The Problem of a Priori for Education: Education as the Practice of Knowing

The Conundrum of the a priori Recently I was invited to be part of a project with Donna Adair Breault and Rick Breault (2005). My role was similar to many others--to pick a quote from John Dewey and to briefly elaborate its meaning for teachers. I chose to focus my comments on the following, Prejudice is the acme of the a priori. Of the a priori in this sense we may say what is always to be said of habits and institutions: They are good servants, but harsh and futile masters. (Dewey, 1977, 136) I am not a Dewey scholar so I am not one to naturally dwell on his insights. Yet this quote has intrigued me ever since. It tells me about Dewey's understanding of the fallibility of science, of contingency and of the location of truth being always beyond our current understanding--something always in the future (Noblit & Dempsey, 1996). Knowledge becomes assertion, albeit with certain warrants, of where we are in our knowing and possibly where we are going in the pursuit of understanding. This, of course, creates a conundrum for many: How are we to teach knowledge when it does not actually have a definitive form? I find my own teaching practice as bound in this conundrum. I want to be able to say that I teach about knowledge being forever situated, constructed, and in the process of being formed, but in the late nights I wonder if I fail to communicate this. Or that the teaching practices I use are so caught up in the notions of teaching content knowledge that my intent is lost in cultural practices that are deeply about transmitting truth of more definitive kinds. This is to say that while I hope I can use teaching to transform or transgress the a priori, I am caught up in a world were certainty is understood to be desirable and, as I will explore below, a basis of power. Even when we have intentions to make education more liberatory we often express this from a definitive position--one that itself makes liberation seem not all that liberating (Ellsworth, 1988). We all too often critique one set of a priori by invoking another. Dewey would ask us to look a bit deeper at these moves. Using an assumption (an a priori) as a heuristic seems reasonable to him, but when the assumption cannot be questioned it is mastering us--and this then is prejudice in its root form. Unquestioned or unquestionable assumptions enable distinctions to be drawn in such ways that the distinction is seen as a property of that being discussed when it is better understood as a property of the assumptions that make it possible. Written this way, prejudice seems quite ordinary and in this abstract form, bloodless. Yet when the a priori is embedded in an education as a social institution, as Dewey alludes in the above, unquestioned assumptions and the distinctions drawn with them can indeed be "harsh. " My main argument with Dewey turns on the second characterization, "futile. " I can imagine that Dewey was using futile in the sense of being ultimately unsustainable, but I live my life not in this long sense but in the short sense. In the short sense, the a priori that distinguish races, for example, run through my life, and go beyond DuBois' (1903) famous prediction that race is the problem of the Twentieth Century. In the Twenty-first Century race still permeates my life--and I am of the race that benefits from this distinction. Thus the notion that a priori are "futile masters" does not speak to my everyday life. Race has been a quite useful master for whites like myself, and continues to be. The a priori of Race and School Subjects It is not an accident that race has been a useful master, considering how race became an a priori in the context of the age of exploration and the colonialism it enabled. Willinsky (1998) argues that what we take to be the disciplines of knowledge were products of colonialism. For colonialism to work, the indigenous people had to be created in a form that made them exploitable to the colonizing power. …