ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall consider some challenges to my view of liberal education that group themselves around the idea of the relativity of knowledge and its relationship to political, social and economic interests. This is to consider arguments at once more complex than, and different in kind from, those considered in the previous chapter. Those people holding what I there called the economic utility view of education do not set out to challenge the taken-for-granted view of knowledge. They hold the same view of knowledge as most other people but suppose, quite overtly, that some knowledge, especially technological knowledge characterized in terms of skills, is much more useful than other more abstract knowledge and understanding, and ought to be the main consideration in schools. The challenge of those I shall now refer to as 'relativists' is more profound in that all knowledge is presented by them, to a greater or lesser degree, as arbitrary systems of meaning, and opposed to absolute and objectivist views of knowledge which they suppose to characterize the way knowledge is presented to and received by pupils in schools. To this extent the challenge is an epistemological one about the nature of knowledge, and can be met, at least in some measure, by reminders about how I have characterized knowledge and understanding earlier in this work. The challenge of the relativists is more complex even than these epistemological differences and hypothetical characterizations of knowledge, because grafted onto the relativistic epistemology is a theory, or a body of alternative theories, seeking to account for the dominance and institutionalization of certain systematizations of meaning, albeit arbitrary and problematic, by socio-economic or political explanations of the dominance of social or political groups.
