knowledge and ignorance, which makes us both aware and attentive, but simultaneously not sure and without power to control. In Heidegger’s ( 1968 ) terms, it is about the withdrawal of the thought-provoking thing:

What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all. Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we are drawing toward. What draws, attracts us by its withdrawal. (p. 9)

We are attracted to a thing because of the play between what we know and what we do not know. We are paying attention to a thing because of what we do not know, and because of what we are aware of. Both, knowledge and ignorance, drive the movement of thought. However, we are talking here about knowledge that is aware of its limits (of its own ignorance), and about ignorance that is interested, is paying attention, is being drawn. Ignorance that does not ignore.

The withdrawal of what is thought-provoking means that being drawn never reaches its fulfilment. Therefore, thinking is infinite, radically open and, in a way, unproductive (cf. Masschelein 1996 ). So it does not end with a result that embodies its nature, purpose, or sense. Thinking is not encompassed by its product—in fact, it has not got any product at all. Being drawn into what withdraws as thought-provoking, that is as the most serious thing to think about, does not have its “natural” end. Naturally, one who thinks can stop the movement of his/her thoughts and turn away from the thing of his/her interest. However, stopping does not mean resulting in or producing. Therefore Heidegger ( 1968 ) notes:

Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences.

Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom.

Thinking solves no cosmic riddles.

Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act. (p. 159)

But does not thinking bring something to our world? Is being unproductive something more than just being empty, being meaningless? What is the sense of thinking?

Let us turn to Hannah Arendt ( 2003 ) here, who reminds us of one of the similes Socrates applied to himself: a gadfly (p. 173). Thinking is a wind , she repeats, following him (and Heidegger), that unfreezes solidified convictions. “Thinking is equally dangerous to all creeds and, by itself, does not bring forth any new creed” (p. 178).

It is therefore destructive in nature; it dismantles the prescribed order of things, disintegrates our knowing; and so it is a painful experience, like a bite of a gadfly to those rooted in, or attached to the current form of status quo . Thinking is dangerous, disruptive; it is an excess that exceeds what is expected, acknowledged, acquired. And although it does not bring forth any new creed , it opens up a space for the new to appear. Hence, apart from its disruptive side thinking is an affirmation of potentiality and refers to an educational imaginary of study practices (Lewis 2015 ; Vlieghe 2013 ). Footnote 4

Following Rancière, we may say that thinking, as displacing the notion of ignorance, stands in the position of “politics” not only by questioning the ways knowledge societies are structured along knowledge possession and exclusion, but also by making room in the “police order” for the new to come.

In Jacques Rancière’s political theory, the social world is constituted by two aesthetics. The first one is a categorising, or mapping structure, which distributes social beings along the lines of visibility, audibility, or, in a general sense, availability to the senses. Some things are visible, some other are not. Some humans are visible and audible, some other ones are not. Their visibility is possible in certain places and certain times and impossible in other ones. Subjects can be seen and heard when they appear in the right time and the right place, and it is just some subjects who can be seen/heard in particular places. Such an aesthetic, such rules of the division of the sensible (in Rancière’s language), Rancière calls “police” ( 1999 , 2010 ).

The second aesthetic is that of disruption of the first one. It resorts to demonstration, to the appearance of the “wrong” people in the “wrong” places, to claiming space and time for the presence of those who were not expected to be there or to speak. It disrupts the police order and creates conditions for its reconfiguration. This aesthetic is called “politics” by Rancière.

The two modes of ignorance we have referred to in this paper are rooted in these two aesthetics. Ignorance, thus, appears “in the mode of exclusion,” as the constitutive outside to the knowledge economy, and, as such, it is absorbed to that economic realm as an object to be managed in a way which secures the commodification of knowledge. Ignorance also appears “in the mode of emancipation” in a Rancièrean sense, as linked with thinking and, therefore, involved in an interplay with knowledge that moves the Anthropos towards the thing and its call to give it a thought. As we have suggested in the introduction to this paper, the first of these modes finds its expression in the aesthetic dominated by nouns: it speaks of ignorance as opposed to knowledge, which itself is seen as plural and property—bound objects to be managed. In this aesthetic—the “police” aesthetic of a knowledge society—the reification and commodification of knowledge and the rearticulation of knowledge as capital find a “natural” setting. By the same token, the production and distribution of ignorance become a means of social exclusion, as the ignorant is placed in the position of being ignored. The same mode is one of the key aesthetics of contemporary educational practice, where knowledge is also parcelled into separate chunks, which can be represented, listed, classified, transmitted, absorbed, digested, and excreted in the form of ticks on test sheets, and where ignorance can be battled, marginalised, eradicated, and simultaneously produced, distributed, and ranked.

The second mode appears to be more complex in this respect. As we have suggested, its aesthetic oscillates around verbs , and it speaks not about an opposition, but about a play between knowledge and ignorance, therefore displacing their meanings from the “police” aesthetic of properties, placements, positions, and structures, towards movements, events, and ruptures of “politics.” Knowledge and ignorance are in play; they are intertwined as someone’s being aware and paying attention, as knowing ignorance, not ignoring and being ignored, but staying among the things of interest ( inter-esse ), being attentive to, concerned for, drawn into what withdraws. Being in someone’s turn toward a thing which is calling for attention, ignorance and knowledge drive the movement of thought that disrupts the stand-still of the structure of the status quo , and—as such—makes the thing/the world open for renewal. Therefore, in the aesthetics of “politics,” the play of the ignorance that does not ignore and the knowledge that is aware of its ignorance, opens up a space for the experience of being able to happen. In this case, education might be understood as time and space for an unproductive being drawn by what withdraws as the most serious and thought-provoking, by the thing of one’s interest. It requires being attentive, sensitive to what appears in the neighbourhood of our Being as calling to give it a thought. Such education is driven by the question: what calls us to thinking?

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Szkudlarek, T., Zamojski, P. Education and Ignorance: Between the Noun of Knowledge and the Verb of Thinking. Stud Philos Educ 39 , 577–590 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09718-9

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Introduction, inspiration, instructions, ignorant supplement, acknowledgements.

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Ignorance: Aesthetic unlearning

Eds . This paper forms part of a Special Issue titled ‘Beyond Virtue and Vice: Education for a Darker Age’, in which the editors invited authors to engage in exercises of ‘transvaluation’. Certain apparently settled educational concepts (from agency and fulfilment to alienation and ignorance) can be radically reinterpreted such that virtues can be seen as vices, and vices as virtues. The editors encouraged authors to employ polemics and some occasional exaggeration to revalue the educational values that are too readily accepted within contemporary educational discourses.

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This article proceeds from a consideration of what John Baldacchino calls ‘viable ignorance’, attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of certain elements of Barbara Johnson's ‘positive ignorance’. It considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of experience, and the cultivation of complementary dispositions, where the knowing, egocentric subject is transformed into, or undermined as, what Nietzsche calls ‘a medium of overpowering forces’. The disposition itself is outlined through close readings of key elements of Nietzsche's notebooks, Lyotard's final chapter of Libidinal Economy (1993), and Stockhausen's lecture, ‘Intuitive Music’ (1971) and developed through supplemental practice-as-research activity in sound. The intention of this paper is to explore the space of aesthetic ignorance as committedly as possible, without reverting constantly to positive ignorance.

Recent research has posited an educational form of unlearning called ‘positive ignorance’ (Bojesen, 2019 ), utilisable as an active means of epistemological resistance against sedimentary and received knowledge. Positive ignorance is the putting into question of, and sometimes moving on from, the knowledge we think we have, and asking where it might be just or helpful to do so. It is a practice resistant to epistemological certainty and productive of a critical form of educational resistance which, while bearing many similarities, is nonetheless distinct from what Jean-François Lyotard calls ‘anamnesic resistance’ (Bojesen, 2021 ), which is more fully resistant to educational imposition, including its own. Anamnesic resistance, in the context of both education and art, is the persistence of a memory of the thought that thought can exceed what has been learned and what can be taught. The present article attempts to further distinguish the active form of epistemological resistance, aligned with positive ignorance, from a more aesthetically rooted and oriented form of ‘anamnesic resistance’ that will be called ‘aesthetic ignorance’.

As John Baldacchino argues, art, as unlearning, ‘reveals how we have no choice but to oppose a notion of reality that we have learned to construct as if it were a built edifice’ ( 2020 , p. x). This opposition does not, as with positive ignorance, to some extent, rely on a confidence in finding more and better knowledge and instead veers towards uncertainty and non-knowledge. For Baldacchino, ‘[contrary] to the romantic foundation on which we presume to build a meaningful aesthetic education, the arts always reveal why we must reject these edificial pedagogical certainties’. (p. x). While Baldacchino's primary reference point, in his Art as Unlearning , is visual art, his arguments are no less applicable to sound and music as art. Art, for Baldacchino, is not only a means of unlearning the pedagogical impositions, but it also perpetually unlearns itself, it is ‘a human act—a doing —that constantly needs to unlearn itself. Likewise, art's poetic scoping is an act of making that is constantly unmade . Art's poetics of practice—its making —is an act of unmaking’ (p. 36). He goes further, arguing that, ‘the unlearnt , the unmade allows us to reclaim our right to our contingency . Only as contingent beings could we claim the yet unclaimed and the already unlearnt. This is where knowledge begins to unravel, and where it is constantly returned as a way that knows by way of what it seeks to doubt and of which it seeks to retain a viable ignorance’ (p. 36). An aesthetic education, then, that pursues and is constituted through a form of aesthetic—or even aestheticised —ignorance. As this article will show, aesthetic ignorance relies more on a Coleridgean suspension of disbelief—behaving as if— than entry into any kind of ontological ur-moment.

Where positive ignorance, for Barbara Johnson ( 1989 ), makes received knowledge the subject of doubt and critique, aesthetic ignorance actively operates within the space of ignorance in an often non-critical manner. Art, though, can fulfil the obligations of both forms of ignorance, acting more or less critically, depending on the experience, the context and the intention. Aesthetic ignorance is neither necessary nor desirable in all artmaking and can even be a significant barrier to art as a more incisive form of critique or reflection. Art that strives for political, social, or even philosophical critique is in many ways better served by positive ignorance than aesthetic ignorance, and, it could be argued that the suspension of disbelief required in more extreme examples of aesthetic ignorance artificially ‘removes’ often significant contextualising, critical and reflective components of artistic practice. While this article seeks to explore this extreme, future work will explore how positive ignorance and aesthetic ignorance might act effectively together.

[W]e have tried to describe the birth of unconscious musical systems, shaped simultaneously by practice and ear training, which makes the members of a musical civilization so skilled at recognizing features that are relevant (which play a part in the structure) and at the same time make them practically deaf to nonrelevant features—the former being at the cost of the latter. We can now measure more efficiently the power of this training and the whole process of learning needed to unlearn it and hear the music of others. (p. 227)

While Schaeffer's Treatise is, to a great extent, dedicated to this active process of unlearning by means of positive ignorance, the present article follows the trajectory of ignorance away from knowledge, to where it can become a resource for thinking what might be called aesthetic educational experience at a distance from knowledge. Ignorance, then, is not as a means of criticality but as the diminution of knowledge. The article considers Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's reflections on modes of experience, and the cultivation of complementary dispositions, where the knowing, egocentric subject is transformed into or undermined as what Nietzsche calls ‘a medium of overpowering forces’. The disposition itself is outlined through close readings of key elements of Nietzsche's notebooks, Lyotard's final chapter of Libidinal Economy ( 1993 ), and Stockhausen's lecture, ‘Intuitive Music’ ( 1971 ), and then employed as a means of reflecting on the broader conditions, especially the extent and limits, of educational experience.

This article, then, explores the space of what Baldacchino calls ‘viable ignorance’, attempting to take leave from the critical and pedagogical obligations of ‘positive ignorance’, as represented by Schaeffer's approach. Where Schaeffer's primary focus is the pedagogical process for retraining the ear, thus potentially privileging the listener rather than the artist, my own focus here is more acutely directed towards the aspects of the creative experience that might be described as aesthetic ignorance. The approach taken is, no doubt, at the limits of intellectuality, and, perhaps especially for Stockhausen, the theoretical arguments developed are often more of a means towards a particular orientation away from knowledge rather than robust theory in and of themselves. It would be straightforward to provide a deconstructive critique of most of the assumptions made by the authors cited in the text that follows; however, the intention of this paper is to explore the space of aesthetic ignorance as committedly as possible, without reverting constantly to positive ignorance.

[W]hen you become like what I call a radio receiver, you are no longer satisfied with expressing yourself, you are not really interested in yourself at all. There is nothing really to express. Then you will be amazed what happens to you, when this state is achieved; when you become aware of what happens through you, even for short moments, you will be quite astonished. You become a medium. (Stockhausen, 1971 , p. 125)

This description is remarkable in its similarity to Lyotard's description of the ‘conductivity’ of the ‘good energy conductor’ (Lyotard, 2020 , p. 36) in Libidinal Economy , a state that can only be attained ‘by disinvesting the channelling and exclusive dispositifs called the ego, property, the closed voluminous body’ (Lyotard, 1993 , p. 269). Lyotard opposes this to Bildung , which he describes as a ‘movement of conquest, the accumulative journey of the self, the voyage of initiation which is also the phenomenology of mind’ (Lyotard, 1993 , p. 264). Neither is good or bad, in a moral sense, though they are, nonetheless, distinct; the former lending itself more to a receptive, intuitive, even somewhat passive, disposition, while the latter is more likely to affirm or instantiate an ‘author’ as an authority.

Keats said that the poet is a chameleon, and Hofmannstal that he had no ego, but this is not enough, it is not just the poets who should have this romantic privilege, already attributed to them and to the gods by Plato; let everything go, become conductors of hot and cold, of sweet and sour, the dull and the shrill, theorems and screams, let it make its way over you, without ever knowing whether it will work or not, whether it will result in an unheard-of, unseen, untasted, unthought, unexperienced, effect, or not. (Lyotard, 1993 , pp. 269–270)

Lyotard maintained the possibility of this mode of being and continued to explore its possibility, explaining in a recently translated 1987 interview, that, ‘One of the current aims of my work is to show that there is, I would not say an ontology, but a mode of relation to something which is very certain within the given, but which also transcends those very empty forms within which the given is habitually synthesised. It is there that I would find presence, in short, a kind of stupefaction or stupidity suspending the activity of mind.’ Crucially, though, this experience ‘cannot be a presence since truly the mind is absent from it’ (Lyotard, 2020 , p. 114).

His logical prioritisation of ‘relation’ over ‘ontology’ and ‘stupefaction’ over ‘presence’ is strongly associated with the breaking of habits, a topic he had explored, with specific reference to music and another important Lyotardian notion, anamnesis, in a lecture given at the Sorbonne the previous year. Anamnesis—a memory of the thought that thought can exceed what has been learned and what can be taught—can also be perceived as a form of (educational) resistance to imposed education (see Bojesen, 2021 , p. 3, for a detailed engagement with anamnesis). It is a means of going beyond what is given; in the case of his 1986 lecture, the ‘musical habits that have sustained [contemporary music] as constraints’ and ‘the regulations imposed by schools and conservatoires ’ (Lyotard, 1991 , p. 168). This resonates with Lyotard's more broadly conceived invocation to, ‘Hatch a plot without a program, a plot of intensities. Don't look for anything else, make yourself a good energy conductor. Blow up the boundary markers that delimit the field, the demarcations’ (Lyotard, 2020 , p. 36).

If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one's system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation—in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice. (Nietzsche, 1969 , p. 300)

The conscious subject works on itself, with and against itself, in order to be accessible to the eventuality. The musical gesture strikes the ear, thus prepared for being unprepared, like an event. Not because it emerges unexpectedly, since on the contrary, it will have been awaited and violently wished for. But it is an event insofar as the subject giving issue to it did not and does not know what this event is, what it consists in, as one says. The composer does not control it. (Lyotard, 1997 , pp. 218–219)

receive any exceptional flash of intuition, going beyond what I know of the past, if there were not a constant stream of new influences on me, coming from all of humanity and its achievements, and the interferences of their vibrations. And equally, influences from outer space, from the stars and centres of energy that emit waves that are structured in a particular way. When I compose I become aware of the fact that the important creative insights are those I cannot explain. Even with the sharpest intellectual training, they remain inexplicable. (pp. 29–30)

Stockhausen's thinking on intuition is, then, remarkably in keeping with Lyotard's emphasis on relation and stupefaction, as are his references to energy and anamnesic approach to going beyond what he knows of the past. Its superseding of ‘intellectual training’ does not commit the latter to irrelevance, instead it emphasises the need to stretch beyond its limitations and expectations, in a manner that is proactive while not primarily progressive or developmental. The defining characteristics of this form of experience might, instead, be receptivity and conductivity.

It is not a question of referring the responsibility for the effect to the cause, of saying: if this discourse, if this face, this music, produce these effects, it is because … It is precisely not a matter of analysis (not even ‘schizoanalysis’), in a discourse that will necessarily be one of knowledge, but rather of sufficiently refining ourselves, of becoming sufficiently anonymous conducting bodies, not in order to stop the effects, but to conduct them into new metamorphoses, in order to exhaust their metamorphic potential [ puissance ], the force [ puissance ] of effects that travels through us. (Lyotard, 1993 , p. 269)

This conception of experience and the ego-dissimulating disposition it implies for Stockhausen, Lyotard and Derrida, especially as understood in terms of emphasis on affirmation, relation, stupefaction, intuition and inspiration, presents a worldview where it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of ‘education’ in any contemporaneously dominant sense. Knowledge is replaced by stupefaction, criticality is replaced by affirmation, relation (of effects) breaks down the distinctions between individuals as well as the shoring up of the ego and ‘I’. Although such a worldview is radical, it, perhaps unsurprisingly, finds a precedent in Nietzsche.

a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a fixed, iron quantity of force which grows neither larger nor smaller, which doesn't exhaust but only transforms itself, as a whole unchanging in size, an economy without expenditure and losses, but equally without increase, without income, enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary, not something blurred, squandered, not something infinitely extended, instead, as a determinate force set into a determinate space, and not into a space that is anywhere ‘empty’ but as force everywhere, as a play of forces and force-waves simultaneously one and ‘many’, accumulating here while diminishing there, an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms, shooting out from the simplest into the most multifarious, from the stillest, coldest, most rigid into the most fiery, wild, self-contradictory, and then coming home from abundance to simplicity, from the play of contradiction back to the pleasure of harmony, affirming itself even in this sameness of its courses and years, blessing itself as what must eternally return, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue—this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery world of dual delights, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, unless there is a goal in the happiness of the circle, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself—do you want a name for this world? (Nietzsche, 2003 , pp. 38–39)

The name he gives to this world is ‘ the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves too are this will to power—and nothing besides’. This passage is one of the few places where Nietzsche explicitly defines what he calls ‘the will to power’, although it resonates with many other tenets of his philosophy, including the previously cited passage on inspiration.

For education, there are substantial difficulties posed by Nietzsche's description of the world as the will to power and Lyotard's description of becoming ‘sufficiently anonymous conducting bodies’ (Lyotard, 1993 , p. 269); a state of relation that seems highly compatible with the world as the will to power. Both approaches de-prioritise egocentric or authorial agency, conceiving of the subject as an effect of a plurality of effects (not causes). Such a perspective on human experience and of the characteristics of the world is, conversely, highly incompatible with common educational logics, where the subject is reasonably clearly determined, and on a path of a linearly progressive education, the effect of definite and limited causes (teaching, reading, as well as some other forms of clearly defined experience). Nietzsche and Lyotard do not deny that education and experience can be perceived in these more limited ways, yet they both gesture towards a more expansive and less determinable ecology of experience, which gives little or nothing to these perceptual modes. As such, Nietzsche and Lyotard's thinking on these topics is both mostly irrelevant to educational thought and practice, and indicative of the contingency and fallibility of dominant modes of conceiving of education.

It might also, though, be possible to conceive of Lyotard, Nietzsche and Stockhausen's seemingly non-educational approaches to experience as being hyper-educational. Unconstrained by accumulated social and philosophical conceptions of the subject (which we might also call the ego) and educational practices, they open up the possibility of education as a much more broadly conceived field, in many ways coterminous (or at least indistinguishable) from transformative experience in general. Their descriptions of beings as a ‘radio receiver’ or ‘medium’ (Stockhausen, 1971 , p. 125), ‘merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces’ (Nietzsche, 1969 , p. 300), and ‘conductors of hot and cold, of sweet and sour, the dull and the shrill, theorems and screams’ (Lyotard, 1993 , 269), suggest highly receptive and conductive modes of experience, ‘of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying’ (Nietzsche, 2003 , pp. 38–39). It produces a conception of education distinct from the idea of education as a descriptor for the perpetually accumulated character, knowledge and skills of an individual, opening it instead on to near-immediate experience and its effects.

The educational emphasis on this form of experience can be reversed to perceive it not primarily as an educational experience but as a state of being that a particular education and cultivation of perceptual practices can help to produce, that is, through reading and applying the thought of Lyotard, Nietzsche and Stockhausen, or perhaps through listening to Stockhausen's compositions. This would be an education in aesthetic ignorance rather than the experience of aesthetic ignorance itself. Clearly, Lyotard, Stockhausen and Nietzsche believe that such an education is warranted because of the proximity its results might have to what they perceive as the ‘truth’ of existence and experience. And, to some extent, one might have to agree with their perceptions to appreciate the significance of such an education. Certainly, many genres of educational philosophy might be able to justify complete rejection of such an approach, within the restricted logic of their own self-justification, though, from Lyotard's perspective, in the context of the differend, ‘A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse’ (Lyotard, 1988 , p. xi). As such, their ‘genre(s)’ of philosophy can only legitimately be judged by their own rules.

If Stockhausen and Nietzsche are to be believed, such an education could bring about the expansion of one's inner universe (Stockhausen, 1971 , p. 32) as well as happiness (Nietzsche, 2003 , p. 38). Admittedly vague and optimistic claims, neither of which appears in Lyotard's, more neutral, Libidinal Economy .

Although Nietzsche and Lyotard describe in philosophical terms how their world views might be understood, and the thinking they believe necessary to alter one's disposition in a manner favourable to appreciating them, Stockhausen provides practical instructions for how this might be achieved more immediately in music. Far from simply a theoretical discussion, Stockhausen, in his lecture on ‘Intuitive Music’, addresses several of his own compositions, designed with these principles in mind, even providing scores as examples. These scores, though, are not typical sheet-music scores, comprised of standard musical notation and symbols, indicating pitches, chords and rhythms. Instead, they are more direct instructions, written only in words, that do not indicate anything specific about what should be played. Stockhausen introduces the lecture by making clear that he does not perceive his approach as improvisational, or necessitating free improvisation, which he suggests is a practice ordinarily located within specific genres, and therefore relying on its traits. He avoids ‘the word improvisation because it always means there are certain rules: of style, of rhythm, of harmony, of melody, of the order of sections, and so on’ (Stockhausen, 1971 , pp. 112–113).

We started playing in a courtyard before the public arrived, then after about two and half hours the musicians left, one by one, still playing and disappeared into the forest, from time to time coming back into the courtyard and disappearing again until it all ended at about three o'clock in the morning. (Stockhausen, 1971 , p. 116)

By successfully attempting to behave as if one has ‘an infinite amount of time and space’, for Stockhausen, not only is there no ‘need to think when it is finished, or whether anybody is listening or not’, the musician reaches a state of mind where they ‘don't care whether [they] die in the meantime, or if the sound may be too long for you to finish playing, or if the space you need is greater than the hall, or your instrument, or your own body can contain’ (Stockhausen, 1971 , pp. 116–117). This approach would not be valid in the context of epistemology and can only be accessed through the viable ignorance of the suspension of disbelief, as Stockhausen makes no provision for performers who might be unable to suspend their disbelief in this way. An example of how this piece has been interpreted was recorded in February 1974 (the same year Lyotard's Libidinal Economy was published) by Catherine Christer Hennix and Hans Isgren, under the original German title, Unbegrenzt (Hennix, 2020 ). In this instance, the single instructive line from Stockhausen provokes more than 50 minutes of genre-less music, utilising recitation, percussion, electronics and a bowed gong, perhaps performing what Lyotard calls an ‘affirmative pseudo-theory of libidinal time, without reference to a subjectivity, even empty’. (Lyotard, 2020 , p. 36).

Far from only being accessible to trained classical musicians owning expensive instruments, due to radical innovations in personal technology over the last decade, specifically through Apps for the iPhone and iPad in the Apple music store and (to a lesser extent) its Android equivalent, it is now possible for owners of smartphones or tablets to download simple or advanced musical instruments, usually for prices under £10. Apple's own entry-level Digital Audio Workstation, Garageband, is free on their devices and contains a large number of fully digital and sample instruments, as well as recording and editing facilities. This opens up accessibility for all types of musical creativity, from the generic to the experimental, to those who have these devices and are interested in exploring sound, even in a casual manner. As such, Stockhausen's philosophy of intuitive music, and the ability to engage with the expansion of the ‘inner universe’, he suggests it offers, is also much more easily accessible to those who might be inclined to explore its effects on themselves. Even though the works from the collection he discusses in ‘Intuitive Music’, ‘AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN’, are for ensembles, it would not be difficult to adapt them for individual performers. Equally, prospective performers could also turn to Nietzsche and Lyotard for prescient provocations (perhaps taking a sentence or passage as a starting point for a creative framing), if the similarities drawn between their philosophies and Stockhausen's Intuitive Music, outlined in this article, are valid. In a sense, the untrained musical performer, able to leave their sedimentary knowledge of various genres of music to one side, might be the ideal subject for Stockhausen's instructions. Though, Stockhausen does suggest that, ‘The best intuitive musician is really at one with his instrument, and knows where to touch and what to do in order to make it resonate so that the inner vibrations that occur in the player can immediately be expressed as material vibrations in the body of the instrument’ (1971, p. 123).

To engage with sound in this manner makes possible an education in something close to, or at least closely resembling, the experiences and dispositions outlined in Nietzsche and Lyotard's ‘world views’, where the ‘subject’ (at least in theory) becomes a medium of overpowering forces, a conductor of effects, a radio receiver, rather than an agent, an authority or a cause of effects. Of course, Nietzsche and Lyotard's suggestion is that while this experience might help to make the existential conditions they describe more apparent, those conditions are at play or in force in all experiences, even if we do not perceive them as such. Reconfiguring perceptions to see subjective or socially accepted certainties, insides and outsides, and linear progressions, as aberrations in such an existence, rather than their fundamental character, might be one of the lessons such an experience might provide. Stockhausen's instructions guide the performer towards ignorance, moving them away from accumulated musical knowledge and understanding, and even their own logic and rationality, guided instead only by a singular dictum and their intuition. No doubt knowledge, as well as residues of social pressures and expectations, cannot be entirely evacuated but, even so, disposing oneself towards such an evacuative possibility through a suspension of disbelief might nonetheless provide a stimulating educational experience, at a distant remove from common conceptions of educational experience.

Think NOTHING Wait until it is absolutely still within you When you have attained this begin to play

As soon as you start to think, stop and try to re-attain the state of NON-THINKING Then continue playing

—and so on. (Stockhausen, 1971 , p. 120)

At the extreme of self-imposed ignorance, ‘IT’ is impatient for ignorance, an impatient ignorance, which is active in terms of its material results, despite being separated from wilful thought. Stockhausen goes on to elaborate on the successes of the performance of this piece, as well as notable themes that seemed to return from performance to performance, as well as admitting, ‘sometimes you get rubbish’ (Stockhausen, 1971 , p. 121). Failures, though, come from ‘when preformed material appears, citations, when you are reminded of something you already know’ (p. 122). Success, then, comes from its originality, or, perhaps better, its non-referability, brought about by venturing as deeply as possible into ignorance.

As someone who at different times in his life has gone deeper than most into his whole being and the structure of his personality, what the brain is, and what the mind is, when I say, I am thinking—who is saying this? Then this person who is saying, I am thinking, can just as easily say, I have decided not to think now. One is not identified with the brain, but with brain activity, and that activity, the thinking activity, is something that is responsible to a higher self, one which uses the brain as a computer. That is all. So acting, or listening, or doing something without thinking, in the state of pure intuitive activity, not requiring to use the brain as a control.

Whether or not such a view is legitimate in light of contemporary neuroscience is secondary, here, to the subjective effect of behaving as if such a process is possible (as suspension of disbelief) and the effect that practising it has on the experience of the individual, notably Stockhausen.

To supplement the theoretical positions elaborated in the article is an application of a creative practice-as-research approach (Barrett & Bolt, 2007 ; Candy & Edmonds, 2018 ), which employs sound as a means of illustrating, supporting, expanding, deflating and surpassing the limits of academic philosophical argument. By employing such a practice-as-research component, this article and its supplements attempt ‘an original investigation undertaken in order to gain new knowledge, partly by means of practice and the outcomes of that practice’ (Candy & Edmonds, 2018 , p. 63). The sound files accompany the online article. This approach is one of two (Bojesen, 2021 ) recent attempts to develop the utilisation of creative practices as means of furthering research by those whose starting point is not necessarily or principally creative practice, reversing the emphasis of practice-as-research scholarship, which primarily focuses on creative practitioners, developing their work as and in the context of scholarly research. The intention is to develop this practice more explicitly, as the main subject of a future research output.

As all of the works described in ‘Intuitive Music’ are for ensemble, ‘IT’ will be adapted for a multiplicatory solo performance, recording five pieces in layers, all guided by Stockhausen's instructions (Stockhausen, 1971 , p. 120). Each layer contains an electronic instrument performance, and the final piece is the combination of all, recorded successively on top of one another. Five layers (Audio Clips 1 – 6 ). The purpose of this sonic supplement is not merely to illustrate Stockhausen's approach but to provide a first-hand engagement with this form of aesthetic ignorance, actively researching from within the experiential space outlined by Nietzsche, Lyotard and Stockhausen. This research does, as with Stockhausen's instrumentalists, rely on latent retained knowledge of the use of instruments, yet, this is a form of research that produces no ‘knowledge’, only the work itself.

Layer 1. Audio content can be heard at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12705

Layer 2. Audio content can be heard at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12705

Layer 3. Audio content can be heard at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12705

Layer 4. Audio content can be heard at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12705

Layer 5. Audio content can be heard at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12705

Ignorance final piece. Audio content can be heard at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9752.12705

While the intention of creative work such as Stockhausen's, and the adaptation of it presented here, is to produce a piece of music, it can also offer a means of developing and exploring, first and second hand, the ability to approach our psyche and disposition in a manner at least somewhat incompatible with dominant conceptions of and approaches to education and the assumption that it must produce knowledge. By purposefully utilising aesthetic ignorance as a means of individual creativity and cultural production, education and research for knowledge is deprioritised or, rather, oriented away from its predominant emphasis on ego and knowledge development.

To attempt to become a medium, radio receiver or conductor of effects within the confines of a discrete artistic performance is, of course, not the same as completely reconfiguring one's relation to the world in the manner a zealous Nietzscheanism might imply. However, even though Nietzsche and Lyotard's world views, at least those expressed in the late notebooks and Libidinal Economy , suggest a reconfiguration of how experience is perceived and interpreted, this does not mean that other modes of perception are somehow false. Rather, if understood from Nietzschean and Lyotardian positions, these modes of perception are themselves effects of the underpinning conditions of existence, as they define them. Thus, every form of education could, from this perspective, be understood as conditioned by what Nietzsche calls the will to power, which, as he makes clear, is nothing to do with an individual desire for power but instead almost the opposite: that the ego is itself subordinate to the overwhelming forces (effects, for Lyotard) it experiences and by which it is conditioned. And, as this article has suggested, these forces or effects, acting as they do on individual psyches, could be perceived as ‘educational’, even when critical thinking is purposefully stalled in favour of a suspension of disbelief, such as in the musical example provided by Stockhausen and elaborated on here through the adaptation of ‘IT’. Unlearning through aesthetic ignorance is a form of education.

I would like to extend my gratitude to Karsten Kenklies, David Lewin and Phillip Tonner, who provided extremely helpful commentary on an earlier version of this article, helping me to more accurately focus on its ambitions and avoid numerous intellectual potholes. I am also grateful to Paul Standish for his patience and support in delivery of this article.

Bojesen , E ( 2021 ) Educational resistance . Educational Philosophy and Theory , 1 – 12 . https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1927702 .

Bojesen , E ( 2019 ) Positive ignorance: unknowing as a tool for education and educational research . Journal of Philosophy of Education , 53 ( 2 ), 394 – 406 . https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12342

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Education is the Best Antidote for Ignorance

“while it cannot cure everything, education is the best antidote for ignorance.”.

Dear Friends,

I hope you’ve had time to enjoy the company of family and friends this holiday season. My heart goes out to those who are suffering in numerous ways from the tragedies that seem to beset us at every turn. I remain convinced that while it cannot cure everything, education is the best antidote for ignorance .

Here is just a brief summary of what we are resolved to do to ensure light is shed on the critical importance of education opportunity in each and every community this year:

Coalesce and build up the efforts of individual citizens, teachers, and parents who are trying to create their own schools and education programs to serve more students. There’s nothing like the American spirit to turn upside down the statu s quo (think Tocqueville) .

At CER, we’ve never been big fans of working through pre-existing organizations that have their own challenges, goals and constituents to worry about. We’d rather bolster the efforts of real people doing the work daily — with advice, counsel, connections and the strategic public relations influence that CER has to connect the individual to the agency that he or she needs to get their idea recognized, expanded or pushed through state halls.

Engage the tens of thousands of education entrepreneurs who are at the heart of the technological advances that make learning accessible to people everywhere!

With a special connection to the edtech universe globally, and our connections with the best of schools and school pioneers in the charter movement and larger education choice arena, we can move mountains to ensure that new schools and proven practices are expanding and growing. What we’ve seen accomplished in just under 30 years with the entrepreneurial innovations borne in the edreform movement could, if expanded, provide millions more students with what they need and deserve.

Inspire the movement that we helped launch 26 years ago to put parents front and center in leading policy, advocacy and their own efforts to educate their children.

We need PARENT POWER like never before. I’m gratified the  term we once helped coin for education is actually making ripples in politics today, thanks to the inspiration of Dr. Howard Fuller and his new army of advocates who are challenging any one who stands in front of the proverbial schoolhouse door to prevent parents from making the decisions most critical to their own children’s lives.

We will accomplish these things in many ways — from engaging in legal efforts, advocacy, public relations, research, information sharing and good old fashioned public awareness. Regardless of tactic, however, we must ensure the opportunity for learners at all levels to find the best education — rich in content and in character formation — and tailored to their needs.

As we begin the last hours until the New Year and a New Decade, let us resolve to hold leaders to account for what we know to be consistent with the values this country holds dear — freedom, equality and prosperity for all! And to those who stand in the way of applying all those things to education, we say, look out! You haven’t seen anything yet!

Please consider giving to CER this calendar year before the clock strikes midnight!  There are many ways to engage — donations (click below!), memberships, sponsorships of our programs and podcasts, or consider engaging our new CER Advisory team to help you advance your idea, your school or your product! Whichever way you decide, just remember that if you want something to get done, you always go to the busiest people… and those who’ve shown their impact consistently year after year.

And please designate  The Center for Education Reform a s your charity when shopping through  AmazonSmile .

That’s CER! Please join us.

And from all of us, Cheers to a Healthy, Prosperous and Opportunity-filled New Year! Happy 2020!!

Founded in 1993,  the Center for Education Reform  aims to expand educational opportunities that lead to improved economic outcomes for all Americans — particularly our youth — ensuring that conditions are ripe for innovation, freedom and flexibility throughout U.S. education.

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Persuasive Essay: Why is Education Important in Our Society?

Introduction.

Education is more than just learning from books, and it is a shame that a lot of schools do not see that it is more than just a curriculum and school score. A good education can teach a child how to learn so that the child may take up independent learning as an adult. Education may also teach a child how to reason so that a child does not grow up to be ignorant.

I will show you the two best reasons why education is important in our society.

Persuasive point 1

The biggest selling point for education in our society is the fact that it helps people learn “how” to learn. It is not about the knowledge they accumulate, it is the way a child is taught how to “learn” things. A child may come away from school not knowing a lot of the course, but if that child has been taught how to learn, then that child may become an adult that learns everything he or she needs in life. Otherwise, that child may grow up to be a person that cannot see the obvious because he or she cannot reason and consciously learn new things.

Persuasive point 2

Education teaches people how to reason, and if they are taught how to reason well, then they help subdue their own thoughts of ignorance. For example, there are lots of posts and websites on the Internet about childhood vaccinations and how dangerous they are. Ignorant people than never learned how to reason will look at them, believe them and support them. If a person is taught how to reason then he or she will know how to recognize empirical evidence.

That person would look at all the people in the US that have had childhood injections (most of them) and then look at all the people with autism. They would reason that if childhood vaccinations caused autism then most of the people in the US would have autism. If a person is taught how to reason then that person may see how people that smoke seem more likely to develop emphysema than people that do not smoke. They would then reason there is a link between smoking and emphysema. This sort of reasoning can be taught in schools, and if children are not taught it then they walk around risking their children’s lives by not vaccinating them, and walk around smoking because their daddy smoked for years and it never hurt him.

If education is not seen as important, then one day it will just be all about school scores and hitting the factors of a curriculum. There will be a day when children start to hate learning because school put them off it for life (this already happens in some cases). Plus, without education teaching people how to reason things out and teaching them how to separate what is fact from what is faulty evidence, then our society will become more and more ignorant until a smarter country simply marches over and takes our country from under out ignorant noses.

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How Too Much Education Can Result in Ignorance

Quick: Are you at all familiar with ultralipids , cholarine, or plates of parallax ? All of them? One of them? None? Read on, and in a couple of paragraphs you’ll see what your answer means for your personal level of ignorance.  

“The trouble with the world,” Bertrand Russell quipped ,  “is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” If a large body of research by Cornell psychologist David Dunning is to be trusted, Russell wasn’t even half right. The stupid may indeed harbor wildly overblown assumptions about their capacities, but the same is true of people on the other end of the intelligence spectrum. In fact, the more education people have, the more ignorant they may be. Ignoring our ignorance and assuming we know much more than we actually do seems to be a universal human tendency.

In a recent article in Pacific Standard, Dunning proposes that “we are all confident idiots.” (He’s pretty sure about that.) “In many areas of life,” Dunning writes, “incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are.” Jimmy Kimmel’s popular “Lie Witness News” bit — where he feeds people on the street misinformation and watches them riff on it as if it were real — is only the tip of the iceberg. Ask survey respondents if they are familiar with “entirely made up” concepts like those in the first sentence of this post, and 90 percent will attest to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about some of them . (Did you?) We tend to resist recognizing when we have a vacuum of knowledge. We think we know a lot more than we do. And we make stuff up, often without realizing it, just to assure our egos that we are good enough and smart enough. “[P]eople who don’t know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills,” Dunning writes, “tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge.”

That assured ignorance can be extremely dangerous. Dunning suggests that it was a contributing factor in the 2008 financial collapse. Recent research shows how badly informed Americans are when it comes to basic principles of finance:

“In 2012, the National Financial Capability Study , conducted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (with the U.S. Treasury), asked roughly 25,000 respondents to rate their own financial knowledge, and then went on to measure their actual financial literacy. The roughly 800 respondents who said they had filed bankruptcy within the previous two years performed fairly dismally on the test — in the 37th percentile, on average. But they rated their overall financial knowledge more, not less, positively than other respondents did. The difference was slight, but it was beyond a statistical doubt: 23 percent of the recently bankrupted respondents gave themselves the highest possible self-rating; among the rest, only 13 percent did so. Why the self-confidence? Like Jimmy Kimmel’s victims, bankrupted respondents were particularly allergic to saying, ‘I don’t know.'”

Dunning’s most intriguing idea is that we don’t even have a grasp on what “ignorance” really is. Most people think of ignorance as a lack of information, gaps in our knowledge that could be filled in with appropriate training or education. That’s too hopeful:

“The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance — as an absence of knowledge — leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence.”

Here, Dunning’s primary example is driver’s education courses, which “tend to increase, rather than decrease, accident rates.” How is that possible? Because after taking Driver’s Ed, most people think of themselves as sophisticated, savvy motorists who know just what to do if they begin to skid on a slick road. Having that certificate on their fridge “leaves them with the lasting impression that they’re permanent experts on the subject.” Unfortunately, “their skills usually erode rapidly after they leave the course.” Drivers would be better off if they steered clear of icy roads entirely rather than try to navigate them with their weaker-than-they-know winter driving skills.   

It’s tempting — well, more than tempting, natural  — to read these ideas and project them outward on the rest of humanity. “Sure, other people might have no idea they’re so incompetent, but I’ve got a pretty firm grasp on what I know and what I don’t know,” you might be thinking. But you’d be wrong. The problem, Dunning says, “is one that visits us all.” He explains that while our brains are great at cramming our heads with reams of knowledge, they “do not confer … insight into the dimensions of our ignorance.” The antidote for organizations and small groups may be listening to devil’s advocates, which I wrote about recently . For individuals, the strategy is to

“… be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls ‘considering the opposite.’ To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure.”

Even with all these safeguards, it’s inevitable that we’ll make mistakes when we think we’re really on top of our game. There may be an evolutionary explanation for this irony: If we were wracked with an appropriate dose of doubt about every decision we faced, we’d be paralyzed. We’d never get married, agree to take a job, or buy a house, let alone pick a flavor of yogurt at the grocery store.

But of course the armchair speculation in the previous paragraph is just that: a plausible, but weakly considered insight. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But it should be taken with a grain of salt. And speaking of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin probably put it best in his  introduction to The Descent of Man when he claimed that opponents of the theory of evolution had their heads in the sand:

“It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known, but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

Couple that idea with the concept of Socratic wisdom — the Athenian philosopher’s announcement that his wisdom consists in the fact that he knows that he knows nothing  —  and you have something of a recipe for confronting, if not overcoming, Dunning’s conundrum. 

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Themes of Education and Ignorance in Animal Farm

• Categories: Animal Farm George Orwell

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Words: 1311 |

Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 1311 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Table of contents

Animal farm essay outline, animal farm essay example, introduction.

• Introduction to the theme of education and ignorance in "Animal Farm"
• Thesis statement

The Pigs' Recognition of the Power of Education

• The pigs' revelation of their ability to read and write
• The pigs' manipulation of knowledge for power

The Pigs' Manipulation and Silencing of the Animals

• Napoleon's consolidation of power
• Removal of debates and silencing of dissent
• Exploitation of the animals' ignorance

The Animals' Struggle to Advocate for Themselves

• Inability to find the right arguments
• Manipulation of the animals' lack of knowledge
• Subjugation of dissenting opinions

The Pigs' Use of Ignorance as a Means to an End

• The deceptive treatment of Boxer's retirement
• Exploitation of the animals' illiteracy
• Transformation of the pigs into human-like beings

The Transformation of Animal Farm and Its Downfall

• Abandonment of initial principles
• Abuse of education leading to societal failure
• Society becoming stratified and oppressive
• Recap of the central themes and messages in "Animal Farm"
• The consequences of abusing education for power
• The portrayal of human flaws in a society of animals

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Essay on Importance of Education for Students

500 words essay on importance of education.

To say Education is important is an understatement. Education is a weapon to improve one’s life. It is probably the most important tool to change one’s life. Education for a child begins at home. It is a lifelong process that ends with death. Education certainly determines the quality of an individual’s life. Education improves one’s knowledge, skills and develops the personality and attitude. Most noteworthy, Education affects the chances of employment for people. A highly educated individual is probably very likely to get a good job. In this essay on importance of education, we will tell you about the value of education in life and society.

Importance of Education in Life

First of all, Education teaches the ability to read and write. Reading and writing is the first step in Education. Most information is done by writing. Hence, the lack of writing skill means missing out on a lot of information. Consequently, Education makes people literate.

Above all, Education is extremely important for employment. It certainly is a great opportunity to make a decent living. This is due to the skills of a high paying job that Education provides. Uneducated people are probably at a huge disadvantage when it comes to jobs. It seems like many poor people improve their lives with the help of Education.

Better Communication is yet another role in Education. Education improves and refines the speech of a person. Furthermore, individuals also improve other means of communication with Education.

Education makes an individual a better user of technology. Education certainly provides the technical skills necessary for using technology . Hence, without Education, it would probably be difficult to handle modern machines.

People become more mature with the help of Education. Sophistication enters the life of educated people. Above all, Education teaches the value of discipline to individuals. Educated people also realize the value of time much more. To educated people, time is equal to money.

Finally, Educations enables individuals to express their views efficiently. Educated individuals can explain their opinions in a clear manner. Hence, educated people are quite likely to convince people to their point of view.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Importance of Education in Society

First of all, Education helps in spreading knowledge in society. This is perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Education. There is a quick propagation of knowledge in an educated society. Furthermore, there is a transfer of knowledge from generation to another by Education.

Education helps in the development and innovation of technology. Most noteworthy, the more the education, the more technology will spread. Important developments in war equipment, medicine , computers, take place due to Education.

Education is a ray of light in the darkness. It certainly is a hope for a good life. Education is a basic right of every Human on this Planet. To deny this right is evil. Uneducated youth is the worst thing for Humanity. Above all, the governments of all countries must ensure to spread Education.

FAQs on Essay on Importance of Education

Q.1 How Education helps in Employment?

A.1 Education helps in Employment by providing necessary skills. These skills are important for doing a high paying job.

Q.2 Mention one way in Education helps a society?

A.2 Education helps society by spreading knowledge. This certainly is one excellent contribution to Education.

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Essay Samples on Ignorance

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Artists and Activists Both Have a Role. But Not the Same One.

As the literary world is roiled by fights over politics and war, are we losing sight of the writer’s purpose?

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By Phil Klay

Phil Klay is a novelist and an essayist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war.

• Aug. 5, 2024

Two decades ago, I was a public-affairs officer in the Marine Corps, a public-relations guy for the military, tasked with “telling the Marine Corps story” and providing accurate information about military operations to maintain the trust of the American people. We weren’t propagandists — we told the truth, and in Iraq we welcomed plenty of embedded reporters who we knew would write extremely skeptical articles on the progress of the war — but there were fairly tight borders around what the military thought the American people needed to know.

Listen to this article, read by Robert Petkoff

Coming back from Iraq in 2008, though, I had a set of stories that didn’t fit perfectly with the official one I had a license to tell. Some were things I’d seen, things I could report on in a journalistic way, sure of the facts, but others were things I’d heard, stories that I couldn’t vouch for personally but that, passed to me by word of mouth and preserved in my memory, that unstable medium, nevertheless seemed to express something true and unsettling.

One was told to me by a young combat correspondent, a Marine whose job in the corps was writing articles and making videos about the work we were doing. He had been in Ramadi when a suicide bomber detonated among a crowd of civilians, killing and grievously wounding dozens. The local unit took the injured to the Ramadi combat hospital, where Navy doctors, nurses and corpsmen got to work as Marines lined up to donate blood.

Horrible slaughter in a region of Iraq where violence has spiraled out of control does not make for a good news story, but there were messages the Marine Corps was happy to put out: that unlike our barbaric enemy, who brutally murdered men, women and children, we cared about Iraqi civilians and would work tirelessly to save lives. And so this young combat correspondent asked one of the Navy surgeons, who for long hours had been feverishly working among the mangled and bloody innocents, to give an interview. And because the only quiet place was the room where they had placed and bagged the dead, the cameraman set up near the bodies of all the people they had failed to save.

Undoubtedly, the doctor knew what messages he was supposed to deliver to the camera, and undoubtedly, he believed in them, too — that he had a noble mission to carry out, and that his noble colleagues were dedicated and skilled and humane. Nor was he new to death. He was a surgeon in a shock-trauma platoon in the most violent city in Iraq, all too familiar with amputating limbs, with stitching intestines back together, with treating burns that devoured faces, ears and fingers. That day could not have been the first time he bowed his head as the chaplain whispered prayers over those who died on the table. But before the interview started and the red light of the camera turned on, he took a moment, sat down among the dead and quietly wept. The young Marine cameraman stood there, silent, patient, and waited for the doctor to collect himself so he could tell his story about the good will of the American military, whose invasion had unleashed this chaos.

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• Can Kamala Harris win on the economy?

A visit to a crucial swing state reveals the problems she will face

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K amala Harris  has all but erased Donald Trump’s polling lead in America’s seven swing states, which is testament to the excitement generated by her late entrance into the presidential race. This week, her campaign revved up in each of these battlegrounds. The blitz started on August 6th at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the most crucial of the swing states, where she introduced Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, as her running-mate. From there the two were due to hold rallies in the other six states: Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

In their first joint appearance, she and Mr Walz repeated their warnings that Mr Trump wants to ban abortion, is a threat to democracy and cares only about the rich. Underlying it all was another message—that the American economy is the world’s strongest, and that the country remains a place where people who work hard get ahead. “We fight for a future where we build a broad-based economy, where every American has the opportunity to own a home, to start a business and to build wealth,” Ms Harris told a roaring crowd of her supporters in Philadelphia.

Just 50 miles (80km) up the road from the rally is a town where this sunny message rings true. Bethlehem was immortalised in 1982 by Billy Joel in “Allentown”, a song about Pennsylvania’s industrial decline. The rusted carcass of Bethlehem Steel, once its leading firm, still dominates the skyline. Today, though, it is an atmospheric backdrop for music festivals, outlet shops and a casino. The unemployment rate in the area was just 3.6% in June, a whisker above its lowest in decades and half a point less than the national average. What makes the town fascinating is how it maps onto national politics. It is located in a county, Northampton, that serves as a bellwether for the state as a whole: most voters backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 before defecting to Donald Trump in 2016 and returning to Joe Biden in 2020.

Yet Bethlehem also shows why Ms Harris will struggle to campaign on the strength of the economy. Although plentiful jobs and rising wages would normally boost an incumbent, for the past couple of years surveys have shown that Americans are downcast about the economy. The Democrats have been trying to overcome this by touting development around the country, and in Northampton they have much they can point to. In January Mr Biden visited Allentown, a 20-minute drive from the old steel mill, to highlight how well the economy was faring. The area has added over 30,000 jobs since his election. Real wages are up since before the covid-19 pandemic. Manufacturing is actually making something of a comeback: local investments include $500m in packaging facilities and $7.5m in a bottle factory.

Josh Shapiro, the state’s Democratic governor who was on Ms Harris’s shortlist in her search for a potential vice-president, is also a regular visitor to the area. On July 16th he stood in front of a redbrick office building that once belonged to Bethlehem Steel for a ceremonial signing of the state budget. And in January he was in town to launch an economic strategy. He has a good story to tell: the state’s median hourly wage is nearly a dollar above the national median, just as it was in 1979, before the collapse of the steel industry, according to the Keystone Research Centre, a Pennsylvanian think-tank. The economy helps explain Mr Shapiro’s popularity. About 50% of those in the state approve of his performance, against just 35% who do not.

The hole truth

The halo does not extend to the White House’s management of the economy. Polls gave Mr Biden low marks, with more confidence placed in Mr Trump on economic affairs. Ms Harris is faring better than her boss but is starting in a hole. One explanation is inflation , which voters, rightly, see as more of a national problem than one made locally. Inflation has cooled recently but prices are still up by roughly 20% since Mr Biden took office.

It is something people feel everywhere, says Wayne Milford of Birthright Brewing, a craft brewery and restaurant in Nazareth, a town next to Bethlehem. “I’m having to overpay staff just to keep them working,” he says. Costs have also soared for ingredients—flour, tomatoes, beef, pork and chicken wings. He has fewer customers, and those who come spend less. This might sound inconsistent with resilient consumption figures at the national level. But restaurants reveal that all is not well: in the first half of this year spending on dining out barely rose, growing at its slowest since the start of the pandemic.

Northampton’s politics are muted. More homes fly American flags than display signs for either candidate. Still, party allegiances run deep. At a hardware store the owner, Barbara Werkheiser, greets a stream of customers, politely helping them find paint, valves and tools. But ask her, a Republican, about the economy, and it is a picture of utter gloom. “I don’t see growth. I see struggle. I see supply-chain issues. I see higher costs for products. I see that it’s hard to get reliable help,” she says. She is convinced that things would be better under Mr Trump. “He may be an ass but he was an ass that got things done,” she says. Partisanship has become a crucial variable in the past couple of decades. Republican voters are more optimistic about the economy when a Republican is in the White House, just as Democrats are more positive when one of theirs is president. Motivated reasoning of this sort guarantees tightly contested elections in any state where the population is divided fairly evenly between the two parties.

For Ms Harris there is an extra frustration. In theory, she has a reasonable record to run on, with Mr Biden signing into law big spending programmes for electric vehicles ( EV s), infrastructure and semiconductors. In practice, it will be a while before residents notice the results. For instance, the first major slug of EV- factory funding for the region was announced just a few weeks ago, when the administration gave Volvo more than $200m to expand production at facilities including a truck plant. The checkpoint at the local airport, Lehigh Valley International, has been modernised using a $5m federal grant. But a bigger project—$40m for a new logistics and cargo hub—was just approved at the start of this year. “I think it’s a little too early to talk about the actual impact,” says Nicole Radzievich Mertz of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation.

Each state has idiosyncrasies, and in Pennsylvania one is the tension between energy production and environmental protection. A fracking boom has made it America’s second-biggest gas-producing state. In her failed run in the Democratic primaries in 2020, Ms Harris called for a ban on fracking; Mr Trump is using that as ammunition. But in surveys roughly half of the state’s residents oppose fracking on environmental grounds. Ms Harris has now retreated from her calls for a ban, and appears to support a continuation of fracking with stricter safeguards—basically the same as Mr Shapiro’s position. In Northampton, a hundred miles away from intense fracking activity, that is probably closer to the median view than Mr Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” mantra. That may help Ms Harris make up for votes she is sure to lose in gas-rich parts of the state.

As for the big question—which candidate is better for jobs and growth—Northampton also yields an insight into why recent strength is no clinching argument for Ms Harris. Simply put, America’s economy has done well regardless of who occupies the White House. Mr Biden talked about Northampton as if it were a broken rustbelt community before he came to office. In fact, it has been on an upward trajectory for a while. The unemployment rate in the Bethlehem area trended lower throughout most of Mr Obama’s presidency and Mr Trump’s, and went lower still under Mr Biden as the pandemic faded. And household incomes have climbed, rising about 20% in real terms over the past decade.

Politicians love manufacturing. Yet Northampton’s true strength lies in its diversification. During Bethlehem Steel’s glory days, manufacturing accounted for about a fifth of jobs; now, no single industry accounts for more than 11%. Less than two hours’ drive from both New York City and Philadelphia, it has also transformed itself into a logistics hub. Coupled with good schools, pretty town centres and affordable housing, Bethlehem and its neighbouring towns have attracted newcomers. In the past five years their population has risen by 4%, whereas the rest of Pennsylvania’s has grown by 1%.

Many local firms are growing, too. Michael Woodland, owner of a signage franchise, sees a cross-section of Northampton’s economy in his contracts with hospitals, sports teams, the airport and more. Demand has been so robust that he recently bought a new building with nearly 10,000 square feet (930 square metres) of floor space. “We tempered some of what we were doing these past couple of years because the experts were all saying that a recession was coming. Well, it didn’t come, and we kept getting busier,” he says. The main issues in the election are, he thinks, personal and cultural rather than things that will affect business. The one risk that worries him is violence triggered by the election. “But unless it’s completely catastrophic, businesses are going to continue moving forward,” he says. Politics may swing; the economy stays steady. ■

Explore more

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Can Kamala Harris win on the economy?”

Briefing August 10th 2024

Swing-state economies are doing just fine, america’s “left-behind” are doing better than ever.

From the August 10th 2024 edition

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