ABSTRACT
This work is concerned with two central issues: how we can know, or come to know the world; and the role that formal education plays in the provision and structuring of our knowledge of the world. What follows, however, is not a philosophic enquiry specifically concerned with conditions of knowledge, nor is it a psychological treatise on how people learn; rather it is an examination of the factors that are involved in the act or process of knowing the world as it really is, or in making correct interpretations of what is really happening in the world. It is also an examination of the factors that impede us from knowing the world as it really is - but that consideration heads us far too quickly towards education, which is an area we would do better to arrive at after we have discussed certain basic problems that are more closely concerned with knowledge itself. Let us begin, then, with a detailed examination of what is involved in coming to know the world.
