I’ve written before of the modern tendency to use glossy pictures and even fast-moving images to teach, even to teach subjects requiring some concentration and some use of abstract reasoning. This is absurd. It’s been known since at least the work of the English psychologist, Richard Gregory, that the human brain—like the brains of monkeys even more than apes—places a priority on colors and movement as a means of detecting food, dangers, and sex opportunities. (The latter might be less important for humans since color doesn’t indicate fertility for human females as it does for chimpanzees and other close relatives.)
I don’t really have a good handle on the history of the efforts to understand the nature of human acts of perception and cognition and how they interact. I know a little bit about the modern effort and I know how St Thomas Aquinas anticipated much of the general findings—see How Brains Make Up Their Mind by the neuroscientist and philosopher Walter J Freeman for an excellent overview of the Thomistic understanding. In any case, I do know that Richard Gregory played an important role in the modern re-discovery of the active nature of human perception and how it interacts with thinking.
The main thrust of Gregory’s work was the nature of perception, which he saw as an act like unto cognition rather than a passive reception of images or other stimuli. Since there are only finite resources in the human brain, which is already an energy hog, the aggressive stimulation of the visual regions will come at the expense of other regions, such as those with which we reason in abstract ways. One might think that many subjects would be better taught with textbooks and other materials not being distracting to the higher-reasoning regions of the human brain, but nowadays those glossy pictures are found even in high school math books. Much is taught through videos or through rapidly changing images on the computer monitor. This isn’t to say that electronic technology, even fast-moving videos, are never good in education, but it is to say that it is often no good and we should have educators who understand enough to be able to make plausible judgments in specific cases.
This is the problem. Education, though a little more solid when I was in elementary school in the 1960s, was the domain of faddish thinking by way of ungrounded speculation for the entirety of my career as a student. Some of the fads were plausible answers to the wrong questions, such as the phase of short readings with each student working through the file of readings at his own pace. That seemed plausible to deal with the problem of varying levels of skills and talents in the typical classroom but it was really, in my opinion, a gutless dance around the problems of the ideologically driven age-cohort school system: The children advance at different rates, some eventually catching up and some never catching up, but we modern men of the West wish to socialize them as a herd so we sacrifice better education for all but the middling students who move at a rate acceptable to education college theorists.
Now, some researchers have spotted another possible problem, though it’s not a settled issue. In What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades, Maria Konnikova begins:
Does handwriting matter?
Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.
But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.
Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters—but how.
The article speaks of some respected researchers who think it will not turn out to be true that handwriting is nearly this important in the educational process. We’ll see, but we should be asking how major standards were promulgated on the basis of untested speculations that handwriting is unimportant in the education of children. I know that my best learning experiences have occurred when I used lots of pencil lead and lots of sheets of paper to do problems in mathematics or science or when I took notes during lectures on any subject—even when I never used those notes to study.
This is a general problem in the West. We think to be a `scientific people’ by which we are claiming to think in line with sciences dealing with the observable and, often, also quantifiable aspects of reality. In reality, we have been partially freed from traditional ways of thought and feeling and acting, some of which ways carry true knowledge and wisdom, some of those ways point to truth but need to be adjusted to reflect more recently discovered knowledge about reality, and some of those ways reflect knowledge best discarded but for those scholars needing to study the history of human thought.
We are a people with a strange mixture of scientific, magical, ideological, and other beliefs of a good and not so good sort. This comes out in our educational system, one in which people who feel awfully good about themselves and greatly overrate their understanding and intelligence have conducted experiments upon the youth of the United States and many other regions of the West as well. The experiments, on the whole, are failures. The peoples with old-fashioned ideas about learning—immerse yourself in the material, dig in, work till you’re drenched with sweat—out-perform those who have been softened in brains and often bodies to the standards of the modern American middle-class. Those more successful peoples include the ethnic Chinese and Japanese, traditional Jews, some eastern Europeans, and some immigrants from impoverished regions, though I’ve heard expressions of concern that more recent generations of even Chinese-Americans might be moving toward the trashy attitudes of the American middle-class of European descent.
The loss of respect for the activity of handwriting follows upon a similar loss of respect for such activities as memorizing addition or multiplication tables. To be sure, that was an activity useless to me since I could already handle addition and multiplication of all those relatively small numbers well before I had to endure hours of useless practice each week, but that points back to the problems with age-cohort education. We prioritize socializing, and I would even call it brainwashing, and that is perhaps the original sin of American educators. By high school, I wasn’t in the same classes as the fellows I would join for pick-up baseball games or card games in after-school hours—the only effect of age-cohort education for me was the slowing down of my mental development and perhaps of my emotional development.
In any case, though I was lucky enough to be ahead of the sheer stupidities of New Math, I can remember the upset and the complaints of some parents who had at least vague intuitions this New Math stuff wouldn’t help their children to so much as balance their checkbooks. And I wish to say that memorizing addition and multiplications tables was good in itself though I didn’t need it at the time I had to endure it. In any case, though few know this, the New Math programs back in the 1970s were adopted over the protests of various societies of mathematicians and most likely the protests of a lot of individual mathematicians and scientists and engineers and maybe some humanists possessing at least a broad understanding of mathematics.
Human beings are the result of specific processes of evolution. Those processes have somehow produced a very complex brain which allows us to shape minds, abstract relationships between us and other entities as well as `global’ regions of Creation; we shape those minds by active responses to reality. Yet the shaping process itself is a somewhat ad-hoc process as we would expect from the most basic understanding of natural selection and and other evolutionary processes.
Those who claim to have knowledge of some sort of education science overrule those who have knowledge of the specific fields of knowledge and ignore those specific fields which tell us much about the human being, an animal capable of transcending in some ways that animal status by way of processes we only partly understand, an animal capable of acquiring high levels of skill in passing on and gaining abstract knowledge of the bookish sort. He is a very particular sort of animal not `designed’ to be an animal literate in well-defined ways with well-defined additional cognitive skills in logic and mathematics and higher-level music, but rather an upright primate with skills and aptitudes selected for survival and reproduction yet capable of abstract reasoning and able to develop sounds and alphabets to communicate the number of enemy warriors approaching and also the concept of rational number. The Pythagoreans were even capable of reacting in disgust and fear against the possibility of an irrational number.
But all of this came about by development processes, some linked undoubtedly to ongoing evolutionary processes. These were development processes which occur as the human being responds to the world around himself as well as to his own body. They are also processes which themselves are the results of specific events in biological evolution.
The mathematical truths which are part of Creation shape the mind of the mathematician or even the minds of those who make instrumental use of mathematics; the mind of the student, the potential mathematician or physicist or accountant or carpenter, doesn’t access realms of abstract truths apart from this mortal realm. He accesses realms of abstract truths through this mortal realm and by way of specific events in this mortal realm. He doesn’t impose order upon chaos but rather draws principles of order from that (seeming) chaos and uses it understand that chaos—a fascinating process of often unstable iterations occurring over generations. He has the brain suited for such a world and for such activities within the world; that brain “makes up a mind” as Professor Freeman has it. Without understanding that brain, how it operates and how it interacts with the world outside of itself and how it interacts with the realms of truths it posits with increasing certainty, we can’t understand how to educate children or even how to further educate our own selves.