‘Knowledge is power’

Francis Bacon is usually credited with first delivering to us the notion that ‘knowledge is power' in his collection of religious meditations published in 1597 entitled the Meditationes Sacrae.' Bacon had strong ties to early Empiricism and was influential in the establishment of experimental methods in the sciences.

In this Enlightenment context, the claim that knowledge is power can be understood as reflecting Bacon's reverence for major advances in our knowledge of the natural world that were made during his lifetime and which represented, for him, a previously unrealised power.Today, the claim that ‘knowledge is power' has become something of an aphorism. As with all good aphorisms, it has been adopted as a pithy marketing tool.Two recent appearances are worth noting. In 2012, the claim appeared on a billboard advertisement for a new Volkswagen pick-up truck — the Amarok. More recently, PlayStation have assumed it as the title of a “brilliantly entertaining quiz show game”, launched in 2017. These contemporary appropriations of the claim that knowledge is power reflect something interesting about what it has come to mean in the twenty-first century. They indicate, in the first place, that we still recognise and engage with this idea. Moreover, the familiarity of the aphorism and its use as a marketing tool suggest that it has broadly positive connotations. These connotations can no doubt be attributed, at least in part, to the Enlightenment context in which the idea originated. Knowledge is still power. Francis Bacon would be proud.

I take this Enlightenment idea as a starting point for the following discussion. In particular, I am interested in the impact that this idea has had in the context of a twenty-first century education. How does the idea that knowledge is power play out in our schools and universities? How does it feature in our education systems and how does it impact upon the intellectual characters of students? Specifically, how does the pervasiveness of this idea in our schools and classrooms affect students' willingness and ability to be intellectually humble? I suggest that this idea presents itself in contemporary classrooms as a barrier to the development and exercise of intellectual humility. Simply put, when we equate knowledge with power, we make it harder to be intellectually humble. In its most prevalent manifestation, this barrier arises in the form of answer-oriented education. I will spend the majority of the paper outlining the nature and impact of answer-oriented education.Towards the end, I will suggest one way to remove this barrier by shifting from answer-oriented to question-oriented education.The latter, I argue, warrants further attention in philosophical and educational research.

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Source: Alfano Mark, Lynch Michael P.. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility. Routledge,2020. — 514 p.. 2020

‘Knowledge is power’

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