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Issue 4: |
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| Article 3: | The Neurological Facts About How People Learn by Peter Kline |
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Traditional education exposes people to information and the need for
certain skills that they might not encounter any other way. As an
organizing mechanism, it thus serves a function. |
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This is a highly inefficient way of learning, which unfortunately is characteristic of nearly every school system in the world. It is now clearly established that the average person should be able to learn the entire content that is taught in a typical K-12 educational program at a minimum of ten times as fast as it is now being learned. This has been proved in a number of highly successful alternative schools that have demonstrated student capacities developing ten times as fast as the expected norm. One of these in the ESOL program in the Galena Park school system in Texas. This means we must now accept the fact that traditional education profoundly slows down the learning process. Let's take a brief look at how and why this happens. The brain is organized to think in a non-linear fashion. This means that it always sees everything in terms of an external frame based on a system of Gestalts. Anything that fits into the structure of this framework is learned quickly and easily. Anything that doesn't is rejected as nonsense, and either not learned at all, or learned by rote and thus put into a form that is virtually unusable. This means that the most important function of education should be to establish the contextual framework that makes all that is learned meaningful to the learner. This framework begins with the self as a reference point. In effect, we never learn anything that is not about us personally. If we do not have a way to relate an experience or piece of information to ourselves, then we cannot learn it effectively. The means by which this happens is a three-stage cycle of input, integration and output. The input is an experience that the learner has. The integration is a modification of everything else the learner already knows that is based on the new experience. The output is an idea, a set of ideas, or a set of actions that are controlled by the newly learned insights. In this paradigm, context is everything. I have to know how what I am learning fits into the general context that I am familiar with. I have to be able to evaluate it in terms of what I already know. This is obvious, for example, in the process of vocabulary building. In order to learn the concept of "big" I have to understand the general concept of "size" that enables me to distinguish between "big" and "small". Already we see an interesting problem. People and cats interpret these concepts differently. People stand on two legs and are most conscious of "big" as it refers to other people, who are much more obviously taller, rather than wider than they are. Thus "big" translates into "tall," so a tall glass of water seems to have more in it than a wide glass holding the same amount of water. A cat would get the opposite impression. Cats use their whiskers to measure the width of spaces they are trying to get through. To them "big" would mean "wide," and "tall" would be unimportant. So a cat would figure that a wide glass would have more water in it than a tall glass having the same amount of water. This is just a single one among billions of possible examples of how all our learning is based on our own prior experiences. If a teacher does not take these into account, he or she cannot teach us effectively. The concept that I have described here may seem obvious, but it is very far from being so, as one of the most widely accepted examples of developmental learning comes from a misunderstanding of the above example. Children are confused by the water container problem not because they don't understand about the conservation of the liquid as it passes from one glass to another, but because they do not share the teacher's definition of the words "big" and "small". To them, one glass contains water that is taller. The other glass contains water that is shorter. They have not yet learned how to distinguish between tall and big and short and small. They could easily learn to do so if they were given other kinds of examples that allowed them to generalize these concepts in the way that the teacher assumes they are generalized. Modern research in neurology leads to a great many insights about how people experience the world that is incompatible with the way information is usually explained in text books or lectures. The examples I give here from Gestalt psychology are only a tiny glimpse into a very wide area of neurological functioning that must be understood in order to construct successful educational systems. One quick example of a different sort of problem in Gestalting: In computer programming, the formula x = x + 1 is a meaningful statement. In algebra, however, it is self-contradictory and thus meaningless. I once watched a group of adults spend two full hours unsuccessfully trying to learn this concept in a class on computer programming. I was able to teach it to them in thirty seconds as soon as I changed the language used. Instead of saying "x equals x plus one," I said, "We're going to transform x into x plus one." Suddenly there was no problem, and everyone understood immediately. We will not solve our crisis in the schools until we begin to think about the problems of teaching from this perspective. The question is not "What is the information?" The question is "How does the learner perceive the information?" By asking the latter question rather than the former, education could leap ahead a thousand years with a single step. We cannot answer that question, however, until we apply the findings of many different breakthroughs in neurology to the science of education. Only when we do that will education become a science, instead of what it is now: a collection of seriously misguided myths and superstitions as harmful as the worst misunderstandings about medicines were a thousand years ago. |
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