The Cartesian view of knowledge

I think therefore I am vs We participate therefore we are.

Both Plato and Descartes have many strong points. They also have some weak points in their philosophies. The Cartesian view of knowledge, which by the way, all of us have been explicitly or implicitly trained in, and has dominated Western philosophy for over three hundred years is the belief that there is a clear separation between mind and body, a clear separation between the thinkers and the doers, between management and the employees.

On top of that there is this notion that knowledge is a substance. And what you really need to do, is that you now want to talk about teaching. You look at theories of pedagogy, which treat knowledge as a substance. The game of pedagogy, or corporate training by and large, is: how do you find a way to optimally pour knowledge into a kid’s head with the recognition that there is already something already in the kid’s head. And so pedagogy has to do with impedance matching in terms of how do you pour a substance into this receptacle. And that has a lot to do with practically every conceivable theory of pedagogy that we know about. The trouble is, it is based on the presupposition of knowledge as a substance, and that there is a sense of a separation between mind and body, which is probably not correct.

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