Learning is Being Moved
Learning is a mysterious factor, it is a function of our minds yet most humans out there never
pause to reflect on how something they can almost feel within them actually works.
It could be that it's related to survival, but that's too easy an explanation. Far too easy and simplistic.
In my observation the key is aesthetics and it is not limited to the human species, nor just primates, nor just mammelia. Perhaps not even
just fauna.
It's probable, shockingly, that some little primate off in some obscure rain forest
in South America, may be accomplishing more as a species than all humanity.
Even with less intelligence to work with, the creatures may be yet able to come
up with more profound observation and reflection than the average human
being. It's the old conflict between quality and quantity.
In the primate it seems an incredible amount
of learning takes place in the arboreal environment, and comparably far less in
the classroom. One simply has only to compare the individual's ability to
cope with it's surroundings to see that the human subject has far less ability
to deal with it's environment. You might try to draw the line between
learning and instinct, but that's just it, the superior brain must also have
superior instincts.
From what I can glean to date, apparently we learn when we are moved. The more deeply the better. And this learning takes a certain passage of time. We don't really know what we've learned
until the physical knowledge in the form of it's biological aspect is in place in our minds.
It is possible for an animal, even those thought of as being baser, to have a more profound grasp of information than many humans.
The startling conclusion is that any subject when taught in the correct manor can be completely absorbed by any human being and much more quickly than originally
imagined. Here I reiterate what I have already postulated in previous papers, and that is that the modern and classic educational processes and institutions of learning actually IMPEDE learning.
It may sound like I'm only trying to criticize and tear down, but that's not the case. This
institutional teaching process has been going on since primitive man sat at meetings and discussed things using coherent speech.
The proverbial gathering round the campfire. There is some aspect in logic common to all humans that actually
impairs learning. It's not a matter of anger or complaint, but simply a reality.
But they went beyond speech. They left the fireside, went to the cave walls and
resorted to art. It mystified them, and they knew they had something, they knew not what. But the same mysterious impediment of logic still fights art
to this day as not useful but rather imagined to be frivolous. But I am
trying to present a concept here, that the aesthete is a learner. If so,
that could apply to everyone.
High schools now drop art to use the time to teach pupils nothing but only how to pass or obtain higher scores on tests. In the thought
processes, the individual ponders the dilemma and tries to reason a way out of that situation. But as I observe in six millennia of this, logic and reason are not good enough; they are not suited to this task.
Something doesn't work just because people think it might. You really have
to dig and make an effort to discover the realities of the learning process.
The real environment triggers learning. Witness a person trying not to be lost. Within a couple of days, that person has enough recollection to get back and forth from destination to home base. Yet when algebra is taught to thirty classmates by the professor, the curriculum is taught in
topics and tersely covered day by day. This is not how the mind learns and only a small number of those thirty will actually grasp enough of the subject to be useful to them later.
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Paul A. L. Hall
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