From School Knowledge to Everyday Life: Introducing an Alert Bell to Upgrade the Common Sense

Abstract

One of the aims of school education is that students develop knowledge they will be able to use in their professional and personal life. However, it seems that school does not completely reach its goal. Too often, learned knowledge is not used when it should be. Actually, many research results illustrate the fact that well learned knowledge is not necessarily used outside its belonging discipline, for instance in a day-today context, even if it could be helpful. We assume that, in those cases, decisions are based on common sense instead of school knowledge, however the later was learned. Developing a didactic of common sense, our research project has two goals: the first one is to better understand the dynamic between school knowledge and common sense knowledge involved in day-to-day situations. The second one is to design a device that will upgrade the common sense in order for it to mobilize relevant learned school knowledge when dealing with problems pertaining to real life situations. This paper will focus on the first steps of the research dealing with the second goal.

Keywords

• Rationality
• Common sense
• School knowledge
• Day-to-day situations
• Didactic
• Degrees of certainty