Getting To Know About Energy In School And Society

Joan Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135723392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This work considers the different meanings of energy and its effects upon language and personality. It highlights, through a range of practical examples, the difficulties of teaching the concept of energy and ways in which it can be related to the everyday world and school physics.

Chapter 1

General Knowledge about Energy

The Nature of General Knowledge

The place to start any search about understanding is in the general knowledge of the public. This is important for the study of learning not only because it is the foundation on which education has to build but because it will continue to flow strongly in daily conversations throughout life. Scientist or layman, expert or novice, we are united by our general knowledge. But before it is possible to think about the contents of general knowledge concerning energy—the topics, meanings, vague concepts and vaguer theories—there is a need to explore, if only in outline, the nature of general knowledge itself. Here, right at the beginning of the subject, is quite the toughest task of all. We have to find an answer to the question—is what we all know, or think we know—without ever having learnt it—a system of knowing at all?

The vast majority of our information about energy is not specialized knowledge of the kind learnt at school. It is a rag-bag of items which may refer back to episodes or conversation, family sayings, or to advertisements which ‘caught the eye’, and then almost inexplicably lodged in the memory. There are a number of possible reasons—personal, literary, perceptual, emotional or social—for holding fast to this knowledge, and the purpose of this chapter is to begin to unravel some of these.

General knowledge is certainly not the kind of trivial pursuit which figures in ‘Brain of Britain’ and other public competitions. That is a flagrant misuse of the term. What such games are really about is non-general knowledge because they aim to catch out competitors, eliminating all but those with exceptional powers of recall. Only in one way does such quiz-type general knowledge resemble truly socialized general knowledge. It consists of discrete pieces of information thought to be eminently reliable. Indeed, we are forced to rely upon them with a child-like faith because, unlike theoretical or systematic knowledge, such ‘facts’ do not come from a familiar field of knowledge.

‘What is quercus ilex?’

‘When was the Field of the Cloth of Gold?’

‘What are the main constituents of cement powder?’

To a small body of specialists these items are known because they are a part of the system of things that they have learnt to understand. The answers have a place in an ordered scheme of knowing. To the rest of us they are little more than cognitive clutter, valued more for their rarity, and for the kudos that their knowing brings, than for any real interest.

True general knowledge is general because, we assume, everyone else also knows it too. But a moment’s reflection is enough to conclude that they could not possibly all do so. Even if we could list every item of general knowledge about energy known to any one person, the tally would be bound to be different for the very next individual. For this kind of knowledge it will be the assumption of similarity rather than its actual existence which will be the important characteristic.

Talking and Arguing

There is a reason for this grossly improbable assumption of similarity. General knowledge is valuable because it contains meanings rather more than facts. We can only talk to other individuals if we believe that the words we use and the allusions we make will be comprehensible to them too. We need continual reassurance that they ‘know what I mean?’. Explanation over the telephone, where the usual visual clues to comprehension—nodding or smiling—cannot operate, is particularly unnerving because we are deprived of reassurance. Social beings that we are, we depend on continual affirmation in order to continue with our spoken train of thought. So, just to be able to talk to other people, we must assume that we share general knowledge meanings. As G.H.Mead put it, ‘we need to exchange perspectives’ with the people we are talking to.

Conversation has always been the vehicle for common meanings and associations. Generally it carries on without effort because we all have an investment in the kind of agreement which is very little different from simply understanding. Since words have several meanings depending on context (a problem area which will be discussed in greater detail through the talking and writing of children) all intelligent listening is an active ‘hopping’ game as we move from one meaning vantage-point to another trying to find a place from which all the landscape makes sense.

Nevertheless arguments do take place in such conversations whenever we do not get ready confirmation and want to change the other’s meaning, or lack of it, to our own. For this we use rhetoric—which has had a bad press over the last many centuries. We tend to use the term pejoratively now to describe political tub-thumping and illogical verbal bullying, but in this case we need the word in its basic sense of common, alogical persuasion. The ancients contrasted logic and rhetoric with care since they practised and valued both. Zeno, we are told, compared logic and rhetoric to ‘the closed fist and the open hand’. It is a little surprising to find that rhetoric is considered the more open, and logic, which mathematics and science have appropriated and elevated to the higher position, as closed. But the reason for this openness is the two-way personal persuasion which is involved. To convince another by rhetoric we need to ‘show’ them how we are thinking. For this we need to work hard at producing exemplar material in situations which they too will recognize. So, in the language of modern sociology, we need to ‘construct’ how the other is, and choose those extra pieces of general knowledge which we feel will be familiar to them.

Rhetoric is not illogical: it just avoids logic. It is altogether looser than logic since it allows the essential change of context which the act of commonplace persuasion needs. The ‘rhetorical question’, which is almost all the substance that most people retain of this ancient discipline, is not just a question which needs no answer. It is the result of an open process in which the persuader seeks for a context in which the other would see things from the same perspective. Then, if successful, the punch-line in rhetoric, no different in this respect from the conclusion in a logical Socratic argument, simply confirms the end-game by showing that there can only be one answer. The underlying skill in rhetoric, but not in logic, is construing the other person’s likely meaning and point of view. In logic, on the other hand, the character and knowledge of the adversary is of no interest whatsoever.

The context of rhetoric is marked by justification and criticism, logoi and anti-logoi. It is a social concern in which different points of view clash, and there is a potential infinity of these clashes. The maxim of Protagoras (that there are two sides to every question) suggests that an unarguable rightness and wrongness cannot be established since critical challenges are always possible. Matters are different in the realm of logic…. Deducing that ‘Socrates is mortal’ from the premises ‘All men are mortal’, and ‘Socrates is a man’ does not involve entering into an endless argument between religious believers and sceptics about immortality. (Billig, 1987:95)

So the consensual meanings of general knowledge are built up by almost identical social processes whether there is initial agreement or disagreement.

The general knowledge of children and adults is not likely to be quite the same because they have had different learning experiences. Nevertheless parents tend to assume that what they know is also the ultimate goal of what their children should know. It seems to be the aim of every community to pass on to the next generation, by means both open and devious, the knowledge that members of that community believe they share. It is a kind of cultural immortality in which education takes on the role of Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’. General knowledge is the very stuff of common culture.

So adults talk carefully to children, as anyone who has heard a friend ‘change gear’ when a child enters the conversation, will bear witness. It is as if we mete out our stock of knowledge little by little, as and when we consider the child is ready for it. In the words of Joshua Meyrowitz:

Socialization can be thought of as a process of gradual, or staggered exposure to social information. Children are slowly walked up the staircase of adult information, one step at a time.

However it is also true, as the same author points out, that the media now exposes children as never before to the full uncensored thrust of adult culture and information. Not just sex and violence, which raises so much alarm in some quarters, but adult musings on every aspect of life, have become totally accessible.

In summary, adult general knowledge about energy is likely to be insidious and persistent. It is continually reinforced by the meanings used in common talk, both person to person and through watching similar interaction on the television screen. In this way it is shot through with the kind of social understandings that we use more for understanding people than for scientific concepts.

The Operations of Common Sense

Mainstream general knowledge is what Schutz and Luckmann (1973) have called the ‘social stock of knowledge’—a choice of words which carefully refrains from suggesting that it has either structure or internal logic. It might be no more than a random collection without any system—just titbits of information that have come our way in different circumstances. But human beings have to justify what they know, however it has been derived. The stock of knowledge may not be logically coherent; parts of it, as we shall see, will not stand up to even the most tolerant inspection. Yet it needs some kind of credentials—psychological if not logical— if we are to use it, and go on doing so. In place of a philosophy our collection of facts and opinions has a loose justificatory system which is defiantly referred to as ‘just common sense’.

To say that something is ‘good common sense’ is to appeal to a silent but supposedly assenting majority, like those we imagine having confirming conversations with, and thus to dodge all argument. It also refers the matter to the arbitration of elusive principles which are thought to be enormously convincing, and yet are never named. In this way it can become a hiding place for both outrageous prejudice and total ignorance.

In his book on World Hypotheses Stephen Pepper defined three traits of common-sense knowing. The first of these is best described as ‘taken for granted’. If it were otherwise, if the general knowledge we justify as common sense could be analyzed and confirmed in a more logical fashion, then it would cease to rely on the disreputable arguments of ‘common sense’ and become instead part of another and more formal and logical knowledge system, such as science. Common sense has to allow for the inclusion of values and feelings as well as facts, so the normal processes of logical analysis cannot accommodate it. Yet, because it is such comfortable ‘taken for granted’ knowledge, it does not even notice this absence of logical justification.

Pepper’s second and related property of common sense is its security. To abandon, even for a moment, what is held to be common sense is like entering a looking-glass world where everything is unfamiliar and horribly disturbing. Learning school science can be just like this. It leads into regions where ‘correct’ principles seem to be grossly at odds with common sense. Who could believe, for example, that a bouncing glass marble is reversibly ‘squashed’ on impact like a soft rubber ball? We are taught in science lessons that potential energy must be stored in this way in order that the logical coherence of another knowledge system be maintained. Because children are still intellectually biddable they mostly go along, for a while at least, with this protection of the logical bastions of science; but it is at the expense of the comfort and security of common sense.

So scientific knowledge may require a kind of courage, even reckless-ness, which can be hard to keep up around the clock. School pupils often retreat back into the familiar arms of common sense when the tough logic of physics becomes too hard to maintain.

No cognition can sink lower than common sense, for when we completely give up trying to know anything, then is precisely when we know things in the common-sense way. (Pepper, 1942)

The third characteristic of common sense is peculiarly awkward. Not only is it taken-for-granted, it can also flout almost every rule of argument and not be found out. Its security and obviousness seem to resent inspection. Social experiments which flout this convention by questioning everything which appears to be common sense, are frankly infuriating. Ask someone in what way they are ‘feeling fine’, or why they think someone ‘looks shifty’, and the greater your show of interest the more irritated they will become. The attitude of common sense is so alogical that it can tolerate neither attack nor probe.

When science writers like Joseph Bronowski recommended the thought of science as The Common Sense of Science because it ‘asserts the unity of knowledge’ we must treat the phrase with caution. The only unity in commonsense knowledge is the comfortable assumption of sharing. And that very comfort may depend on a belief that if we share the knowledge with everyone then no one will challenge it. In the words of Stephen Pepper common-sense knowledge is ‘cognitively irritable’; like an amoeba it may even change shape when poked by an inquisitive outsider.

The fourth and final characteristic of common-sense knowledge is that it is intersubjective. For whatever reason it seems so obvious and secure to us, we expect it to be so also for others. That is not to claim that this vague knowledgeattitude provides us with similar cultural views about energy because they are based on similar observations and deductions. They are similar because they have achieved intersubjectivity—the result of deliberately matching our accounts to the views of others by watching for signs of understanding and agreement. Common-sense knowledge is born and bred in our everyday chat; it is reinforced and added to there, and achieves its greatest polemic triumphs there in the shifting ground of social arguments. These arguments are won not by logical confrontation, but by the art and practice of rhetoric.

All these curious characteristics of general knowledge will be important for studying children’s ideas about energy. In particular they give strong hints about the way in which we should go about the task of exploration. Knowledge which is ‘cognitively irritable’ might be expected to squirm and even transmute under the probing of an intensive interview. Indeed, there is no shortage of published transcripts which show just such retreat and reinvention under the pressure of continued questioning, however gently it is carried out. On the other hand a knowledge system which is believed to be held in common, would be expected to be most itself in a social setting. Many of the illustrations to be quoted will be extracts from children or adults talking to each other in groups.

Personal Knowing

The characteristics of common-sense thinking which protect it from either inspection or introspection also differentiate it sharply from another kind of untutored knowledge. Some children and some adults have built up their own idiosyncratic theories and hypotheses about the world out of active private reflection. Such homespun explanations of the way things are can be described, tested and argued about. This is valuable ‘personal knowledge’ and not unreflective common-sense knowledge.

The boy Tim, for example, in Rosalind Driver’s book Pupil as Scient-ist?, held a private theory that gravity was greater higher up because objects released from greater heights fall faster. He set out to test it by raising the arm of the clampstand to find out if the extension of a spring was greater at a greater height. This kind of personal knowledge which may even invite disconfirmation through experiment, lies poles apart from elusive commonsense knowing. It is just as much a kind of proto-science as that of the young Einstein who imagined running after a beam of light, and later deduced that the speed of light is invariant.

The conclusions of personal knowledge, like those of common sense, may be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the light of the prevailing judgements of science, but they differ totally in their methods of justification. Personal proto-scientific notions are the products of private work on an idea or image, teasing and testing it to find how far it will match reality. It will be strongly championed in conversation. Elusive common sense is not open to such examination: it needs to remain flexible and even indefinite to match the meanings of those who may be engaged in conversation. It has little pretension to logical coherence. Phrases like ‘Well it all depends on the circumstances’ can be used to ward off attacks of inconsistency. As Schutz and Luckmann wrote, such life-world knowledge has a small-scale ‘horizon of meaning’. Common sense has traded in logic in return for popular agreement. It is what everyone knows, and no one really wants examined. But personal knowing is private, treasured, and defensible.

Talk, Meanings and Historical Relics

There are at least three different ways in which we might go about the task of finding the common meanings for ‘energy’. We might simply reach for the dictionary, especially for one which conveniently lists the different accepted meanings along with their first dated use in the literature. This is easy to do and we shall begin our investigations here.

In the second place we could listen to groups of people talking together about energy and try to infer their meanings, contexts and attitudes. We shall expect rather opaque and general purpose opening gambits as they begin to search for points of contact. It is where one person answers another that the agreement on meaning might begin to emerge. Recordings of the discussions of three different groups of adults who knew each other well, will be used for this purpose.

The third way of exploring meanings is more arcane. We will assume that at least some of these meanings might be relics of past theories about the nature of energy, albeit somewhat damaged and disfigur...