Summary: Sebastian Fiedler reminds us that world building and rebuilding are outcomes of profound learning experiences. I add Piaget and System Theory and Alethic Truths and refer to wisdom along the way. [entry has been retitled-- from Rebuilding Personal Worlds-- and edited since first publication]
In a recent entry , Seb Fiedler, reminds us that learning, as it should be delivered, must be more than a sincere and effective effort to add data , yet one more file card, to a stack (for clever regurgitation at some future authority-pleasing exercise). He quotes Robert Grudin's work in "the grace of great things" in part as follows:
Whatever ther subject matter or style, true teachers always convey the sense that the communication of an art demands of the student not only effort and attention but cathartic psychological change. To learn is not merely to accumulate data; it is to rebuild one's world...
Seb goes on to ask whether (hope that ) personal weblogging might give each of us better access to the teachers who will help us rebuild our [individual] worlds.
I share the wish and agree that those few times I've had a 'real' teacher in my life I remember. Why? Because of the sense of deep, enabling transformation that came from the experience.
I have a few ideas about rebuilding worlds, however, which make our 'world', the one we're building together, more complex.
Interestingly systems thinkers, developmental psychologists and Dewey concur (though using somewhat different vocabulary) that learning occurs because of disequilibrium. Piaget, for example, mentions assimilation and accommodation as constant tidal process which influence individual becoming. One process tends to map one's expectations onto the environment until the environment no longer does 'the right thing'...even if corrected (via what some call 'negative feedback'). This mapping onto the environment is called assimilation.
The disequilibrium phase.. when a series of corrections fail to achieve their goal (to get the environment to fall in line with present expections) .. is followed at some point by a form of capitulation... the learning system then opens up to the environment and tries out new sets of expectations and accompanying actions. These tryouts occur successively until the environmental response once again meets [a different, more sophisticated, generally] expectation. This trying out of successive expectation/action combinations is called accommodation.
What has been referred to as adding more data I am interpreting as assimilation -- using already mastered environmental control strategies (aka negative feedback) to get the environment back in line -- basically staying the same, not changing or remodeling one's world. The true teacher has to provide experience that will have the learner incapable of making experience still fit the old scheme- thus the student must enter anaccommodationphase which results in remodeled view of life.
Final thought: the remodeling can be large or small. When I think of major efforts (again, realization of potential is, to me another issue) at remodeling I don't think of new slip covers or a better faucet on the sink, I think of redirecting and reoutfitting-- using , of course, as much of the old furniture and old paint as possible. In short, world building should be BIG.
Big means an integrated set of truths which, if mastered, might well change one's world-view. Such truth's Roy Bhaskar has called alethic truth(s)
This is the true world of forms, which account in all their complex, manifold and mediated determinations for all the phenomena of what identity theorists are pleased to call the sensate ... and non-sensate world." (Dialectic: The pulse of freedom, p. 164 via Ruth Groff, in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, September 2000, p. 407)Alethic truths are, in short,those that are deep causes-- supra truths which undergird,encompass and affect lesser or supplementary truths.
- System Theory/Cybernetics
- Psychoanalytic Theory
- Behaviorism
- Buddhist principles of living
- Germ Theory of Diseases and Treatment
- Astrological Analysis of Character in Context of a Multiphased Life (hey... don't get uppity ... it is a comprehensive world-view)
- Constitutional System of Government
- Energic Theory of Diseases and Treatment (as existing in meridians of accupuncture, shiatsu, accupressure, etc.)
- Newtonian Physics
Now if we only could match world-change-level of learning with a great analysis of individual potential so that when the world change occurs it translates as a fuller and higher expression of that individual's
