I’ve often thought of education – my chosen field – as applied epistemology. This was a conceit. Education does not explore or enact the subtle, rich, body of epistemological thought. Education has an epistemology, a vulgar blunt-object affair that is, essentially, the product of the limitations of the structures of traditional schooling.

The problem can be seen if one looks at the act of assessing knowledge. As a teacher, you’re expected to assess the knowledge of the kid in front of you continuously through the learning process. What does the kid know when he or she comes to you? What do they come to know from your lessons? What do they know at the end of the unit? What do they know at the end of the year? What do they know while walking the stage in their cap and gown? This should all sound familiar. These reflect basic questions of epistemology. What is it possible to know? How do you know? How do you know what they know? How do they know what they know?

Brushing up on your epistemology won’t help. In its most abstract form (if you’re talking about “neutral monism,” for example) epistemology provides no comfort to the teacher trying to determine whether or not the kid in front of her “gets” the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Every teacher knows you can’t directly access the kid’s knowledge. We recognize that typical school tests are a proxy for such direct knowledge. We recognize that with our assessments we are constructing epistemological “if-then” statements. We are setting up a condition with an outcome that would only be possible if the student held such knowledge. If the student can answer questions about the French Revolution on a test, then, it is supposed, they know about the French Revolution.
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