ABSTRACT
Schools should aim to communicate what is true, and for the most part, educators have accepted that there can be a curriculum whose veracity is beyond reproach and that the major task is to improve on better ways of improving understanding. However, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education should contend with the likelihood that its knowledge bases are not neutral, a theme which I will more fully develop in Chapter 5. This chapter introduces the basic concepts and contention about the nature of truth claims. While these ideas have a long history, it has been the events of the last century that are particularly pertinent to our current situation. While in the early 1900s, philosophers were concerned with absolute truth, the postmodern reaction made the similar mistake of absolutely denying the possibility of truth. The current consensus is a hybrid acknowledgement of the social nature of truth and its associated subjectivity, but with the possibility that objectivity as an ideal worth pursuing. Such a nuanced view will be a challenge to educate, and the contention of this book is that without a reliance on empirical investigations of the kind that makerspaces enable, these epistemic goals will be harder to achieve.
