Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2015 number 1

In connection with the adoption of new educational standards, a greater role in education has been given to unsupervised study of students. But is it really so that a student is able to acquire the necessary knowledge by self-study? This is often the case that the students, without the help of an instructor, simply misinterpret the content of instructional materials, giving some alien meaning to them. This phenomenon must have some objective reasons. To settle the problem it would be of some use for us to turn to some concepts of modern epistemology and philosophy of science, such as M. Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge, Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument, T. Kuhn’s idea of relativity and subjectivity of knowledge, L. Fleck’s observation on how a scientific fact is formed. For example, according to Wittgenstein, it is our being accustomed to acting in accordance with the rules in a certain way, our using them regularly, our practice that give meaning to the rules and signs. The essence of language is the regular use of certain rules and signs in certain circumstances. It is a wrong rule-following that students commit when they misunderstand the words of a textbook. Only the joint activity of people makes it possible to establish stable and intersubjective language rules, and the collective practice and regular use support these rules. The concept due to M. Polanyi is close to Wittgenstein's idea. The former identifies two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge which is rational and can be formalized and tacit, implicit, nonformalizable knowledge. Both types of knowledge are fundamentally important from the epistemological point of view; both of them are always there in any act of cognition. It is the formalized knowledge that students found in their textbooks while doing their unsupervised study. However, tacit knowledge cannot be communicated through a textbook. It is just this kind of knowledge that students lack; this is why they often do not get the point of what they read. To make understanding possible, tacit knowledge ought to be communicated in the course of its being used by an expert. The idea of implicit component in the process of acquiring knowledge takes on a special significance when we talk about learning a foreign language. The learned, explicit knowledge is obtained as a result of conscious learning when the student’s attention is focused on the formalized features of linguistic phenomena. In contrast, acquired knowledge is obtained by involuntary, unconscious learning in the process of communication. Hence it is increasingly important to participate in a classroom activity: in a group and under the supervision of an instructor. The above observations show how important for the acquisition of knowledge instructed learning is, guided by an instructor who is able to share his or her inarticulable experience.