Education and Active Ignorance

Abstract

While traditional pedagogy presupposed that subjects naturally desire to know, some authors pointed out that “active ignorance” should be taken into account when pondering different educational strategies. Indeed, it often happens that skepticism, doubt, inaction, or refusal to change is not a consequence of a lack of knowledge but of avoidance of it. Active ignorance can be detected in diverse fields, which points to the fact that the phenomenon is widespread. As the paper shows, active ignorance can further be understood as an umbrella term that covers several categories of phenomena: avoidance of truth, doubting the obvious, and repression. The cause of active ignorance can be detected in conservative function, since it serves to provide the subject with coherence by filtering out information that could dissolve or fragment the individual. In educational sciences, Plato’s insight from the allegory of the cave should be taken into account, pointing out that prisoners will not be willing to accept the liberated messenger’s news if it turns out to be unsettling with deconstruction of their established value-systems. The safe return to the cave is sooner to be found in the educator’s effort of providing adequate contexts for “souls” to uncover the truth for themselves, thus understanding education as “an art of the speediest and most effective shifting or conversion of the soul.”

Keywords

• active ignorance
• education
• pedagogy
• the allegory of the cave