Javier A. Tabush

 

"The author employs Hayek’s concepts of knowledge and spontaneous order to outline a learning-centered alternative to teacher- and student-centered pedagogies. In a Hayekian classroom, learning (intellectual order) emerges from a polycentric web of instruction, study, conversation, frustration, and discovery that continually elicits and tests the knowledge claims of students and teachers. Yet, unlike Hayek’s impersonal market process, the process of liberal learning is both personal and impersonal. To capture this hybridity, the author supplements Hayek’s insights with those of Parker Palmer, a liberal educator whose analysis of the classroom as a community of truth is attuned to the interpersonal dimensions of knowing and learning."

 

 

Hayek’s concepts of knowledge and learning, and his alertness to “the epistemic- cognitive properties of alternative institutional arrangements” (Boettke 2002, 265), suggest a provocative reframing of the basic pedagogical problem: How to educate? 

 

 

The actual problem, Hayek argues, is how to utilize “the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use,” despite the fact that this knowledge “is not given to anyone in its totality” 

 

"Much like Hayek’s theory of the market, Parker Palmer’s pedagogical theory is based on a post-objectivist theory of knowledge."