The problem of common sense

Kumashiro defines ‘commonsense’ as something that is common knowledge to most people that tells us what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. Typically this “commonsense” reflects the perspectives and explains the values of only certain people in society, commonly the more privileged. This tends to create problems because in different areas of the world they have different ideas of the ‘commonsense.’ In this article we see the debate of ‘commonsense’ between the schooling and education of the people in the United States and Nepal. Currently in the United States, teachers are trying to avoid the traditional lectures, memorization, textbooks, and tests methods as they used to use in the past because of their current common knowledge that those ways are not as efficient. These methods that they are trying to avoid in the United States are the current methods that the people in Nepal still use. This creates conflict because the United States teacher believes that their ‘commonsense’ way to teach is the correct and more efficient way so they try to change the methods in Nepal as well. 

‘Commonsense’ commonly goes unnoticed to many of us because it has been so embedded into our society that we would not think otherwise. Because it has become so normal to us it is important to pay attention and pick out when ‘commonsense’ is being used in order to be able to question it and its purpose because it creates false narratives. We need to break this ‘normal’ that society has created in the more dominating areas of the world because it is highly inaccurate. Many of the problems we face in our world are not being challenged or fixed because of the ‘commonsense’ narratives that have been drilled into our heads which makes it extremely difficult to change peoples views and understandings.

Some “commonsense” understandings I always understood was that teachers are supposed to follow the curriculum so the students meet the requirements that the government/school division set in place. I also understood that the approach to teaching would typically depend on the specific teacher and or subject. Math and the sciences have always been taught by “the book” having black or white answers. In those subjects you would either be right or wrong, whereas subjects like english or art had more room to explore different methods and approaches to teaching with there being a variety of acceptable answers.