Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 08:53:42 -0500
From: Henry van Eyken
Reply-To: unrev-II@onelist.com
To: unrev-II@onelist.com
Subject:
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Profound Thinking (but of questionable
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rellevance to present DKR project)
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I wouldn't write these things if I were to believe they are irrelevant.
But I realize that they may not be quite in order at this point of the
initial DKR development work. I must let others, especially the
hard-working team leaders, be the judges.
My personal, principal reasons for having contributed the three "Letters
to my Colleagues" items are:
- Look at the educational establishment as an organization badly in need of
bootstrapping along with a personal-experience view where the nub of that
bootstrapping process ought to be. Let me add something that should not
be overlooked. The way I have written about education, including the
direct reference to one particular institution, is not exactly socially
acceptable. Thus I tend to bring out issues that many like to hide from
public view and/or pooh-pooh. It is an approach, and an attitude from my
side, that is not going to get the kind of co-operation that is the
hallmark of the Session 6A presentations by Pie and Spohrer. In contrast,
by writing my "letters," I was serving pretty hot potatoes and you can
imagine what institutional reactions I had to be prepared for and which
actually occurred. A fair number of people agreed in direct encounters,
but hardly anyone publicly. In the end, I think (not "like to think," but
truly think) that people tacitly agreed, but without perceptible effect.
- To address the point about self-learning. I don't wish to bring myself in
the picture too much, but I have been very much an independent (and
haphazard) learner as a consequence of the home environment in which I
was raised, the Nazi occupation during my teenage years, and the "hunger
winter" of 1944-45, to be followed within a few years by being drafted in
the army. I simply did not have "normal" educational opportunities. I
have enjoyed successes that have stood me in good stead and, looking
back, I can also perceive, although not all that clearly, shortcomings.
In short, I approach the subject of self-learning with caution, but
without wishing to take a stance intolerant of other people's thoughts.
- To provide an example of what I believe, rightly or wrongly, to be a
pretty pure and highly important example of bootstrapping. Accomodative
learning, typically, is the acquisition of broader concepts that allow
the acquisition of knowledge that would otherwise be impossible. It may
require the destruction of fairly deeply held beliefs (and associated
social habits), which can be an emotionally painful experience and
threatening to self-esteem. It may upset in the learner a sense of
comfort. School may conflict with home. Taking this thing to the extreme,
we are looking, I believe, at things like religious conversions and
turning creationists into evolutionists to say nothing of broad social
phenomena like women's emancipation and accomodating (I mean: respecting,
not merely assimilative accepting) the multihued society. The more common
occurrences are the "we have always done it this way" and "if it was good
enough for" syndromes. The acquired broader view, the expanded horizon,
is one's very personal equivalent of "C." Or so I tend to think. And like
sample "C" activities discussed, it requires co-operation where an
outsider (or some special circumstance) shocks the learner into
C-behavior. A C-change would normaly be a socially induced occurrence.
(Thought: aren't the most dramatic books, plays, and movies B -> C
conversions? Seeing the light? Epiphanies?) I very much welcome any
deserved critical lambasting here because we are here at the heart of
lifelong, 50-some-years personal education in a time of accelerating
change.
- Personal bootstrapping may easily put one out of touch or in direct
conflict with one's immediate environment, i.o.w. one risks a social
cost and, consequently, an emotional cost. "Misfit" is a common word
used in this connection. Especially harmful in family and
child-rearing contexts.
- In a class by itself, it seems, is the apparent barrier to mental
accomodation of natural phenomenon that have been surmized by
calculations such as, for starters, particle-wave dualism.
[Interesting anecdote: J.J. Thomson received a 1906 Nobel prize for
elucidating properties of the particle known as electron (1906),
properties that cannot be conceived as belonging to anything but a
particle; his son, G.P. Thomson, received a 1937 Nobel prize for
demonstrating the thingie is under certain circumstances best
conceived as a wave phenomenon. A sad thing about some officially
imposed curriculum is that there is hardly time nor the needed mental
substrate to do full justice to the marvel of it all! It all gets
reduced to the basest of assimilation in preparing for such moronic,
plug-them-in exam question like "calculate the wavelength of an
electron traveling at x% of the speed of light." Maybe the efforts
reported by Pie and Spohrer have changed some of that.]
Sincerely,
Henry
Henry van Eyken
vaneyken@sympatico.ca
Post Script
I wonder how notes like the above would best find a suitable fit in
a DKR. They do not represent such concrete knowledge as the properties
of a screw that holds a tail to an airplane. They are not information
anyone would be searching for in a knowledge container. How are they to
be placed such that they do not contribute to info-overload for those
consulting the DKR and still will come to the fore to be acted on (or
replaced) at an appropriate instance? I still have to catch up with the
Discussions, but isn't this the kind of issue our "DKR leaders" are now
wrestling with?
Fleabyte --
http://www.fleabyte.org
...is an evolving, experimental web-publication devoted to public computency,
which, like common literacy, is regarded as essential to an environmentally
healthy, democratic society.