Subject: Tom Abeles
ATSJU@garthdee1.rgu.ac.uk
Date: Wed 15 Mar 2000 - 02:08:33 MET
From: <ATSJU@garthdee1.rgu.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 1:08:33 +0000 Subject: Tom Abeles
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In response to Tom Abeles contribution - I share his concern with the
concept of knowledge and learning as someting which is just an assembly of
modularised parts.
Thw whole is surely more than the sum of the parts, and the assumption that
assembly of the more measurable parts equates to knowledge has been a
damaging one in education and in society.
To give an example - grammarians attempted to provide a set of rules for
assembling sentences, yet it does little to make the meaning, and the real
underpinning principles of communication clear as linguists well know.
In psychology, for a long time, students were expected to study those aspects
of behaviour which could be reduced to a measurable unit, and extrapolate up
from rat and fruit fly trials.
It is only now that more qualitative approaches are being used that there is
acceptance that the most valuable insights are not easy to capture by
reduction to a measurable concrete unit.
Like words on a page, or animals in a zoo, they are not the same in a
different context.
Jenny Ure
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