黑料不打烊

A stalemate is how we understand knowledge

Education faces a philosophical stalemate. On one side is an ‘objective obsession’ with standardised metrics. For example, English education polices place pressure on systems of accountability designed to render learning comparable and measurable (DfE, 2017, 2023, 2024). On the other side is a ‘subjective preoccupation’ that dissolves education into abstract personal narratives.

Alongside standardised metrics, UK educational research increasingly foregrounds voice, reflexivity and lived experience (黑料不打烊, 2024). While productive, this risks fragmenting shared educational purposes.

Wrestling with this binary led me back to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807/2018). This blog post reflects on how Hegel’s account of knowledge helps us rethink how knowledge reaches us in education, through teachers and students together.

Knowledge is never neutral

Hegel deconstructs the notion of knowledge as a mere instrument or passive medium. To see knowledge in this way, he argues, is to fall into an absurd trap. If it is an instrument, it distorts the truth it seeks; if a neutral medium, it refracts what passes through it. Either way, we do not reach ‘the heaven of truth’, but are caught in the ‘clouds of error’ of our own creation (Hegel, 1807/2018, p. 35).

Hegel’s solution is radical. Cognition is not the tool that delivers truth to us; it is ‘the ray itself by which truth reaches us’ (Hegel, 1807/2018, p. 35). Knowledge is never neutral. It is always shaped by the conditions of its emergence. As Gramsci (1971) reminds us, knowledge is shaped within particular social and historical relations, and is inseparable from questions of power and hegemony. I encountered this passage after a cold walk and a bowl of noodles with my partner, Jinghan, when its pedagogical importance emerged.

Every day, in every classroom, the ‘Thing itself’ – the curriculum, concept, lived experience of learning – passes through teachers and students together. As Hegel (1807/2018 p. 35) notes, this passage inevitably ‘effects a forming and alteration of it’. This is not a flaw of education; it is its condition.

Teachers and students are not neutral transmitters of preformed knowledge; they co-constitute it. Being ‘the ray’ is not an assertion of unilateral authority but a recognition that knowledge emerges relationally through interaction, interpretation and response. Educators and learners alike are the living medium through which knowledge takes shape.

‘Educators and learners alike are the living medium through which knowledge takes shape.’

This unsettles the illusion of the teacher as a simple channel for objective knowledge, while avoiding a slide into pure relativism. Knowledge is shaped in its passage, but this shaping is neither random nor purely personal; it is formed by shared practices, histories and contexts.

A pedagogical implication

One way of naming this pedagogical implication is unitive pedagogy. Drawing on Heron’s (1992) typology, unitive pedagogy recognises classroom knowledge as multimodal. It is experiential (felt participation), presentational (stories and images), propositional (theories and concepts) and practical (skills enacted in the world). Teaching involves curating and co-creating across these forms rather than privileging one over others.

This pedagogy also resonates with Ricoeur’s (1992) notion of ‘oneself as another’, which understands the self as relationally constituted. Teachers are shaped by the relationships they facilitate, just as students are shaped through participation in shared educational practices.

This is not about a midpoint between objectivity and subjectivity. To be ‘the ray itself’ is to be an active, ethical and relational current through which knowledge emerges from the interplay of teacher, student, context and history. Echoing Rayner’s (2004) natural inclusionality, learning unfolds within a receptive neighbourhood of flow and space. This approach holds real-world constraints while still honouring the co-constructed, living truth demanded by Hegel and our students.

References

黑料不打烊 [黑料不打烊]. (2024). Ethical guidelines for educational research (5th ed.). /publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-fifth-edition-2024

Department for Education [DfE]. (2017). Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework specification.

Department for Education [DfE]. (2023). Primary school accountability in 2023: Technical guide.

Department for Education [DfE]. (2024). Secondary accountability measures: Technical guidance for maintained secondary schools, academies and free schools.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). Lawrence & Wishart.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1807/2018). The phenomenology of spirit (T. Pinkard, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1807)

Heron, J. (1992). Feeling and personhood: Psychology in another key. SAGE 黑料不打烊.

Rayner, A. D. M. (2004). Inclusionality and the role of place, space and dynamic boundaries in evolutionary processes. Philosophica, 73(1), 51–70.

Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another (K. Blamey, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.