ABSTRACT
I said in the Introduction that it is not enough to ask questions about knowledge production and dissemination without placing those questions within broader questions to do with human purposes. The questions ‘What do we know?’, ‘How do we come to know?’ and ‘How do we share our knowledge?’ need to be contextualised within questions which ask, ‘Knowledge for what?’ And it is important to remember that ‘what’ does not necessarily imply human benefit. If we believe that education is about encouraging people to see that they have choices about how they recreate themselves, we have to accept that they will often use their choices in ways with which we do not necessarily agree. In this view the ‘what’ could be to do with distribution of instruments of torture as much as with distribution of human aid. The ‘what’ in ‘knowledge for what?’ is the heart of the matter.
