What is Learning Really Made of?
True, there does seem to be a serious argument for the good hard work of the laborious student, rehearsing his or her painstakingly detailed notes over and over again until at last they get it and so proceed the next paragraph, step by step. After all what is a student but one who studies.
However, let's take a look at the learning process. Knowledge is a physical thing. It's made of nerve tissue. But the brain is a thrifty organ, in spite of the abundance of it's so-called gray matter. The first aspect of learning, is in a temporary form, gelatinous, temporary short-term memory. If reinforced by a sort of repetition of the stimulus, it starts to become solid nervous tissue.
It isn't some sort of wiring easily strung up like a printer to a computer. It's not just axons and dendrites, but also transmitter chemicals and many other elements. It's more than just a spark. It's a cooperation between the brain, the endocrine system, and the environment.
That brings to mind the classroom environment. Usually a chamber of some sort; a shelter from the elements. Where the pupils rendezvous with the lecturer, the teacher or professor. But I maintain that this is not the sort of environment the endocrine system was geared to react to. On that premise, the classroom environment for at least three or four centuries has actually been fighting learning rather than fostering it.
You see, reason is a poor method of ascertaining the best situation for any sort of procedure. For that you need science. Since when have the majority of institutions of learning experimented with the classroom? Oh, some may have experimented with visual elements, such as demonstrations, movies, video and so on. That's a bit of a start, since the vision is not only connected to the brain, but also to the hormonal system as well, but it's still not good enough.
Obviously there hasn't been enough experimentation or scores of institutions would have hailed the breakthrough. Never, though, has it occurred to these bastions of learning that the classroom and the lecture hall are actually the enemies of learning. Since when do you see the majority of students emerge with vast stores of knowledge? Only the minority, the A or B students, ever get by with what might be termed adequate knowledge.
You may argue that they are the ones that worked harder or studied more and merit the fine scores leading to their matriculation, while the other, those laggards, are justifiably left behind. I see it the other way, the laggard is the institution that was only to succeed with fifteen percent of it's potential, and here we're not talking about a crop like wheat or tomatoes, we're talking about human beings; real people with their whole lives ahead of them. Who, due to the lethargy and failure of the institute in which they trusted, face the whole rest of their future quite ill equipped to either prosper themselves, or aid the society into which they go to itself prosper.
If they the institutes and those who proffer them, got of their high horses and did their homework, they would guaranteed certainly be producing a student body with one hundred percent graduation, one hundred percent A Plus students, certainly not one failure, not one wash-out except for those students who decided that the body of knowledge for them could be had elsewhere, such as carpentry rather than oceanography and so on.
So how does the physical development of memory and ultimately knowledge initiate itself in the human brain. My hypothesis is based on my personal experience in trying to learn French. Trying to learn in the classroom was dismal. Even if you passed, that still didn't mean you had anywhere near a command of the language, let alone fluency. Then I found myself in Paris. I then picked up fluency and literacy very quickly indeed. But since I was at the time self employed as a street singer, the fluency I picked up was the type lingo used in the area I was in, a sort of slang called Largo.
This would tend to show that it was being present in a real, vivacious environment that triggered the memory to kick in. Hence the indication is that the initiation of the physical aspects of memory in the brain comes from the endocrine system which is the ultimate contact between the body and it's surroundings. By this I infer not simply emotions such as adrenalin, but also the introduction of chemical signals into the bloodstream that permit the brain to go ahead and form the physical tissue necessary for set of stimuli to become stored memories.
I call it the endocrine system of learning. Now, how to implement this into the classroom environment remains to be seen. For that I would need a grant of several million dollars and a team of scientists and technicians to do the science and arrive at solid usable conclusions. But to start off with, I would say offhand that the classroom environment might be transformed into a sort of classroom theatre, in which the light varies in hue and candlepower, the ambient temperature of the room changes, environmental stimuli be introduce as sight, sound, smell, and some sort of tactile elements as well.
The curriculum should be introduced with the knowledge that the understanding of what was being taught wouldn't be had immediately, but would materialize slowly as the physical brain tissue in each pupil developed. In accordance the level of nutrition in each individual should be such that the body wouldn't preclude the development of brain memory tissue for survival reasons. In other words if the body's endocrine system "thought" (for want of a better word) that the memory tissue were unnecessary, it's development might be shut down by the endocrine system in favor of other systems, such as the musculature, the cardio-vascular, or even the reproductive systems.
Oddly enough, there may be a correlation therefore between the provision of junk food in school lunch programs and poor scholastic averages for the same institution. It may be that there has to be enough nutrients, in particular protein in the form of the basic eight amino acids, and also the critical basic olio acids as well, that the endocrine system (theoretically, mind you), becomes convinced that it's all right to go ahead with building the body systems it deems necessary as well as the others, and, yes, well, okay, even the brain.
I mean, has anybody actually looked into that? You may have to require the student to supplement his or her diet right in the classroom in the supervision of the instructor and maybe at that to be inclusive in the classroom environment since taste and the assimilation of correct nutrition may also be part of the set of stimuli needed for the endocrine system to trigger formation of memory tissue.
In short, it boils down to what is needed is a transformation of an institution merely imagined by human logic to be necessary to perform the task of teaching, to a station of learning where the teacher becomes the technician imparting to the student exactly, or closer to exactly what is needed to actually assimilate the curriculum.
This is by no means some utopian day dream. The utopian illusion would rather be a scholastic system like the type now in use, where the majority of students, with no child left behind, graduate with A, B, or at least C averages. That isn't going to happen because of their faulty logic compounded with inflated dignity and false pride. The fact is that the physical institution is simply out of touch with the reality of the biology of the materiel it's trying to work with. It always has been, it always will be, because that's their attitude and that's their intransigence.
Ultimately, they have to maintain the illusion that they already know it all.
Click here to return to the "Highwater 96 Oil Painting" page.
Click here to return to the "Logic, the Death of Civilization" weblog.
Links out:
The Paul Hall Art home page
Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email Paul (and all) at paulandall@paulhallart.com