Hidden knowledge: Working-class capacity in the ‘knowledge-based economy’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The research reported in this paper attempts to document the actual learning practices of working-class people in the context of the much heralded ‘knowledge-based economy’. Our primary thesis is that working-class peoples' indigenous learning capacities have been denied, suppressed, degraded or diverted within most capitalist schooling, adult education institutions and employer-sponsored training programmes, at the same time as working class informal learning and tacit knowledge are heavily relied on to actually run paid workplaces. Our analysis is based on five case studies of Canadian union locals which document the learning practices of hired workers based in different industries and employment sites with strikingly different support systems for education and training and working-class learning generally. We criticise dominant theories of adult education for preoccupation with a historical and individualised, psychological processes and motives while ignoring the collective learning processes that working-class people rely upon most. For this reason we rely on a cultural-historical theory of adult learning. These case studies show that workers are generally active learners, that they do much of their learning informally and that much of this learning is of high quality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".