Part 1 of
Several; Some Backstory
"It was the invention of the axle that made the invention of the wheel useful. And, that took nearly 4000 years."
I will be
using a number of older graphics and charts and making reference to a great
number of previous, and sometimes on-going, works by other educators and
accomplished scientists. Of course, I
will never take credit for some piece of work, or data, originated by someone
else – Nothing in this volume is intentionally plagiarized. I am going to go out on a limb here and do
citations parenthetically, on the fly and leave it up to you, dear reader, to
do whatever verification you desire.
Also, I will
be referencing certain bodies of work,
and scientists, that are generally accepted and entrenched in most studies of
cognitive and/or meta-cognitive processing. A few clicks of the mouse and all of
this material is available to anyone.
The human brain has one essential function and
that is to make decisions. All
of the factual data accumulated from many years of study and experiments, I
contend, lead to a simple conclusion ; i.e. all life seeks to survive as long
as possible. All decisions derive from
this one conclusion.
The brain is a body organ and responds to
chemical reactions. In the instance of
actual body movement as it reacts to those decisions, the process of decision
making does not stop, it merely descends into lower and lower cognitive levels
of awareness. By the time body parts
actually move, it has reached a level of subliminal awareness, however it does
continue and, according to the essential skills of the individual, it provides
unique levels accuracy and speed.
Meta-cognitive decision making abilities have a dependency on
the individual’s unique make-up, both physically inherited and those which
developed in response to stimuli in the first years of life. The manner and means each person decides to
implement may follow certain patterns.
However, due to the simple application of physiological science, are by
necessity unique at least by the degree that their own life experiences have
shaped them.
These unique attributes do not need to be graded or categorized. They need to be accepted, much as a person’s
height or other physical qualities, and entered as an ingredient in the formula
for that person’s education. They simply need to be ascertained and respected.
However, up until recently this thought processing, as it works its way from immediate exposure to information, retained in some series of steps to become memory and thereby useable knowledge, has had a truly variegated history.
Fig. 1
Figure 1 is recent adaption of the work of Benjamin Bloom (1956) American.
Fig.2
Which is an update, as it were, from Edgar Dale's chart published in 1946; figure 3.
Fig. 3
Now push all of this study into the mystery of human thought in reference to
learning, back a bunch of years, back
a bunch of years and we come to Sir Francis Galton of “Eugenics” fame,
who in 1883 came up with this gem.
Bearing in mind that Sir
Galton was drawing a lot of his notions from the work of his half cousin, Charles Darwin. There is something very telling from Galton’s
chart, in that he was most definetly one of the most brilliant men of his time,
by most measurements we would accept today for intelligence, He was also subject to frequent mental conditions
we term nervouse breakdowns today. Which does not in any way diminish his
numerous accomplishments, but does display a mind given to very deep
imagery.
And, as is not uncommon with
human minds possessed of such remarkable abilities and their attempts to
compose massive concepts into any some form of communication with other minds lacking in such abilities, he ranges into almost the bizarre. It would appear so, to me, anyway. I have found, however, that when Galton's chart is enlarged to a point where it can be really interpreted and is used in conjunction with his writing, though extremely erudite in style, it begins to take on some form and make sense. This is a bit of an exercise in patience on the part of the outside researcher, though.
I put forward these charts and very basic interpretations of my own, to begin to display how so much of what is a matter of thought that is essential one of imagery and to meld it into one of written language. Or, we have taken the two most basic modalities of learning; these being the visual and the verbal (written auditory) and made a case for something we want to be accepted as truth, or proof of a truth. My case being we have applied something that is not binary in nature and done our best to make it fit. We are pounding a square peg into a round hole.
In the next part of this section, I will put forward just a few more examples of how this truly does not work.
All material in this blog is from “Equations
for the Joyous Mind” © 2016 by Dale Clarence Peterson
dalepeterson.us
Just published “Twelve
Roses for Kathy – A journey on a motorcycle out of the darkness of bipolar
disorder”
Wild and interesting!
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