Theory and Research in Education

Ideally, public knowledge should encapsulate the achievements of millennia of inquiry, making them available to individuals and groups for the promotion of their various ends. I explore the ways in which the actual situation fails to live up to this ideal. Our investigations are not always directed towards the questions of most concern to most people, the results on which experts agree are not always based on reasons the broader public is prepared to endorse, and the dissemination of information is so distorted as to make supposedly free discussion and debate an unproductive shouting match. The consequences for democracy are severe, since a healthy system of public knowledge, able to discharge its function, is an essential component of a flourishing democratic society.

Educational standards, assessments, and accountability systems are of immense political moment around the world. But there is no developed theory exploring the role that these systems should play within a democratic polity in particular. On the one hand, well-designed standards are public goods, supported by assessment and accountability mechanisms. They have the potential to serve democratic goods in particular, such as transparency, equality, and public discourse. On the other hand, their very potential to advance systemic democratic goods signals a level of reach and power that threatens the achievement of these same democratic values along other dimensions. This is especially evident in the contemporary United States. Adults’ democratically legitimate control over education within a democracy may well undercut children’s legitimate claims to receiving an education that equips them for democracy. Because the latter should trump the former, democratic goods are best achieved through embedding very limited educational standards, assessments, and accountability measures within an educational system that selects, trains, and provides ongoing support to civically engaged and thoughtful educators. Under such circumstances, they may promote a virtuous circle that builds capacity, motivation, and public support for strong and effective civic education practices, while still offering the adult public a strong democratic voice in public schools.

Cognitive enhancement — augmenting normal cognitive capacities — is not new. Literacy, numeracy, computers, and the practices of science are all cognitive enhancements. Science is now making new cognitive enhancements possible. Biomedical cognitive enhancements (BCEs) include the administration of drugs, implants of genetically engineered or stem-cell grown neural tissue, transcranial magnetic stimulation, computer/brain interface technologies, and (perhaps someday) modification of human embryos by genetic engineering and/or synthetic biology techniques. The same liberal—democratic values that support education as a public institutional endeavor also supply reasons for institutionalizing and publicly supporting BCE. Pursuing the goals of education may require changing what we have hitherto regarded as the individual’s ‘natural’ potential, even in the case of normal individuals, and this may require recourse to BCE. The prospect of BCE raises no novel issues of distributive justice. Like other beneficial innovations, BCEs have the potential to worsen existing unjust inequalities, but they also have the potential to ameliorate them.

Educational researchers have assumed that the concept of funds of knowledge is related to specific forms of capital. However, scholars have not examined if and how these theoretical frameworks can complement each other when attempting to understand educational opportunity for under-represented students. In this article, we argue that a funds of knowledge approach should also be studied from a capital perspective. We claim that bridging funds of knowledge and capital has the potential to advance theory and to yield new insights and understandings of students’ educational opportunities and experiences. Finally, we provide a discussion of key processes — (mis)recognition, transmission, conversion, and activation/mobilization — to which educational researchers need to pay closer attention when attempting to understand the attainment of goals in under-represented students’ lives.