For centuries, knowledge has been thought to be the key to human progress of all kinds and has dominated Western culture. But what if knowing has now become an impediment to further human development? The End of Knowing is concerned with the practical consideration of how to reconstruct our world when modernist ideas have been refuted and many social problems appear insoluble. Newman and Holzman suggest provocatively that we should give up knowing in favour of "performed activity". They show how to reject the knowing paradigm in practice and present the many positive implications this has for social and educational policy.
Over the past two decades, a post-modern critique of the modern conception of knowing and its institutionalised practice has emerged. To many, this is a dangerous threat to the tradition of liberal education, strengthened by recent prestigious voices from the physical and natural sciences. The End of Knowing challenges even the postmodernists themselves, rejecting the reform of knowing for a totally new performatory form of life. They support their argument with a new reading of Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein that suggests they were aware of the importance of activity as "postmodernists".
The authors' development community, from which the ideas in The End of Knowing have arisen, exists without government or university funding or political affiliation. Their findings offer an alternative to existential despair in confronting a post-modern world without meaning by showing how to make meaning and develop lives through performed activity.