What Does It Mean To Be Smart: A Brief Study of Epistemology in American Education

“You’re so smart,” is all the valedictorian heard the entire week leading up to her graduation. She heard it in the grocery store line, in the hallway saying goodbye to her favorite teacher, and over the phone with her grandma. Each time, she smiled just a little wider, feeling really giddy inside, finally feeling rewarded for spending the last decade of her life meticulously pouring into her academic work. She had never dipped below a 95% on a single test, except for that one time she got a B+ on a math quiz because of COVID. She tore that test up right after, and had trouble even seeing the letter B for weeks.

Kai knew how much work it had taken her to get to this point. She barely allowed herself to leave her home all throughout high school. She knew every inch of her school library so intimately that the Dewey system needed her. In just four years she had spent thousands of hours, locked inside, barely even glancing at the lunch her mom had packed her, as she barreled away at her work. When the scholarships and news coverage of her success began to make rounds, she felt a deep sense of validation for her efforts. She knew she was smart, and finally the world would see it too.

For Kai, the week flew by in just a few seconds. Before she knew it, it was graduation day, and she stood in front of a thousand people, trying to get a hold of the podium that stood in front of her. She had been preparing for weeks for her speech and couldn’t wait to address her class, most of whom she barely knew. She did have a friend or two. But as she looked across the sea of unknown faces, she knew that she was ready for the moment.

“Class of 2023, we’ve finally made it!”

As Kai began her speech, her once best-friend, Ari, stretched out her arms, leaning as far back as her chair would allow, and yawned uncontrollably. A lion’s roar type of yawn. The type where you worry if your jaw might completely come unhinged, leaving your mouth at the bottom of the floor. She quickly rushed her hands to her face, but was a little too late, failing to effectively cover her boredom with the unnecessarily wordy procession. She and Kai had a long and complicated friendship, that slowly faded, for no particular reason other than the fact that they had such different lives. Ari, still full of love for Kai, smiled, but couldn’t help but feel a sense of insincerity. She closed her eyes for a brief second, slowly tuning out Kai’s voice, teleported to the years of memories they shared together.

In the spring of their sophomore year, Kai and Ari had chosen to take an economics class together. It was nearly the end of the school year, Ari remembered, because the bags under her eyes were large enough to hold $100 worth of groceries, pre-2022-inflation. They were told to choose a topic that they wanted to research and present to the class. Kai and Ari had both always been fascinated by poverty, though for very different reasons, so they decided to research the psychological effects of abject poverty on Appalachian Americans. Ari remembered Kai rushing to the library to get her hands on every book she could find on the topic. She wouldn’t stop talking about John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. She memorized numbers and statistics, and could regurgitate every philosophical argument about the nature of poverty. Her work culminated in one of the most artistic and creative presentations Ari had ever seen. She remembered thinking after school that Kai was destined to give the greatest TED Talk one day, as she watched her get into her brand-new Mercedes-Benz, to meet her private tutor to debrief the presentation.

Ari couldn’t help but be awestruck by Kai. How was it that she was able to speak so articulately and profoundly about an experience that she had never had? She threw out numbers and statistics so confidently as if that was what poverty was. Ari had no idea that 46.66 million Americans were living under the poverty line in 2017 and of these people, 21.7 million were children. In hindsight, she wished she had added a few more graphs in her own presentation. Hers looked like a modern day ChatGPT abomination, with a few sparse, random words thrown clumsily on an all-white background, with no transitions and soul to be found, while Kai’s was more like a premium Claude-subscription presentation.

But for some reason over the last few months leading up to their presentation, every time Ari found a few minutes in her day to work on the project, she found it so difficult to write anything down. She couldn’t understand how to value the distant numbers and facts she was reading about poverty, when her own lived experiences with it felt so real and personal. The exhaustion was slowly getting to her. She had spent every morning for the last few years feeding her sister with her left hand, as she got her brother dressed with her right. It always fascinated her how her two hands could work simultaneously on such different tasks.

They barely saw their mom, as she would work all day at three different jobs across town. Even with all that work, Ari knew that they were just getting by to pay their bills on time to keep the lights on. It was also hard to ignore their situation when she’d have to rake the eviction notices that always piled up outside of their door. But she never wanted to use that as an excuse. So she’d put on her shoes, and hold her siblings’ hands tightly, still a little greasy from the cheese sandwiches she had made for them. They were young enough to think that she was Gordon Ramsey because of how effortlessly she sprinkled the cheese on the slices without crumbs falling on the floor. The floor that sometimes felt like it was moving because of the roaches.

But when she sat listening to Kai’s presentation, she felt as if it was her who knew nothing about poverty. She didn’t know how to speak so abstractly about something that she was experiencing every day. The teacher had explicitly said to not share personal information in the project, for that wasn’t academically rigorous. It didn’t make any sense. Why did the school continuously reward and pedestalize Kai’s abstractions, while undervaluing her own personal experiences regarding the very same topics?

This question deepened for Ari over the years, making her feel more and more disillusioned with the educational system that they were a part of. She remembered the start of her senior year so clearly, when her biology teacher hung up Kai’s recently fancy-journal-published research paper on why breast cancer often goes undetected for millions of women around the world. It was placed squarely in the center of the back wall, with nothing else around it. It made it aggressively impossible to ignore. Ari couldn’t even turn to get the crick out of her neck she got from her rock-like pillow that her mom swore was blessed, without looking straight into the soul of that paper.

“Everyone should aim to be like Kai one day,” was the last snip their teacher left them with to end their day. With a sour taste in her mouth, Ari left school to pick up her siblings before getting on the bus to take them to the hospital. She didn’t want to share this information to the class, but one of the many women that Kai spoke about, was her mother, who only detected her breast cancer two months after it had begun to violently spread throughout her body.

Ari helped calm her strung-off-of-sugar brother down, while she moderated her own anxieties of losing her mother, as she talked to the doctors about next steps and possible treatments. She lost her breath when having to consider the financial burden of high-quality care. But how could she make a decision that prioritized her own financial well-being, when what was to be lost was her own mother? She tried to hide her tears, as she held her mother’s hand listening to the mechanical hum of the HVAC system. Time seemed to slow down, as the loud tick of every second from the ancient clock on the wall, stretched itself as wide as it could, as if to grace eternity with its presence.

Ari couldn’t understand how Kai could talk about breast cancer, just as she had poverty. Distant, aloof, and purely rational. Her presentation on poverty didn’t touch on breast cancer, and her paper on breast cancer barely covered poverty. But in Ari’s experience these two were so deeply interconnected, that the lines barely existed. Economics and biology ceased to be two distinct worlds, and instead were just one hodgepodge of the same absurdity. For Ari, they were a couple in perfect synchrony, tied intimately at the hip. But the way Kai spoke about them, was as if they existed in their own neat silos.

Ari would notice this pattern time and time again. Always with the same reception from the teachers and the school. Kai’s approach to knowledge was heralded as the model for excellence, while Ari’s lived experiences were just seen as distractions, taking her away from what mattered most. Her schooling.

“Fuck this school,” Ari thought, as she watched Kai prepare to give her speech. She already knew what was to come. A long, drawn-out meander about how anything is possible, if only you try. And to never give up chasing your dreams, no matter what. To keep persevering. And most importantly, that their class could accomplish anything that they set their mind to. It was the same hope-core fiction that helped people who went through a large portion of their lives, shielded mostly from real suffering, feel as if they too had some large obstacle to overcome. “Everyone needs to feel like they’re overcoming some big-bad monster, I guess,” Ari thought to herself.

Knowing that she could finally crack her neck in peace, far away from that research paper, Ari cranked her neck rapidly. As she proceeded to twist her neck to the other side, to create symmetry, obviously, she experienced her entire world collapsing. It was as if she was falling into a black hole of some sort. What was happening? She tried desperately to open her eyes, when she heard a voice. A tonal mix between Dumbledore and Gandalf. Just wise. No other way to describe it. A wise voice.

“Ari. Come with me, I want to show you something. My name is Dumbledalf. No regards to Dumbledore or Gandalf, that is just happenchance, I promise. I spoke to your mother, and she wanted you to know how proud she is to see you walk across that stage. She’s always known how intelligent and knowledgeable you are. She wishes nothing more than to be here with you right now.

I know this graduation has been bringing up a lot of conflicting emotions for you, and I completely understand. I’ve come here today, far from where we spirits usually hang out in Lawrence, Kansas, to give you a little more context. The confusion you’ve been feeling with your education is completely valid. The division you’ve slowly felt building up with Kai, is caused by a deeply entrenched philosophical choice that has taken hold of educational systems around the world. It started a long time before either you or Kai even took your first steps.

To illustrate, I want to take you back to the 18th century in Western Europe. It was a time where early capitalism was taking shape, the first modern encyclopedias were being written, and absolute monarchies across the continent were being seriously questioned. This period of time is known today, as the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. A small aside, it’s fascinating how you’ll never know how people in the future will label the period of time that you live in. For all you know the 21st century might be called the age of LeBron James.

Anyway, LeBron glaze aside, during the Enlightenment, Europe was experiencing the most profound intellectual revolution in its long history. Prior to this period, knowledge and faith acted quite similarly in the Medieval world. The Church was the primary institution of learning, and schools largely existed to interpret scripture and theological texts. Truth, at that point, could only be revealed through these texts, never discovered. The idea that a person could use reason to arrive at new truths independent of the Bible was sacrilegious, the most famous of these examples being Galileo. He was put on trial by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for supporting the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around. His biggest crime was suggesting that his observations and mathematical reasoning should override religious authority as a source of truth.

But this stronghold on what counted as truth, could only be held for so long. The road to the Enlightenment, in hindsight, seemed inevitable, slowly building for a few hundred years before its peak in the 1700s. The invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s, was the first catalyst most historians point to. It created a technical mechanism for ideas to spread faster than the Church could control them, effectively destroying the monopoly it held on knowledge distribution.

In 1517, the Protestant Reformation was sparked by Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, a document that was nailed to the door of a Church in Wittenberg, Germany which contained a list of arguments and complaints against specific practices of the Catholic Church. This split Christianity and complicated the idea of who gets to be the sole authority on truth. This created a division to the centralized institution that resided over knowledge, building a pathway for new ideas to emerge.

Following this split, the long and brutal Protestant-Catholic conflicts began, culminating most violently in the Thirty Years War, started in 1618, which led to the deaths of somewhere between 8 and 11 million people. People then began to question whether religious institutions could singularly be trusted when this much destruction was caused in its name. This questioning became the fuel for the rising skepticism with the Church.

Finally, a few decades later, the Scientific Revolution built the frameworks for which new knowledge, separate from the Church, could be acquired. In 1687, Isaac Newton published his seminal Principia Mathematica, which demonstrated that the entire physical universe (insert random falling apple here) operated according to a small set of mathematical laws. Most importantly, his work suggested that the universe wasn’t something that needed to be accepted blindly on faith, and could instead be reasoned through and discovered.

And so working in tandem, the technology from the printing press, the division of power by the Protestant Reformation, the growing skepticism from the Thirty Years War, and finally the new intellectual frameworks to build a system of reasoning all came together to create the grounds for the Enlightenment.

Ari, stay with me. I see another yawn coming, but just wait. It’s about to get super interesting. I know if I had more stimulating visuals around me, this would be a bit more engaging. But I haven’t gotten the latest updates from OpenAI, so just wait a few more weeks.

Enlightenment thinkers, were now designing a new model of knowledge that they could begin to rely on and build upon. The basis for this new form, had its roots all the way back to 375 BC with Plato. He’s that one bearded old philosopher. No, not that one, the other one. The other, other one. Plato theorized, most famously in his allegory of the cave, that reality has two fundamental layers. The first being a world of representations that we experience through our senses and perception, and the second being a more real world of pure forms and truths that the mind could only access through reason and logic.

This thought, revolutionary at its time, gained its concrete form during the Enlightenment. One of the core consequences of this shift in thinking, is that because the truth could only be accessed through reason, the identity of the observer (or student in an educational context) was viewed as a source of bias and distortion that needed to be systematically minimized. The ideal knower, consequentially, became just the mind. A bodiless floating brain, that sits in sterile ivory towers and watches across the land, learning through methodological observations and reason. The detached and aloof academic was now the peak of intelligence.

This is why your experiences at school always felt incomplete. This is why Kai’s ability to abstract and intellectualize, gaining, what philosophers would later call representational knowledge, was always seen as a higher form of knowing, compared to your direct ability to relate to those same topics. But what if we were partially wrong? While representational knowledge can be extremely useful in developing standardized, formal ways of understanding some parts of our world, what if it fails at capturing other aspects? What you bring to the table is called relational knowledge, the other equally-important half of this puzzle.

Relational knowledge supposes that an observer doesn’t interact objectively with a static reality, but instead is in constant mutual relation to the universe around them. Even after I said that out loud. I don’t fully know what I even said. Let me try again. What if the world around us isn’t simply a thing to be known about, but is something to be related with.

Take a sunset for example. If you were to ask a conventional scientist to define one, they might say that a sunset is the scattering of visible light through the Earth's atmosphere as the sun approaches the geometric horizon at approximately 0 degrees elevation. The different colors that are seen, are caused by light traveling through a greater thickness of atmosphere, causing shorter wavelengths like blues and violets to scatter away while longer wavelengths like reds and oranges pass through with less deflection.

But something about this definition is stale. It’s incomplete. It sounds like a person who has never actually seen a sunset. Just someone who has read about one. A definition like this cannot capture objectively the experience within a person when they come across a mind-shattering sunset, on the drive home after a long day. It cannot capture the awe that humans across thousands of years have found in the closing of the day. That experience cannot be standardized, for it resonates differently within each person. That means to truly know a sunset, one cannot just read and memorize the definition of one. One must also sit and feel how a sunset resonates within. The truth then emerges as a relation between the observer and the observed. It can only be generated through encounter.

Your experiences with both, cancer and poverty, are not distractions from knowledge, as your school made you feel, but the very basis upon which knowledge must be built. Learning relationally asks the student to actually enter the world. To observe and record, representationally sometimes, but to dive into the unknown. To not just learn about music by reading notes, but to pick up a guitar and strum. To learn about statistics, not through invented datasets, but by collecting information and measurements about problems that actually matter to them. To not learn about Shakespeare in the classroom, but to join a travelling play, to feel how uttering, “To be, or not to be” feels leaving the mouth. To learn by being.

Relational knowledge is life affirming. It asks you to go outside. To put your homework down. To put the books down. To actually go outside and live. To go and work with others. To live.

It doesn’t ask for you to reduce and minimize your identity, in order to be a higher functioning brain. The problem was never you Ari and I’m sorry you ever left school feeling that way. As I return to Lawrence, I want to leave you with this article I wrote on Substack. I really have a lot of free time now. Us spirits get bored too.

This article covers how systems are built differently depending on whether they center representational or relational knowledge. Hopefully after reading that, you can find more connections between these theories and your schooling experiences. And then I’ll come back, and we can brainstorm some actionable changes we can make. I’ll see you soon.

Bye Ari. You are smart. I categorically reject your school for making you feel otherwise. Or if you will excuse my language. Fuck your school.

Part Two will be out next week :).