If I don't know I don't know I think I know If I don't know I know I think I don't know

"He that knows not, and knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him He that knows not, and knows that he knows not is a pupil. Teach him. He that knows, and knows not that he knows is asleep Wake him. He that knows, and knows that he knows is a teacher. Follow him." (Arabic proverb)

"We know what we know, we know that there are things we do not know, and we know that there are things we don't know we don't know" Donald Rumsfeld (4 Sept 2002) (Woodward, 2004: 171) It is ironic, perhaps, that the initial insight is allegedly Arabic.

This paper is playing around with a conceit: two senses of the term "know". However, it is all in a professional cause. The two senses are those of: awareness of self, (represented by the vertical red line in the diagram below) and knowledge of the world (the horizontal blue line)

There are of course four possible combinations, which are explored below. "Knowledge" but not simply as Bloom understands it: potentially this is the whole cognitive domainYou may find parallels with the witting and willing practice model, and also with the familiar "unconscious incompetence" to "unconscious competence" model, which relates primarily to practical skills: here we are exploring knowledge. Laing's poetic exploration of its interpersonal convolutions cited above (it goes on for another 21 pages), and the citation of the idea by Neighbour (1992) credited as an Arabic proverb demonstrate that it has a considerable provenance.

Not knowing you don't know

The first possibility is that of being unaware that you don't know something. This is the "ignorance is bliss" state, enjoyed by everyone who pontificates about politics in pubs. It is also the position of many people on "soft" occupations (such as teaching, or social work) which look from the outside as if "any fool could do it". (Some do.) And it is engendered by

consummate professionals who make what they do look easy (such as plasterers and chefs and popular novelists and...). Many students start from this position, and although the Neighbour proverb calls them "fools", it is not really fair. Let's go on

So the first move is often to make learners aware of their ignorance. This is tricky, in practice. Unless they are a captive audience it is quite easy to frighten them off. (It is also quite seductive, because it is a chance to show off your own level of knowledge or competence.) On the other hand, it is a crucial step in developing motivation to learn. There are various ways of doing it.
The German teacher's name was Roger Baker (in the unlikely event that he wants to look himself up on the web)In my first German lesson, a young teacher recited a poem to us in German:

it sounded great, but we couldn't understand a word of it, of course. He didn't really need to do it, because we already knew we didn't know any of it apart from a couple of phrases picked up from war films. He was trying to show what we might aspire to, and went on to explain that. (It must have made an impact because I can remember the lesson fifty years later.) You can ask a student (usually either one who is a bit full of himself and needs to be "taken down a peg", or one who is mature enough not to be humiliated) to do something practical in the certainty that he will fail. Only do this if you are confident that when you do it, as you will be challenged to, you can manage it yourself. You can pose a problem which has a seemingly simple answer (political, economic, legalor in Neighbour's case, medical), and then show the problems in reaching that simple solution, which stem from ignorance of the context.

The trick is to show something which is (so far) beyond the students' reach, but not so far beyond it that they will despair. The second trick is to make it interesting. I have deliberately not mentioned strategies for doing this in accountancy. More significantly: In continuing professional development courses in particular, you may be challenging survival-oriented practice in which people have a substantial vested interest: this is the key to the whole un-learning/learning process. See Learning as Loss for more on this. Unless you have to do it, don't. Many learners (particularly those who have signed up for your course of their own free will) are only too aware of what they don't know. The last thing they need is for you to rub it in. Skill in this area is of course a core competence for charlatans. Whether self-help gurus who must convince you of your personal inadequacy or potential ill-health, religious proselytisers who must convict you of sins only they believe are sinful, or salespeople who have to create a "need" for their product, they all have to manage this stage. Study and learn from themjust don't believe them.
A specialist variation on this is the anosognosia of everyday life as Dunning (2005) calls it. See here for a great article on that, which is more relevant to teaching than one might at first think.

Knowing you don't know

This move, from "knowing that you don't know" to "knowing that you know" is what most learning and hence teaching is all about.

Knowing and not knowing that you know

The interaction between knowing and not knowing that you know is however more complex and much neglected. There are two kinds of knowledge (in a third sense) or practice involved here. The first is that for which the move to "not knowing that you know" or "unconscious competence" is the highest stage of development. See the Learning Curve page. This applies to the basic skills of driving, or knitting; the kind of thing you can "do without thinking". The second is where people who have informally learned a great deal mistakenly put themelves in the "knowing that they don't know" category because they have never received any academic or professional accreditation for their learning. This is the downside of our qualification-driven culture, which dismisses those whom Gramsci called "organic intellectuals" because they do not have the recognition of the formal educational system. In the UK, the system of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) and their Scottish equivalents was designed in the late 1980s to provide an assessment scheme to grant credit for just such unsung competence: in the event, it has become just another training scheme. (Discuss!) The situation of such learners is like that of M. Jourdain in Molire's Bourgeois Gentilhomme who was delighted to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life. A major task for the teacher of adultsparticularly perhaps the "basic skills" teacher and the teacher on access programmesis to enable learners to claim credit for what they already know and can do, without ever having realised that it is "worth anything". Neighbour's Arabic proverb enjoins us to "awaken" someone in this position, which means to take them back, counter-clockwise on the diagram, to an awareness of their knowledge. There is a link here with Mezirow's concept of "transformative learning", in which education leads to a re-evaluation of life so far.

(There is perhaps a third possibility here, too, which is the fit with the willing but unwitting category in the model of practice on this site.)

The problematic expert

The fourth possibility is touched on in the discussion of expertise. This the person who (wait for it!) knows that she knows but does not know how she knowsor cannot express it. Ask about a particularly brilliant bit of practice and you will get a banal answer which might have come out of the textbook, but which totally fails to do justice to the complexity of what she has done. Sometimes that answer will be given because she does not want to appear a "smart-arse" ("Ass" if you are American, but I wouldn't wish to confuse you with references to donkeys.) Sometimes, though, she might claim that it is a matter of "not being able to put it into words" or even, disconcertingly, of a "hunch". She may even be afraid of trying to express her expertise, for fear that an inadequate exposition will somehow jeopardise fragile knowledge. Once she has said it, it might become ossified. She might feel obliged to live up to her exposition and limit that insight and creativity which goes beyond words.
I was once asked to contribute to a cookbook. I have a few recipes which I am quite proud of, and I decided to offer one which involved making a batter. I had to systematise the recipe, and specify quantities: but I just could not get it right. Left to myself, as it were, I could just slurp in the milk and get the right consistency with no problem. I was probably taking account of the size of the egg and several other variablesbut for the life of me I could not specify the quantity of milk. I had the same problem with the herbs in another recipe. I gave up. Interestingly, it was several weeks before I was able to make those recipes again with the same insouciance I had previously taken for granted.

Some things we can teach, and some we can't.

So that's the whole story. Or is it? Is there any connection between the "Don't know that you know" stage and the "Don't know that you don't know" stage? Possibly (but not always). There may occasionally be a cycle: if you don't know what you do know, you probably don't know what you don't know, either. This may be the case for people who are stuck at a survival learning level. They have learned to get by with what they know, to

the extent that they do not give themselves credit for it, or are even unaware of knowing it, as we have discussed. However, they can't take it any further because it is out of awareness, so they are unaware of how they could move on from mere competence or proficiency to real expertise. For such people, because they do not know what they know, they may be unsure of their knowledge, and may be threatened by the prospect of moving on, which leads to a degree of resistance to new learning.

The Bottom Line

Clearly we have to get people to realise what they don't know, if necessary. But fascinating though it is, the inarticulate expertise of not knowing that you know is a dead end from the learning and teaching point of view. The only open position, with potential for development, is that of knowing what you know.

Notes: "Unconscious incompetence" etc.

Most readings seem to accept this model as a given: it is most frequently cited as an idea from NeuroLinguistic Programming. The following sites explore it without provenance:

http://www.trainer.org.uk/members/theory/ process/stages_of_learning.htm http://www.neurosemantics.com/Articles/ Unconscious.htm http://www.nlp.org/glossary.html#U The following sources have been cited as its origin, although I have not so far been able to get hold of them to check them out:

Dubin, P (1962) 'Human Relations in Administration', Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1971). A practical guide for supervisory training and development. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. There's a fascinating exploration of the whole story at http://www.businessballs.com/consciouscompetencelearni ngmodel.htm The medical school at the University of Arizona has taken similar ideas further with their Curriculum on Medical Ignorance (CMI) and developed the Q-Cubed; Questions, questioning and questioners project. Here is their "Ignorance Map", which identifies:

Known Unknowns: all the things you know you don't know. Unknown Unknowns: all the things you don't know you don't know

Errors: all the things you think you know but don't Unknown Knowns: all the things you don't know you know Taboos: dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge Denials: all the things too painful to know, so you don't as you see, it goes rather beyond my little model. [acknowledgements to Perkins D (2009) Making Learning Whole: how seven principles of teaching can transform education San Francisco; Jossey Bass p

While it is imperative to us that we are educated and continue to educate ourselves, the truth about ignorance is that it is as important to our growth and survival as knowledge is. Indeed, without ignorance we have no reason to expand our awareness or to seek knowledge. Ignorance and knowledge, while opposites, actuallywork together and must work together in order for us to be able to create for it is from the unknown that the very life that we enjoy today has become known. With all the hubbub about the Qur'an burning started by a fellow that has admittedly not even read it and the hullabaloo about the it's not a mosque people and it's not at Ground Zero I just had to throw my oar in to the proverbial waters. The fact of the matter is that it is a cultural center modeled after the 92nd Street Y to be named Cordoba House and one has to go out of one's way from Ground Zero to get there. In addition, Muslims have been praying at the Ground Zero site for the past ten years because.....they lost friends and family there too!

Positively Ignorant
Ignorance is perceived to be a negative and so it is but that does not make it either bad or evil. Without negative there is no positive and therefore there is no motion and no life. Without exception, none of us would enjoy the places we live, the things we have, our ability to travel and to connect with each other had our ancestors not ventured into the unknown. To be ignorant is to be unaware of and to not know somebody or something. It is the child's ignorance that drives it to know and understand its environment and the people, creatures and things in that environment. It is as it should be.

Negatively Ignorant
Ignorance and a drive for knowledge are innate in humankind and yet we have made ourselves and each other wrong for both. We have argued, fought, killed, maimed, tortured, ostracized, condemned and imprisoned each other for the crime of ignorance. A few years ago I read a letter to our local paper from a lawyer for a client that had been sentence to a long prison term. It has haunted me since. As a seven year old child this now condemned man had been out in the garage with his father who was cutting wood with a power saw. The young lad asked his father a question that many of us would welcome from our children, "Can I help?" This father's answer to that innocent query was to respond with, "You want to help, I'll show you how you can help!" In then grabbed his young son's hand and ran his little fingers through the saw severing four of them. The lawyer expressed in her letter her sadness and frustration that this man was being imprisoned rather than receiving the help that should have been his from a caring society years before he ever got to the point where he was visiting his father's actions upon others. What happens when a person gets stuck on an incident from the past is that they continually dramatize all the decisions, perceptions, and moods experienced that it literally takes over the individual and influences all of their behaviors. It is like a movie reel that just plays the same scene over and over and over again. They do not see who or what is in front of them in present time.

Shocking Ignorance
When a something happens that shatters your world, your trust in others, your dependence upon others, it is a shock, a big shock. To use the young boy in the circumstance above as an example, in his asking the father the question, "Can I help?" he was in a high mood level, very present and had a positive vision and intention. What he got in exchange was an extremely negative mood level, spiritual absents and a negative vision and intention. This caused the boy's game, which was to help daddy, collapse. A shock has occurred when something jars the mind or the emotions with a sudden, violent and unexpected blow. The person has experienced an outrage and a severe offense to all that could be considered decent. Individuals can be put into shock this way and indeed, as with September 11, 200, an entire country and its allies can be put into shock this way. It is an alarmingly simple thing to put an individual or a group into a state of shock and perhaps the most damaging effect is not the shock itself but the decisions the individual or collective make while in that state of shock. They are always, without fail, negative decisions with negative outcomes and consequences. Individuals and groups in shock are very easily controlled and manipulated.

Certifably Shocking
A person in shock is little more than a ball of confusion, their purpose has failed, their dreams have failed, their reason for existence has failed, and they no longer trust themselves or others. Their disrupted minds give conflicting commands and signals to their bodies, their ability to reason and to know or to reach for knowledge has been severely compromised as indeed their whole world as they knew it to be has collapsed in on them. Instead, they sit in a pool of stupidity, trapped life force and extremely heavy, uncomfortable and painful feelings. They can no longer respond to any given situations they can only react. They are, effectively and thoroughly destroyed.

Advanced Ignorance
We have come a long way since our ancestors set sail to explore and acquire knowledge about the world we collectively inhabit but we have come an equal distance in our ability to react rather than to respond to that world and our fellow humankind. The missiles fired by the rifles, long bows and cannons of the past have been replaced with highly technical missiles that would rendered our own ancestors defenseless. However, in our ability to acquire and apply appropriate knowledge to the caring of and for each other in away that serves the whole rather than a select few who, more often than not are quite willing to lead us where we would never follow should we be in our right minds, we remain woefully ignorant.

The Truth About Knowledge

The truth about knowledge is that in our seeking and acquiring knowledge we do not have to concern ourselves with ignorance. It will come along for the ride without our having to do anything or giving it any attention other than to acknowledge its existence. Whenever we acquire knowledge in an area, our ignorance automatically comes to view. Our ancestors started us on a journey of acquiring knowledge about the world in which we live. It is a journey that once embarked upon became destined to continue. As subsequent generations acquired more knowledge about our planet our vast ignorance of our own solar system and our place in it became blatantly apparent. Knowledge and ignorance give us, as a species, eternal life because for everything we know there is something that we do not. When we condemn ourselves and each other for our ignorance; when we pretend to know when we don't; and worse yet, when we think we know and we do not the result is discord, upsets, and harmful actions rather than balance and harmony. In our seeking to know we will naturally create a balanced and harmonious flow of life force between ourselves and each other and between ourselves and our dreams and goals.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

It is said that we are leaving the Industrial Age behind us and are now at the threshold of what is being called the Knowledge Age. As we step through that threshold we are going to be forced to lay down and let go of our old self-limiting, erroneous and often negative precepts and beliefs about who and what we are. Those who chose to remain behind, clinging to their ignorant perceptions while vehemently condemning the ignorance of others cannot help be faced with unpredictable and unpleasant consequences. It is time to embrace our ignorance, see it for what it is, love it even for it is truly the only 'enemy' that we have for without it there is no purpose to life and no game to play. It is time also to make a decision as to how you are going to use your knowledge - for your benefit and those of others whom you care for and about or for your self serving benefit only to the determent of others.

Knowledge is a double edged sword. It is your own honesty, ethics, integrity and ability to interface with others that will determine how you wield that sword.

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