Thursday, July 27, 2006

With all due respect to Piaget...

In the individual, learning is initially a vast enterprise of finding out what is not true. Much later, ideas that have not yet toppled may be true. A person who wants to start at the end and just hear what is true, like the teacher who offers such short cuts, is a fool. These fools have much company.

Seems backwards to conventional descriptions of the learning process as an accretion of "schema" or some other building up of knowledge but I have two reasons to argue with.
  1. We start off with too many neurons and spend the rest of our life losing them but enriching their connections.
  2. If ignorance were bliss, we should all wish to learn nothing. But that shallow truth is an old lie told in the absence of context. Ignorance is NOT bliss.

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