ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about worth of knowledge in education. The Socratic twist to Herbert Spencer's famous question is deliberate, a way of drawing attention to the huge uncertainty principle operating in educational theory and practice at the present time. The day of the polymath being over, contemporary curriculum theory is inclined to look to the 'disciplines' as the key to the problem of finding some principle of unity in the diversity of modern knowledge. A discipline is a way of making knowledge. A discipline may be characterized by the phenomena it purports to deal with, its domain; by the rules it uses for asserting generalizations as truth; and by its history. Curriculum theorists who take their stand on the 'disciplines' would presumably answer such questions on something like the following lines. All human knowledge can be broadly classified under two headings: knowledge which is the result of deliberate, systematic inquiry, and knowledge which is the residue from ordinary experience.
