The impracticality of “practical knowledge” and “lived experiences” educational research

Abstract

The issue of social and cultural transformations is pressing. There are enough horrors in the world to want change. The problem of change, however, has haunted the human sciences since their institutionalization at the turn of the 20th century. Initially responding to The Social Question about the moral disorder and economic dislocations of the city, the quest today is for the practical (useful) knowledge that makes possible the Enlightenments’ cosmopolitan dream. That dream of change is expressed in PISA, the New Public Management. While the promise of finding the future is daunting and enticing my task is more limited. It is historical by asking about the conditions that make possible the notion of practicality. That designing is told in the name of the future is told holding the lifelong learner who lives in the Knowledge Society. Finding that future, however, is taken as science finding the useful knowledge that can help in planning to change everyday life that changes people. Three limits of such planning are discussed. One is the making of kinds of people as practices that exclude and abject in the impulse to include. Second and paradoxically, the principles for making the future conserve rather than challenge the existing frameworks that govern the present. And third, the expertise of designing people to create an inclusive society produces a hierarchy and inequality. What seems practical and useful is, at least in terms of social commitments, impractical! The remaining question is whether it is perhaps time to (re)vision the human sciences.