Knowledge and justification in education for democracy and active citizenship

Primary schools, as well as universities, are avenues for learning. The gaining of new knowledge is significant to both of these educational institutions, no matter whether it regards spelling out a new word or recognizing how many percent of the universe that consists of dark matter. In this paper I discuss the relationship between issues in epistemology and learning. In Plato's dialogue Teaitetos he presents what is often called the "classical analysis of knowledge". According to this analysis, to have knowledge of a proposition is to have a true, justified belief about that proposition. This analysis has been criticised by for instance Gettier (1963) and restated in different versions. For instance, some versions excludes the truth condition, while the justification condition is often considered necessary for knowledge. In this paper I wish to remain fairly neutral regarding what constitutes sufficient conditions for knowledge, but I do focus on the relevance of justification in knowledge, learning and education for democracy and active citizenship.According to Kurfiss (1988), critical thinking, which is relevant to Swedish school curricula, is defined in terms of justification. Hence, justification seems relevant also to critical thinking and critical dialogue, which in turn is relevant to school. According to Longino (1990), a relevant property of a transformative critical dialogue (in scientific practice) is that it is not authoritarian. Hence, the status of a presented argument ideally does not depend on age or title of the person uttering an argument, but rather on the strength of the argument. I argue that this kind of critical dialogue is also relevant for learning democracy and active citizenship, as well as for the attaining of propositional knowledge in ordinary educational settings.Godkänd; 2010; 20100416 (ylva