Innerarity on the Education Disparity

Smith says, "It is a culture based on a ceaselessly interpretative notion of knowledge". Knowledge is a potential liberator for many individuals and groups. The difficulties and interpretative spaces that accompany knowledge open a series of opportunities for many people. The very necessity that knowledge should always be re-produced and that the actors should appropriate it affords the possibility in a manner of speaking, of imprinting a personal stamp on knowledge. The process of appropriation leaves a mark. In the course of this process, agents take on new cognitive capabilities, hone those they already possess, and generally deal with knowledge in a more efficient manner. This then affords them the opportunity to develop a greater critical capacity for new knowledge to discover new possibilities for action. The social distribution of knowledge is not a zero-sum game. 

The biggest challenge of a knowledge society is the creation of collective intelligence. What used to be a division of labor in industrialized societies is now a division of knowledge, in other words, the articulation of knowledge that is spread throughout society. A knowledge society is, from this point of view, a society that is particularly interested not so much in whether its component parts are intelligent as whether the society as a whole is. Collective intelligence designs an emerging attribute of social system that does not stem from the mere aggregate of individual intelligence: it is, instead, an intelligence that belongs to the system as a whole. 

-Excerpt from Innerarity’s The Democracy of Knowledge