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HOW TO EDUCATE YOUR "SELF" (3 of 5)
The Philosophy Behind the Program
When rightly considered, knowledge is more a verb than a noun; it is both the impetus for and dynamic subject of thought. Knowledge is the cutting edge of the emerging mind. Questions evolve and ideas are tugged and stretched by the energized imagination. "Understanding" unfolds.
The acquisition of knowledge, learning, requires less that one learn a specific behavioral response to a particular stimulus than that one becomes an active thinker. To learn implies that one has integrated an idea into his understanding; it implies that one has not merely added data to static catalogues of the stuff, but that one has become a more astute and intellectually unbounded person. Learning means nothing if not that one has made some aspect of the world more rational and coherent, or perhaps, more complex and mysterious; it extends and clarifies one's vision or fragments and confuses perspective. When one learns, one assimilates ideas and transforms them into integral elements of the mind just as one digests foods and reconstructs it as living tissue.
Unfortunately many of us remember learning without personal insight or involvement. Learning amounted to remembering knowledge was a commercial product, a fixed and finished intellectual package. Few of us recall learning as personally engaging or even less as personally meaningful. Today, the essential dynamic aspects of education, knowledge, and learning have become even more obscured by the increasingly behavioristic tendencies of modern educators. Consequently those individuals in their charge rarely have the opportunity or guidance necessary to experience true intellectual growth. Though new behaviors may be learned, few find meaning and purpose in what they learn.
A prime example of such an intellectually limited concept of education was offered in conversation by a very bright third-grade girl. The child explained how she had learned that the equator was an imaginary line drawn about the center of the globe separating the northern and southern hemispheres. She further explained that the two hemispheres have opposite seasonal patterns, the northern winter being the southern summer and vice versa. Asked why the equator had been drawn after some hesitation she suggested that it prevented the countries of the world from bunching together. (She must have imagined a yellow line painted through the jungles of the Equator.) Questioned why the seasons were different to the north and south, she responded that the sun's rays were at different angles. No explanation of why the sun's rays would be different or why that would matter could be imagined.
It was clear that although this intelligent young child could answer such questions as "What is the equator?" or "Why are the seasons to the north and south of the equator opposite to one another?" she could not meaningfully integrate her lessons into her picture of the world. Although she scored well on her geography exam, as evidenced by her appropriate behavioral responses to the questions asked, her answers referred to what the teacher said and what the diagrams in the books depicted; they did not refer to the world where she experienced the seasons and sun.
The fact is that the lessons the teacher taught had no relation to any questions she would have asked. The lessons were not related to the world she saw through her own eyes. There was no way to assimilate what she "learned into an active, coherent intellectual framework. The importance of the study was unexplored; she saw no meaning in her work other than possible praise. The girl's ability to engage in active thinking was not spurred and some part of life was simply shelved. Though she developed appropriate intellectual behaviors she did not acquire knowledge. It is possible that her own intellectual vigor was ever so slightly diminished, and that after years of such education the curiosity and enthusiasm that shine in her could be all but extinguished.
In general terms, the manner in which one experiences knowledge will not only shape one's conceptions but how one conceives. The theory of knowledge undergirding one's education will affect the attitude of approach one assumes in life. Your sense of purpose and personal responsibility will follow upon your integration of ideas into a coherent vision of the world and your place therein.
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