Paul Pavlik (pavlik@telusplanet.net)
Tue, 14 Sep 1999 20:34:37 -0600
From: "Paul Pavlik" <pavlik@telusplanet.net> Subject: Re: Plato: "Learning Occurs in the Mind Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 20:34:37 -0600
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Thanks to the Seatons for well thought out and expressive thought/summaries.
I would like to take your excellent statements one step more (or put in
different 'words'). Please.
Learning/thinking is group and collaborative in nature (both senses).
Who are we to say so-and-so is wrong?
Go out and watch the birds, and coyotes, have a dog or cat in the house,
etc. You have to experience the group learning of others (like animals) see
them communicate without long drawn out discourses. See them pass on that
info for generations.
In the last issue of Time there was a somewhat naive reportings on the
latest things about 'do animals have consciences'? Can they decide to
'deceive ? The writer went to an example of a ape hiding an orange to get
another orange.
Did this person never watch two household animals playing together? A cat
pretty well always bamboozles the dog with deceptions, feints, bluffs, or,
when caught, with complete, disarming surrender. Most animal-interaction is
highly complex bluffs, lies, shams, innuendoes, feints, false leads. One
reason I had such 'genius' dogs is the pups always learned from old Pooch.
No long animals stories this AM.
Just a question: how can we ignore the basics of animal psychology? How
are these principles NOT applicable to the human situation? Does something
have to be written about in scholarlyjournals, stuffed in libraries,
footnoted and annotated by others before we can accept/use/learn?
Discovery Channel has been having a great series on animal intelligence.
Watch parrots do Algebra. See Coco make up words to express herself. See
the near 100% recall of nut jays six months later.
As I write this, I listen to the magpies outside. We had a war 4 yrs back.
(They killed one cow and were going after more). We had a very small area
of
skirmish. Yet, to this day, I hear them, I do not see them. They do not
even nest in the bush on my ranch. They use trees right across the road!
Now, you tell me how they figured out the extent of my realm? How can they
cope with 'square'? How do they pass this on for generations?
Have you noticed that no one on this list reacted to my previous posting on
these topics? In that post I mentioned my sheep communicating with me by
'mental waves'. . Why? What kind of learning/training./education is that?
No reaction.
From: Andrew Seaton <aseaton@tpgi.com.au>
> Arun quoted Plato: "Learning Occurs in the Mind, Independent of time and
place".
Not only was Plato mistaken - I think he was trying to cope with 'right
brained' inspiration. If you go back through the debates in
edpsych/philosophy over the last 150+ yrs, most of it was due to the lack of
understanding of the different parts of the brain and how they work
together - and apart.
> How dearly we have all paid for that mistaken notion, which is at the
heart
> of the ills of our education system, not to mention our civilisation.
>
> There is now wide consensus among learning and curriculum theorists,
> confirming the commonsense of the layman, that context, purpose and
> experience are essential aspects of learning, and that the separation of
> cognition, affection and conation is entirely artifical. Even Benjamin
> Bloom, whose taxonomies of educational objectives have contributed so much
> to the dissection and abstraction of curricula and of lives, quotes
Scheerer
> as follows: "...behaviour may be conceptualized as being embedded in a
> cognitive-emotional-motivational matrix in which no true separation is
> possible. (B.S. Bloom, et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives:
Handbook
> II: Affective Domain, London, Longman, 1964, p.45.)
>
> Bloom also notes how William James, writing in 1890 and using the term
> 'subjective' in place of 'affective',
> recognizes a fundamental unity of affective and cognitive behaviour, and
how
> one is involved in the other:
>
> As we consider educational theory and practice in the light of the
essential
> unity of cognitive, affective
> and conative behaviour, we can begin to understand the limited success we
> have had until recently in
> educational theory and practice with our virtually exclusive attention,
> within artificial contexts, to
> abstractions, to dissected and symbolically represented fragments of
reality.
Super point here. Thanks.
Paul -
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