Post by Uplifting Education on Nov 30, 2011 19:45:06 GMT -8
Quoted from [url=http://mithya.prasadkaipa.com/learning/igniting01.html
]Section One: BEFORE THE 'SCRIPT' BEGINS: INSTINCTIVE LEARNING:[/url] [/b][/font]
Before we look at the stages of learning, we should explore the raw material that we were born with. We need to know what we are made of before we can attempt to change it. The world of the child can shed a strong light on the way our minds work, and we need to try to understand the capabilities of the developing brain in order to make sense of it later.
Society's logical assumption would be that the child, and particularly the infant, is a helpless creature at the mercy of the experienced. Research indicates that it is the infant that has the highest ability to learn, the clearest instinct to absorb, and the largest built-in capacity to embrace information and entire disciplines of a complexity and at a pace that would leave most adults gasping. As a result, it is the child that teaches the adult about learning. The adult, presuming to have a far superior mind, graciously offers to teach the child about the world -- only to discover with a shock that the child, with its intuitive abilities and awesome learning speed, is teaching the teacher at least as much....
We Understand Learning Before We Even Begin to Learn
When Vidya, Prasad's daughter, was ten months old, she began to stand up and attempt to walk. She could hardly walk two steps before she fell, but falling never seemed to discourage her. One day in June she attempted to stand and walk over 60 times. By the end of July, she was running all over the house and comfortably climbing up and down the stairs. That means that Vidya probably attempted to walk 1000 times before she mastered the process.
The thought of failure never seemed to enter her head. What began as curiosity quickly became compulsion to learn, with no fear stage in between.
We adults normally give up trying new things after the first or second attempt, and it is a rare individual who continues again and again after repeated failure. Yet we are all aware of those rare people who practice something over and over again, in such diverse fields as sports, music, literature or business; and they sometimes achieve greatness. In their case they simply adopted the drive of the child they once were and avoided the trap of fearing failure.
Failure is therefore clearly linked with learning; the more we fear failure, the less we learn. It is not the failed attempts themselves that prevent us from continuing to try, but our interpretation of the situation. In other words, whether we expect to fail or whether we expect to succeed, those expectations will be self fulfilling; either way, we say to ourselves: `There, I told you so.'
We have hardly begun this book and already we see that learning is not much like the common perception of it. The techniques we use to increase learning are perhaps not as important as our attitudes and beliefs towards it.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance
--William Blake
Learning Happens The Most When We Try to Learn The Least
Generations of school children, bored by class and scolded for daydreaming out of the window, have been told to concentrate more. Yet it is clear that attempting to concentrate on something that is uninteresting is an exercise in futility; we go through the motions, we stare at the page, we re-read the paragraph, but we continue to think about something else altogether. We can become better at fooling people that we are working hard, but our glazed eyes usually betray us long before our failed examinations do so.
When we truly learn how to do something, we cease to have to work so hard on it at all. There is no chore involved, and it seem to take only a fraction of the time. In fact, when we are excited about a subject we only need to glance at a page for its meaning to leap to our eyes and affect us deeply. It seems as though our body is doing it all by itself.
Of course, this is not the case; it is that our brain has become so enthusiastic, so practiced at the action, and so comfortable with the new environment it has created, that it can dedicate a part of itself to take care of details automatically, whenever needed. In computer terms, it has `hard wired' a special program or sequence just for that purpose. This leaves us free again to do other tasks.
This can apply to anything, for example learning a musical instrument or riding a bicycle. In either case, once a certain moment is reached, we feel an `aha' taking place; we feel a breakthrough has happened. For the first time, the violinist feels as if the fingers are moving faster than the mind. Once that point is reached, not only do we need never learn that sequence again, we would actually find it hard to unlearn it. It takes hundreds of hours to learn how to walk, and perhaps dozens of hours how to ride a bicycle or drive a car. But once learned, they are imprinted forever.
This explains why it is so hard for many people to unlearn a habit, for example learning to drive on the other side of the road when visiting another country; in this case, the conscious mind's attempts to conform are in conflict with strong, hard-wired messages from the unconscious. After some struggle, we adapt to driving on the `wrong' side of the road, often only to revert to the old program in a moment of tiredness or stress. It is very hard to forget that which has become automatic; an adult does not forget how to ride a bicycle even if no practice or even thought has been given to the subject since early childhood.
This does serve to give us a clue about the implications involved. What else might we have take for granted; what else has become so automatic that we assume it is the only way of doing things? The challenge we might face in rethinking something long adopted as automatic can indeed be formidable, but it could be an invaluable mental exercise to try. Because our established ways of thinking have long since become standard, we have to work hard even to become aware of them, let alone reverse them. Once attempted, the mere recognition that there is more than one way to do something we previously took for granted can be enlightening, even transformational.
Habits are powerful tools, but we surely should not be ruled by them. Even some of our most trivial actions are governed by them. For example, if someone is asked to fold their arms over their chest, they invariable adopt the same method every time, for example right over left. The other way feels wrong and uncomfortable, even unthinkable.
Our very perceptions are also governed by habit. In an early study, a volunteer was given a pair of special glasses to wear during all waking hours. The glasses reversed Up and Down, so that everything seemed to be upside down. Naturally this was highly disorienting at first, but gradually the volunteer started to make progress. Eventually, he could function quite normally. Then, when the glasses were removed, he was disoriented again; he thought that everything looked upside down again.
In another experiment, researchers showed a movie on a big screen to an audience of people who had never seen a movie before. Whenever an actor moved off-screen, the audience stood up and moved to the next room, expecting to see the actor there.
Both the above examples are interesting and perhaps amusing, but they raise a disturbing thought: how would we know if our own perceptions were based on an element of illusion? The very structure of our eyes helps us to form an impression of reality. No two people have an identical perception of the same shade of, say, green, and some people cannot differentiate it at all from, say, a particular shade of blue.The structure of a bat's sensory organs cause it to see reality in a different way altogether. Is there a `true' reality after all? Who are we to assume that we are always right? Yet how many of us question anything about our accepted ways of seeing the world.
Given this enormous reliance on our cherished thought patterns and habits, imagine therefore how unthinkable it might be to change one's attitudes and beliefs on such issues as politics, parents, religion or nationhood. Or, for that matter, one's career.
Our environment naturally influences us, and some of what we experience interests us. This is what we find the easiest to learn. In turn, we put back into the environment more of our specialized subject, thus perpetuating the cycle for ourselves. But we need to ask ourselves: Exactly how arbitrary was the original environmental impact in the first place? Who would we be today if we had not had that experience?
In an age where job retraining has such fundamental implications in national economic as well as in individual levels, there is simply no point in attempting a major effort to retrain anyone unless the idea is embraced by the trainee, the subject as agreeable and seen as worthwhile, and the expectations of success are high. How else could we expect someone to throw away the self-perceptions and habits that have taken half a lifetime to perfect? We fear that after such a dearth of retraining commitments at corporate and government levels for so long, a rush of desperately-needed and well-intentioned training projects could fail because of a lack of awareness that their success is dependent on factors other than subject matter and delivery methods.
As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.
-- Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750-52
]Section One: BEFORE THE 'SCRIPT' BEGINS: INSTINCTIVE LEARNING:[/url] [/b][/font]
Before we look at the stages of learning, we should explore the raw material that we were born with. We need to know what we are made of before we can attempt to change it. The world of the child can shed a strong light on the way our minds work, and we need to try to understand the capabilities of the developing brain in order to make sense of it later.
Society's logical assumption would be that the child, and particularly the infant, is a helpless creature at the mercy of the experienced. Research indicates that it is the infant that has the highest ability to learn, the clearest instinct to absorb, and the largest built-in capacity to embrace information and entire disciplines of a complexity and at a pace that would leave most adults gasping. As a result, it is the child that teaches the adult about learning. The adult, presuming to have a far superior mind, graciously offers to teach the child about the world -- only to discover with a shock that the child, with its intuitive abilities and awesome learning speed, is teaching the teacher at least as much....
We Understand Learning Before We Even Begin to Learn
When Vidya, Prasad's daughter, was ten months old, she began to stand up and attempt to walk. She could hardly walk two steps before she fell, but falling never seemed to discourage her. One day in June she attempted to stand and walk over 60 times. By the end of July, she was running all over the house and comfortably climbing up and down the stairs. That means that Vidya probably attempted to walk 1000 times before she mastered the process.
The thought of failure never seemed to enter her head. What began as curiosity quickly became compulsion to learn, with no fear stage in between.
We adults normally give up trying new things after the first or second attempt, and it is a rare individual who continues again and again after repeated failure. Yet we are all aware of those rare people who practice something over and over again, in such diverse fields as sports, music, literature or business; and they sometimes achieve greatness. In their case they simply adopted the drive of the child they once were and avoided the trap of fearing failure.
Failure is therefore clearly linked with learning; the more we fear failure, the less we learn. It is not the failed attempts themselves that prevent us from continuing to try, but our interpretation of the situation. In other words, whether we expect to fail or whether we expect to succeed, those expectations will be self fulfilling; either way, we say to ourselves: `There, I told you so.'
We have hardly begun this book and already we see that learning is not much like the common perception of it. The techniques we use to increase learning are perhaps not as important as our attitudes and beliefs towards it.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance
--William Blake
Learning Happens The Most When We Try to Learn The Least
Generations of school children, bored by class and scolded for daydreaming out of the window, have been told to concentrate more. Yet it is clear that attempting to concentrate on something that is uninteresting is an exercise in futility; we go through the motions, we stare at the page, we re-read the paragraph, but we continue to think about something else altogether. We can become better at fooling people that we are working hard, but our glazed eyes usually betray us long before our failed examinations do so.
When we truly learn how to do something, we cease to have to work so hard on it at all. There is no chore involved, and it seem to take only a fraction of the time. In fact, when we are excited about a subject we only need to glance at a page for its meaning to leap to our eyes and affect us deeply. It seems as though our body is doing it all by itself.
Of course, this is not the case; it is that our brain has become so enthusiastic, so practiced at the action, and so comfortable with the new environment it has created, that it can dedicate a part of itself to take care of details automatically, whenever needed. In computer terms, it has `hard wired' a special program or sequence just for that purpose. This leaves us free again to do other tasks.
This can apply to anything, for example learning a musical instrument or riding a bicycle. In either case, once a certain moment is reached, we feel an `aha' taking place; we feel a breakthrough has happened. For the first time, the violinist feels as if the fingers are moving faster than the mind. Once that point is reached, not only do we need never learn that sequence again, we would actually find it hard to unlearn it. It takes hundreds of hours to learn how to walk, and perhaps dozens of hours how to ride a bicycle or drive a car. But once learned, they are imprinted forever.
This explains why it is so hard for many people to unlearn a habit, for example learning to drive on the other side of the road when visiting another country; in this case, the conscious mind's attempts to conform are in conflict with strong, hard-wired messages from the unconscious. After some struggle, we adapt to driving on the `wrong' side of the road, often only to revert to the old program in a moment of tiredness or stress. It is very hard to forget that which has become automatic; an adult does not forget how to ride a bicycle even if no practice or even thought has been given to the subject since early childhood.
This does serve to give us a clue about the implications involved. What else might we have take for granted; what else has become so automatic that we assume it is the only way of doing things? The challenge we might face in rethinking something long adopted as automatic can indeed be formidable, but it could be an invaluable mental exercise to try. Because our established ways of thinking have long since become standard, we have to work hard even to become aware of them, let alone reverse them. Once attempted, the mere recognition that there is more than one way to do something we previously took for granted can be enlightening, even transformational.
Habits are powerful tools, but we surely should not be ruled by them. Even some of our most trivial actions are governed by them. For example, if someone is asked to fold their arms over their chest, they invariable adopt the same method every time, for example right over left. The other way feels wrong and uncomfortable, even unthinkable.
Our very perceptions are also governed by habit. In an early study, a volunteer was given a pair of special glasses to wear during all waking hours. The glasses reversed Up and Down, so that everything seemed to be upside down. Naturally this was highly disorienting at first, but gradually the volunteer started to make progress. Eventually, he could function quite normally. Then, when the glasses were removed, he was disoriented again; he thought that everything looked upside down again.
In another experiment, researchers showed a movie on a big screen to an audience of people who had never seen a movie before. Whenever an actor moved off-screen, the audience stood up and moved to the next room, expecting to see the actor there.
Both the above examples are interesting and perhaps amusing, but they raise a disturbing thought: how would we know if our own perceptions were based on an element of illusion? The very structure of our eyes helps us to form an impression of reality. No two people have an identical perception of the same shade of, say, green, and some people cannot differentiate it at all from, say, a particular shade of blue.The structure of a bat's sensory organs cause it to see reality in a different way altogether. Is there a `true' reality after all? Who are we to assume that we are always right? Yet how many of us question anything about our accepted ways of seeing the world.
Given this enormous reliance on our cherished thought patterns and habits, imagine therefore how unthinkable it might be to change one's attitudes and beliefs on such issues as politics, parents, religion or nationhood. Or, for that matter, one's career.
Our environment naturally influences us, and some of what we experience interests us. This is what we find the easiest to learn. In turn, we put back into the environment more of our specialized subject, thus perpetuating the cycle for ourselves. But we need to ask ourselves: Exactly how arbitrary was the original environmental impact in the first place? Who would we be today if we had not had that experience?
In an age where job retraining has such fundamental implications in national economic as well as in individual levels, there is simply no point in attempting a major effort to retrain anyone unless the idea is embraced by the trainee, the subject as agreeable and seen as worthwhile, and the expectations of success are high. How else could we expect someone to throw away the self-perceptions and habits that have taken half a lifetime to perfect? We fear that after such a dearth of retraining commitments at corporate and government levels for so long, a rush of desperately-needed and well-intentioned training projects could fail because of a lack of awareness that their success is dependent on factors other than subject matter and delivery methods.
As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.
-- Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 1750-52
