ABSTRACT
In modern liberal democracies, education is widely recognized as a basic human right. Government must respect this right and allow citizens to obtain the education they consider appropriate for themselves, and especially their young. As government becomes more involved in the provision of education, however, teaching and learning are more integrated into a mandatory institutional framework. This chapter argues that schools could perform considerably better if they were not bound by standards of impersonal, impartial, and itemized knowledge. Such knowledge does not exist. Scientific work at its best is and always was a personal, passionate, value-driven, reflective, and imaginative intellectual endeavor, academically interdisciplinary and in tune with its social and cultural environment. The requirement to teach and learn standardized knowledge conveys a misrepresentation of science as a model of human learning and is incompatible with education. Education empowers human agents by enabling them to benefit from the experience of others.
