Modernities,“Ignorance is Bliss,” and Rethinking the Conditions of Knowledge

“Ignorance is Bliss” is a saying found in the 1768 ode of Thomas Gray on the prospects of going to Eton College. ¹ Gray's ode is about loss of paradise in leaving childhood. My reference to the phrase is not about “loss” but a notion of knowledge important to the nineteenth-century Enlightenments that travels through uneven trajectories of reasoning into the modernities in which we live; reasoning with all of its uncertainties and ambiguities that the current journal issue, I believe, articulates. This focus on ignorance is not as something lacking or absent, but as styles of reasoning and modes of living important for the locating (and unlocating) pathways for anticipating the good life. ² Expressed in the articles and explored here is ignorance as expressing a broader historical pattern of thought that privileges the idea of uncertainty as a mode of living which challenges the doxa of much of contemporary international school planning and their pedagogical practices

A caveat as I proceed. Ignorance is not my field of interest (this sounds odd, doesn’t it?).

My concern is more to “how we think” of ignorance through reading the prior journal articles within an intellectual perspective of a historical and cultural sociology of knowledge. The method of writing, then, has a certain naivety in exploring ignorance. It is taken initially with Lei Zheng's suggestion about this Special Issue, reading some of its general literature, and then thinking along with the specific contributions of the journal. This thinking along with the journal, as hopefully becomes clearer in this discussion, is thinking about questions of knowledge as historical phenomena.

The reading of the different journal articles was like someone standing on different hills and looking at a valley. Each hill provides a different perspective to what is seen, talked about, and felt. With my interest in knowledge (and not valleys), I intellectually play the multiplicities of the notion of ignorance in the articles as a reader and writer. The first section explores ignorance as a knowledge. I know that not everyone in the Special Issue might agree with this statement, but I use knowledge as not about content, information, or the given ontological representations of people and events. Rather, my focus of thinking is about how “things” are ordered and classified to reason about the self and the world, that is, the principles that engender feeling, relevancies, patterns of recognitions, and action. Second and related is to think of ignorance as enunciating styles of reasoning. This theme is engaged to pursue the multiplicities of ignorance in the discussions in a register that works on the above analogy to the climbing on the different hills. I am reminded of the attitude of the European Enlightenments about knowledge as an unthinking what is given as natural and unquestioned. Third and following this trajectory of unthinking is how the thinking about ignorance (re)vision notions of change and agency that are key in social, cultural, and educational theories and research about the educated subject in much of the modern school.

This encounter with ignorance in my reading of the Special Issue, as hopefully obvious as I continue, is homologous to a range of different literatures. These literatures rarely use ignorance as its core concept but have other names (unthinking, problematizing, limits, genealogy). Names that conceptually have homologies to the thoughts underlying the discussions for thinking about educational practices. What follows, then, are images of ignorance assembled through my connecting to other literatures that might fall into the distinctions of “posts” in the humanities and social theories rather than a more direct encounter with the different problematics of each of the journal articles. My use of words like Enlightenments and modernities are not to recapture the past or to colonialize the present, but to historicize trajectories and connections as residues in which notions of ignorance are materialized in flows important to contemporary conditions. I do not cite individual articles but attend to the historical and epistemic qualities of the ideas generated as I read, hopefully in an exploration that does justice to the articles’ elaborate and thoughtful arguments.

Ignorance as a knowledge important to modernity, its faith in reason and rationalities

The Special Issue seeks to challenge, to return to earlier journal article distinction, the doxa of certainty that is pronounced as where ignorance is the lack of knowledge. Its doxa is that of the commonsense of “the enlightened” person is one never wants to be called “ignorant.” The images of the ignorant person are ones not willing to think, living in a sheltered, insulated world where “things” happen in what seems as magical, unreflective, unwelcoming of the foreigners abjected and excluded. Ignorance is associated with traditions that hold sway over as naturalized and routinized modes of living censor—notice my normative language—thoughtfulness, the moral imperatives of the relation of self to others. Ignorance is imagined as what erases the possibilities of all the wonders filled by curiosity, creativity, and imagination allowing for the “rational” opening of new spaces and their possibilities. Ignorance, then, appears as something that refuses to recognize the uncertainties of the present and, paradoxically, to allow for the search for certainty through creativity, imagination, and rationality. Worst and part of the modernistic theory captured in the above is that ignorance produces a world without human agency.

If I frame qualities of modernity through this notion of knowledge as the light of truth against darkness, ignorance occupies a particular historical and limited narrative of the Enlightenments associated with Western liberalism in the long nineteenth century and today inscribed in international pedagogical and assessment discourses. That history, asserting rather than exploring here, is of a human exceptionalism. That exceptionalism is where individuals and groups of people are originary forces of a more progressive world through gaining knowledge that expresses their interests in the quest for progress. This exceptionalism, for example, is found in European and American literature that speaks of voice and stakeholders. Knowledge becomes an epiphenomenon in the awakening of human agents in finding the correct practices and the knowledge for managing educating processes that deliver its utopic visions.

This notion of knowledge against ignorance is a chimera, a beautiful illusion that has limits through its continual assertion of the self as the unity of Truth against uncertainty. The limits of this exceptionalism are found in the challenges of the prior articles’ discussions of ignorance that center on notions of uncertainty that give expression as the importance of the unseen, unthought, and historically generated distinctions, and differentiations that enter into the present but are prior to our conversations. This historically “prior” is something inscribed in the routines and distinctions that travel in the knowledge of learning to be a teacher, and the learning of the grammar and syntax of the school that allow new teachers to enter the teachers’ lounge and to “talk the talk” about children, classroom organizations, and community so others know you belong, and care about the things that the others in the clan of teaching care about.

This learning to give relevance and intelligibility to the phenomena of schooling can be understood as internalizing the style of reason that identifies the subjectivities of the teacher, an educational researcher of school practices, or as a knowable parent or citizen. That is, the abstractions as a theorized subject enter schooling as the interiorized rules and standards of classification and ordering that are not just you, but which are historically inscribed to given intelligibility to education. The inscriptions met you at the doorways of teacher education and the school, produced at the interstices of discourses of pedagogy, psychologies of learning and childhood, models of curriculum, and the administrative language of schooling related to the organization of classroom and children whose identities defined by age and grades, for example.

To “talk the talk” of the teacher are the interiorized a priori of styles of reason that generate patterns of recognition and expectations of experience to order action and reflection. I use the plural, styles of reason, for as with the hills around the valley, there is not a unity from which differences about ignorance is explored but as within different styles of reasons.

If I use the notion of styles of reason, ignorance is a knowledge and also, if I can add, a rationality. The prior discussions in this Special Issue might not always agree with this claim as sometimes about ignorance is spoken as an alternative against the knowledge that exists as schooling and its association with the limits of contemporary rationalities. But ignorance maintains sense of rationality, senses as it requires awarenesses and sensibilities that goes against the grain of what is taken as naturally “there” as the school and its curriculum. Ignorance, then, requires a double quality of knowledge: to recognize what is there but also a disposition of knowledge that what is there is not sufficient or adequate as practices of “thought.” In both recognizing what is there and what is not sufficient brings into a view the notion of rationality, but different from that associated with positivism, empiricism, and the distinctions associated with analytic philosophy.

It is for this reason that rationality was included in the section title to explore the general sense of ignorance as a disciplining, seeking symbolic canopies, and creating ways of thinking that give intelligibility to the complexities, aphorias, and nuances of the world and self. Ignorance, as I will return to later, requires onto-epistemic principles that give form to modes of thinking and acting that has rationality, if not the one typically associated with planning and administration. I use rationality in this broader sense, as well, is to argue against the colonialization of that word that reduces rationality to the calculative reason of knowledge as mastering, planning, and explaining through correlational and causal logics.

I associate the broader sense of rationality with the different styles of reasoning given expression in the explorations of ignorance. Ignorance as a project to order and classify experiences is reasoning that has, if I can use the word, soft calculative properties. The reasoning about ignorance is productive of objects of reflection whose logics having multiple and uneven senses of time, enable an unthinking and rethinking of how space and time are woven relationally, and with non-linear and non-hierarchical qualities. Again, in these qualities arise notions of uncertainties!

Ignorance as knowledge in styles of reasoning

The multiple ways that ignorance is argued in the Special Issue have family of resemblance, to borrow from Ludwig Wittgenstein, and related to Ian Hacking's idea of styles of reasoning. As a family of resemblance, the articles are approaches to challenges of the present that requires thinking differently and going against the grain of the doxa of educational planning and research. The relations of the articles are not tied to a harmony and logic of consistency in the concepts and theories as if they all replicate some original set of philosophical principles about the nature of people and their moral order. Rather the resemblances are in the proximities of their principles activated in feeling, “seeing” and ordering events as they relate to the educative subject. The proximities of thought can be thought as styles of reason, with ignorance as engendering modes of living and principles for making judgments about the relations of the present and the possibilities of change outside of the doxa of the representational logic and temporal linearity that pervades contemporary practices.

Ignorance as a knowledge that carries anticipations

To pursue this idea of systems of reason, I need to first revisit something mentioned earlier about the idea of ignorance as a “reasoning” or a knowledge about the world and one's awareness and participation in that world. This is not merely a philosophical comment but one that has a sociological and material existence. As argued, ignorance is an awareness and recognition that there is something not right, not known, and missing that recognizes anomalies that simultaneously evokes desires of anticipatory qualities—desires of learning but not what can be institutionalized and standardized. This feeling of something not known and missing is continually illustrated, counterintuitively in the history of science. At one layer are discussions of how scientists check their equipment to find out they are working correctly. Yet something is felt as not correct and the scientist becomes suspicious and produces changes that produce findings not seen or understood properly before. The suspicions are of everything that seems normal and working properly is a kind of ignorance that recognizes something is out of the normal, amiss.

But within this feeling of something missing in the desire to know is a broader disposition, perhaps illustrated in a cartoon that hung on the door of a molecular biologist in my university. The cartoon was of a scientist dressed in white laboratory coat and holding a butterfly net. The net was positioned in the air as if trying to catch a question. When I asked the molecular biologist about the cartoon, she said it was what she did. The question of science, for her, was to ask about what is not present, we are ignorant of, and the chase is to find questions about what is not known but worth knowing. A form of ignorance as knowing?

Perhaps, this butterfly net qualifies as a metonym of a mode of living in which the unknown, its contingencies are possibilities opened through the reasoning of ignorance? But it is hard (at least for me) with the above example to think that ignorance as not requiring the desires of knowledge. That knowledge is of what is known that includes recognitions of its inadequacies, empty spaces, desires to find gaps, but to locate what is not known outside of gaps, and to do something different by unthinking the ways of telling the truth about people and the nature of things. Each of these notions of ignorance are different in their patterns of recognition and expectations of experience. And the recognitions and expectations are desires of anticipation, again returning to earlier, of differences in respecting the unknown of “others.”

Ignorance, articulated as a multiplicity of its significance in this issue, then, is not a notion of pure logic. It is reasoning that generates an array of phenomena with different practices of logics to express and give value to the relations of knowing and not knowing. The arguments about ignorance within this Special Issue, for example, are taming the unpredictability, rethinking the relation of uncertainty/certainty, a hermeneutic of openness that resides in its planes of immanence, and layers of thought of the necessity of ignorance as corrective moments in the practices of education—its research, teacher education, pedagogical practices, and ethics.

The different planes of ignorance are rationalities for ordering and classifying but not reducible to singular set of rules and standards and relevancies about the matters and the matters of importance in education. The different principles of ignorance entail an unthinking, an anticipating by not knowing, and a thinking otherwise. Their virtues are a knowledge of knowing that is simultaneously positive and negative. The negative/positive is in the sense of unthinking the doxa of the present that holds the potentialities of enabling thinking beyond the internments and enclosures of the present.

Styles of reason

Perhaps thinking about ignorance as neither positive or negative knowledge, it is more appropriate to think of the differences as having multiple set of rules and standards and relevancies that are not about what is good and bad. The differences about what constitute ignorance are bound in the multiplicities of infrastructures about what is known and how that knowing is ordered. The attention to the multiplicities of knowledge are embedded in what the philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn (1970) called paradigms and Ian Hacking (1992) called styles of reason.

If I start with Kuhn's (1970) seminal work on scientific revolutions, he argues that science is not about the things that “we find” but are practices whose rules and standards make possible the “seeing” of objects as facts, what serves as evidence, and modalities and possibilities that order what is understood as types of subject matter. The practices in producing knowledge are not unified and have different rules and standards that Kuhn distinguished as normal and revolutionary sciences. In normal science, there is a quality of ignorance to conquer the unknowable that is likened to a puzzle solving that exists within a consensus about what is important and knowable. Science provides data and conceptual nuances that allow greater differentiation and distinguishing—like a puzzle to be filled in.

Normal science is the puzzle of a calculative reasoning about what is not answered, to find out what is not known within a bounded field that details an enclosed and contained world of normal science. The story of normal science seeking its totalizing knowledge is depicted in the Norwegian film Kitchen Stories. It is about Swedish faith in the expertise of the social sciences to gain a complete knowledge about social life so as to better manage it for the betterment of humankind. Having data about how women worked in the kitchen, Swedish social science sends a large group of researchers to observe rural men (Norwegian) in their kitchens, thus filling in the missing part of the puzzle of “the kitchen.” Much experimental psychology is related to this notion of normal science.

Revolutionary science is recognition that the questions and matters of science of normal science are unable to accommodate and recognize the anomalies or empty spaces that left untouched and invisible to normal science. In some ways, this notion of revolutionary science as homologies to the notion of ignorance. The American feminist sociologies and histories in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, challenged existing classifications and modes of reasoning. That challenge was initiated by a seemingly simple but profound question that asked historically “how am I that name?” exploring how particular cultural notions of the body and soul are not natural but historically produced effects of power that distribute differences.

A related but more elaborated discussion of the interior of and differences in the social and education sciences related to education is Ian Hacking's (1992) “styles of reason.” The notion of styles of reason draws attention to how varied disciplinary arguments give existence to the things that matters; that is generated through what constitutes the legitimate questions of research, what serves as evidence, functions as a type of subject matter, and the modes and the modalities of “reasonable” action and plans for finding solutions. Hacking looked across the disciplinary fields of philosophy, history, and statistics to consider the different rules and standards that ordered and classified their practices in constituting knowledge.

The styles of reason are significant in creating boundary conditions of what becomes recognized as empirical entities. The theories, conceptions, principles of ordering and technologies of the sciences assembled as infrastructures of science fashion patterns of recognition and expectations of experiences in which objects of what is known (ontologies) and how one “knows” (epistemologies) are produced within and across the disciplinary fields of knowledge.

Cybernetics illustrates both a style of reason that is embodied in much of contemporary social and psychological sciences related to education and as a counterpoint to the discussions of ignorance. Cybernetics emerges in the middle of the twentieth century as a theory of management registered through analogies of ideas of the machine (certainty) and the mind (uncertainty). Cybernetics provided a theory of how schools as organizations operate as interconnected parts to form a system that functions through social norms and patterns of communication to effect efficiency and effectiveness.

Cybernetics enters into social practices and education to think about the double subjects of school: the subject taught as the knowledge of the curriculum and the child as a subject of teaching and the psychologies of learning. But the significance of cybernetics is its entanglement in grids of practices that assemble, for example, curriculum theories about science and mathematics, models of social science for assessing children's academic achievements, psychologies of cognitive learning, social psychologies of classroom communication, educational sociology, anthropology and the social and psychometrics of assessments (Popkewitz et al., 2021). Thus, to give attention to cybernetics requires historically locating its different settlements assembled in the infrastructures of the sciences. ³

Central to the infrastructures of science in education are classifications and ordering of children as kinds of people, such as the life longer learner. The principles generated about the children (and teachers) as kinds of people produced the infrastructures of school practices are not merely about “thinking” but have a materiality. The cognitive structures given in the psychologies of learning and the child as the learner appear as global and nonpolemic. The principles generate with the infrastructures of classroom communications and psychologies of the child as the learner, for example, embody notions of moral order, assemble and connect cybernetics with narratives of the school system's goals, benchmarks of anticipated learning, and children's competences. The interconnected practices in which cybernetics work into curriculum and instructional practices in organizing an “observation deck” to see the child's “nature” in designing learning and as the core of the knowledge defining the expertise of the professional teacher in contemporary international and many national reforms.

Making visible and manageable social existence through the infrastructures in which cybernetics acts has a materiality. It works into the life of schooling as continual processes of optimizing the system through organizing the communication processes and interactions of the networks and its nodules in a status that simultaneously allows for an openness and change. In achieving this, notions of certainty and uncertainty are intertwined with the rationality of the school system continually searching for its equilibrium.

The materiality of styles of reason is given visibility in the post-war years through cybernetics. Cybernetics signified as a field of thought that was a radical shift or, in Kuhn's terms, a revolutionary science. The infrastructure of cybernetics was connected in school practices in different countries after World War II. Zheng (2019), for example, explored historically how cybernetics was assembled and connected as an alchemic process. The complexities of science and mathematics as disciplinary practices producing knowledge were translated into pedagogical principles driven, in part, through the infrastructure of practices connected with cybernetics. Generated was a reasoning about how judgments are made, conclusions are drawn, rectification is proposed, and the fields of existence are made manageable and predictable. The diverse epistemic machineries of the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics were deterritorialized and reterritorialized into a unified system of reason for educational planning and curriculum models that inscribed the pedagogical purposes of managing children applicable across national spaces and cultural traditions.

Today, cybernetics operates as a normal science in education. It is given the name STEM as principles of social life, cultural differences and learning that inscribes the epistemic structuring in constituting “normality” of research. The notions of science and mathematics that appear in school instruction and international assessments are taken as “real” and isomorphic to the disciplinary practices named in the curriculum; yet they are something different.

I focus on the cybernetics and its intersections with theories and technologies of school pedagogies to suggest how the Special Issue on ignorance works against the epistemic principles and styles of reason exemplified in policy and the pedagogical practices of teaching the school subjects. Ignorance expresses desires to engage the existences of the things other than what are not seen. In some instances, in the Special Issue, the “not seen” are absences, a “seeing” that involves a priori inscriptions that create its boundaries of knowing and the basis of managing what is present. And in other instances, it is not absences at all that is the focus. Rather, ignorance is to move to outside of the frameworks of the doxa of the present in which the possibilities of absences exist. Ignorance is directed not so much as what is imagined as to be changed but in making visible the limits of the present as a theory of change for opening possibilities not yet visible in the present. This language of opening possibilities and change, represented in the prior articles; expresses an uncertainty through their notions of “purposeless purposeness,” “swimming,” “not conquering,” “indeterminacy,” to unthink, the recognition of what is not there, and “noise,” among others.

The phrases are qualities to be read as inscribed through the styles of reason rather than concepts capturing what has a prior material existence of the real. To return to an earlier statement, the different movements of thought and styles of reasoning that travel through this Special Issue are not about right or wrong but to think about the present, its matters of importance, and what are signified as important matters. The utopic visions are embodied in different anticipatory imaginaries that produce expressions of the opening of possibilities. The reconfigurations and creations are alternatives are different from the contemporary frameworks of practices such as the relation of certainty and uncertainty bounded in the interpretive framing of cybernetics discussed above.

To this point, my attention has pointed to ignorance as style of reasoning directed to think differently about educative projects. Ignorance, in its different iterations, are bound to unthinking the doxa of the human exceptionalism spoken about earlier as prevailing in much of contemporary Western scholarship. Yet to think of ignorance as styles of reason or paradigms maintains a particular trope of modernity and the Enlightenments that has a partial homology but assembled differently to challenge the doxa of knowledge as the search for Truth against ignorance. The last section approaches this challenge as articulated through this Special Issue.

Reason and the desire of knowledge (including ignorance)

The homologies of the articles about ignorance as a reasoning is the recognition of something missing, or not “right” that paradoxically inscribes the future as an imagined promise of the present. The presence of “the future” in many of the Special Issue articles draws attention to ignorance as anticipating promises of “the good life” but within different epistemes articulated as possibilities bound to, if I can play with an early expression, the relation of phenomena that are the entanglement of the negative/positive. The latter is in opposition to much educational thought and research, for example, that views ignorance as in opposition to knowledge in educational practices. Ignorance as the lack of knowledge expresses epistemic principles of absolutes and binaries: Exclusions are distinction phenomena that are separate from inclusions. The conceptual distinctions make the task filled with a notion of certainty. The idea of inclusion is a final state to achieve, finding the totally inclusive classroom in which there are no exclusions! Uncertainty is in the pathways to that inclusive state. In some ways, inclusion and exclusion bring into view Kuhn's problem solving of normal science.

The analytic distinctions of certainty/uncertainty and inclusion/exclusions elide how what is present is integrally bound with its absences, that is, how inclusion and exclusions are continually in a relation to each other. To speak of the motivated child as successful in school embodies notions of a different kind of child who does not succeed and “lacks” motivation. The discussions of ignorance as a mode of knowing brings into view an attempt to think differently and with different epistemological principles.

This giving of concepts as a representational logic and identity appears as a nonpolemic vision that embodies a more general quality of contemporary scholarship on education that the Special Issue of ignorance goes against. The former is the appearance of unity and consensus embedded in the theories and conceptual distinctions that order school reforms and its policy research as desires. The desires are inscriptions of the present as the anticipation of imagined possibilities. In international and Western policies, the imagined possibilities are talked about as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Knowledge Society, and the global competences necessary for nations and populations to provide for the future development and well-being of its populations.

The doxa of education research is a temporal world of evolution, and its planning as a linearity linked with notions of systems to manage the present as anticipating the future. If I take international assessments of student performances as an example, the indexing and mapping of students’ literacies and well-being are new phenomena for seeing the present and for research to activate that embody philosophical ideals about potentialities of people. The concepts and theories of learning, and the tools of measurement embodied in these assessments are not merely descriptive about acquiring knowledge or processes, but a cognitive structure at the interstices of affective desires that engage philosophical ideals what the child is to become through its activation in the present (Popkewitz & Huang, 2024).

The reference to the future as an objective of the present is itself a historical condition of the styles of reason associated with the human sciences as a space of action. That space is to create new planes of phenomena that become the conditions of possibility historically associated with the modernities in the long nineteenth century, (re)visioned in the long twentieth century, and which continues today under the label of Eurocentricism. ⁴ The latter is associated with a certain global, affective economy which anticipates the utopic and its social and human potentialities that research is to activate. ⁵

If continue a little more with this inscription of the future before turning to the contribution of the discussion of ignorance, the knowledge of science inscribed emotions, attachments, and affiliations in the cognitive structuring from its nineteenth-century formations in the United States and Western Europe. Knowledge was just not to see, and think, but embodied feelings and gave as direction to act (Popkewitz & Huang, 2022, 2024). The “seeing” of society and individuality embodied and entangled dimensions of the past and present with desires about potentialities anticipated through the sciences of education. The Child Studies at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, gave life a directionality about human potentialities. Concepts of childhood were prophetic surfaces that set up ways of measuring and calculating conceptions of the childhood as if they did exist but were directed to the future cosmopolitanism of the child (Hultqvist & Dahlberg, 2001; Rose, 1989). American social and psychological sciences affectively were given as the great panacea for equality (Sklansky, 2002). Concepts of the self, society, learning, and socialization anticipated the potentialities of people that envisioned utopic conditions for the coming of “the good life.” The potentialities, however, were inscribed in continua of values that imagined doubles of the kinds of people that comparatively differentiated the child “to be” and “not-to-be.” The doubles were distributed as principles of “the nature” of the child who were (and were not) creative, imaginative, motivated, and problem solving.

The presence of utopic qualities is elided in the rituals that define science through its technologies. There is the continued analytical and practical separation of methods from theory and content. The focus defines science as methods distinct from theory. Privileged in the sciences are the technologies of measurement and notions of objectivity in the late twentieth century—Western social and educational science, for example. Pronounced in the focus on technologies are a seemingly bodily disinterest and subjective distance in which the only interest appears as “what works” and decisions based on “empirical evidence.” Erased in this focus on methods is how, for example, the ideas that evidence linked to data are historical phenomena linked to seventeenth-century Protestant theology and the function of miracles providing irrefragable external evidence for the truth of Christian revelation (Daston, 1991).

The notions of disinterest and distance work with an epistemic framing of systems of management that create illusions of science as an information bearing practice that strives for Truth as outside of its conditions of production.

The arguments about ignorance escapes many of these distancing technologies that saturate the styles of reason in which science is thought as performing as a practical, utilitarian knowledge for educational planning and curriculum designs. The arguments about ignorance, however, (re)vision the inscriptions of desire or will to know, temporalities as non-directional, and its futures as utopic, if I read the prior articles appropriately. The varied notions of ignorance have not escaped the inscriptions of the utopic and ideas of the good life. But what it has sought is a non-representation reason and logic of reason. The contributions and challenges of the articles of this Special Issue is to (re)vision change as a moment in the present that is to engage the possibilities of imagined utopic futures that are not inscribed as the images of its theories and methods.

The presence of utopic qualities is important (some have talked about these as spirituality) and not my direct concern. It is more directed to how desires are articulated as the conditions of ignorance as knowledge of the present. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1980/1987) who provided a foundation in many current theories of affect, engaged the notion of desire as an epistemic quality of knowledge rather than as a property of any individual thought. Desire is embedded in the onto-epistemic principles that work with a Nietzschean notion of “the will to know” that connects with rethinking of Spinozan notions of affect immanent in the non-representation qualities of knowledge.

In one sense, the possibilities of ignorance and my association of it with desires and affect in the journal discussions can be read as a strategy to think about change. A directionality is given but through the shifting attention away from planning and logically organized processes of things represented. The latter inscribes causes and an evolution of linear processes and development, bound to the functional relations of systems. As I read the different intensities of the prior articles, ignorance gives value to what not seen, one does not know, and potentialities not as an anticipated end or goal inscribed in the conceptualizations of change and the projects of learning. The modes of living in the notions of ignorance entail an uncertainty in the necessarily plotted course of action that are constituted and acted on through the distinctions and ordering of theories of the child. The desire of ignorance is situated in styles of reason which generate the sensitivities in knowing the limits of the present in the search for different conditions in achieving the good life. The anticipatory promises and affective attachment are conditional promises of what be thought of as an experimental life and continual process of becoming.

I have to say that in the discussions of ignornance in the Special Issue embodies the feeling of hope mixed with nostalgia and romantism with these promises. That is ok, in my thinking, as modernities continually require salvation themes. Ignorance as about the future and its uncertainty does not erase the need for salvation themes. The task, if I use an analogy, is a mode of living of the qualities in the myth of Sisyphus. The temporality of unknowing/unthinking/ignorance recognizes that “absolute truth” is beyond us and that to know and learn are the humility in not knowing as learning. Sisyphus was condemned to continually pushing boulders up a mountain, but never reaching its top. The utopic and prophetic are works in continual process, allowing for uncertainties, and recognition of the historical limits and conditional foundations. The knowledge of ignorance is one without guarantees.

Ignorance is/and not of the heritages of the enlightenment

At first glance, ignorance seems as a topic in opposition to schooling. The history of the modern school is told often in different evolutionary stories of the Enlightenments’ faith in reason and rationality. The formation and worldwide spread of the modern school is narrated as the reterritorized, transformed, and transmogrified story of that hope and its practices. The retelling and (re)visioning of the story today, at least in international agencies and the West, is of an unfinished cosmopolitanism who lives as a lifelong learner in a world of uncertainty and multiple communities (Popkewitz et al., 2006). The reason for the lifelong learner is to find stability and consensus in the processes of managing uncertainty through the inner discipline of the problem-solving self—the lifelong learner!

This Special Issue challenges this kind of person and its central epistemic principles through the explorations of ignorance as a significant practice of the educative subject. In a counter-intuitive way, the conditions of knowledge practices are not to conquer the unknown but to make the unknown as a virtue in engaging the complexities of life. Ignorance is a mode of living. That mode is problematizing what is taken as natural and seemingly outside of “time.” The educative subject is oriented to making fragile the causality of the present, the existing inscriptions of the past, and depriving the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature as part of the conditions of its possibilities.

Ignorance as “other ways” to think is perhaps to re-engage notions of agency that reverses the idea of ignorance against knowledge and change. It is a knowledge that involves unthinking the frameworks that intern and enclose the possibilities of present educational practices. That unthinking is to think and to open up possible alternatives. This seeming paradox, expressed earlier about the anticipation of the “good life” through thinking differently, is not a paradox. If I bring in an earlier interest of mine in dialectical logic about relations, what seems as opposites—the negativity/positivity of knowledge—are entangled with the humility of ignorance. The humility is in striving to push the rock up the hill as continual and conditional processes of becoming but which does not forego what Judith Bulter called as the obligation of conditions foundations.

This notion of change—it is a change!—is entangled with but not reductive to the attitudes of the Enlightenments’ cosmopolitanism. I speak of cosmopolitanism not as a distinctive doctrine, a structuralism in which knowledge is an epiphenomenon to human action (Popkewitz, 2008). Nor is it as a dogma expressed today as the hope of the world citizen whose commitments transcended provincial and the local. I speak of it hesitantly as particular conditions of knowledge given reference in the long nineteenth century, historically as expressions in the West but not only of the West. The “ism” of cosmopolitanism gives attention to an attitude with the different assemblies and connections of ignorance as a strategy to seek “the good life” that recognizes the limits of all discourses. Cosmopolitanism that I speak of are the dispositions entangled at the interstices of multiple historical interactions and assemblages that work against any origin narrative and which simultaneously works against a coloniality born geographically and imperially to master and control.

Ignorance discussed in this Special Issue expresses this attitude of reason and rationality but with different configurations of knowledge that work against the logics of representation and notions of differences from sameness. The French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1983) approaches a notion of ignorance indirectly when he discusses the doxa of science as creating veils through geometrizing knowledge and privileging the ocular as the sense for knowledge. That ocular in “seeing” knowledge embodies a metaphysis of inaccessible objects. It mitigates against the sensuous perceptions of the abyss of multiplicities of possibilities and possible relations in nature and life. Serres (1983) suggests, in contrast, that we pay attention to “noise” to bring in other senses rather than to define knowledge through the singular sense of the ocular. The notion of noise forms a territory of rationality, if I bring back the early discussion, for interpreting. Noise is a desire to know that is not reductive to the proverbial “rationality” given by the analytical properties of words and process expressed in, for example, Cartesian logic, and notions of positivism and empiricism.

In some ways, the focus on ignorance has analogies to classical Confucianism focus on relations, movements, and flows that have no centers of representation or human exceptionalism. That reasoning is embedded in this journal as a mode of thinking and acting that forms in relation to the idea of ignorance and unthinking. Wu's (2013) explorations of classical Chinese texts, for example, provides an alternative notions of history that can think outside of the epistemes of time and moral values of Western notions of historicism. Zhao and Zheng (2022), as well, explores the epistemic encounters between imperial China and Europe and contemporary translations at the interstices of the complexities of coloniality entangled in the epistemic ordering and (re)visioning across history strata. ⁶