1 Edu. A new theory of learning can revise thoughts on education
We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything. This is as true for the infant moving from kicking to crawling to walking as it is for the scientist and his equations
Creative Experience
If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach. Perhaps "Talent" or 'lack of talent" have little to do with it.
We must reconsider what is meant by "talent* It is highly possible that what is called talented behavior is simply a greater individual capacity for experiencing. From this point of view, it is in the increasing of the individual capacity for experiencing that the untold potentiality of a personality can be evoked.
Experiencing is penetration into the environment, engagement and total organic involvement with it. This means involvement on all levels: intellectual, physical, and intuitive. Of the three, the intuitive, most vital to the learning situation, is neglected.
Intuition is often thought to be an endowment or a mystical force enjoyed by the gifted alone. Yet all of us have known moments when the right answer "just came” or we did "exactly the right thing without thinking” Sometimes at such moments, often precipitated by crises, danger, or shock, the "average" person has been known to transcend the limitation of the familiar, courageously enter the area of the unknown, and release momentary genius within himself. When response to experience takes place at this intuitive level, when a person functions beyond a constricted intellectual plane, he is truly open for learning.
The intuitive can only respond in immediacy right now. It comes bearing its gifts in a moment of spontaneity, the moment when we are freed to relate and act, involving ourselves in the moving, changing world around us.
Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested (by us), theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with a reality and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.
Acting at this level can be taught to the "average" as well as the "talented" if the teaching process is oriented towards making life techniques so intuitive that they become the students' own. A way is needed to get to intuitive knowledge. It requires an environment in which experiencing can take place, a person free to experience, and an activity that brings about spontaneity.
Aspects of stimulating Spontaneity
Playing Games can be Spontanious
The game is a natural group form providing the involvement and personal freedom necessary for experiencing. Games develop personal techniques and skills necessary for the game itself, through the playing. Skills are developed at the very moment a person is having all the fun and excitement playing a game. He has his Creative Experience to offer, this is the exact time he is truly open to receive it.
Ingenuity and inventiveness can meet any crises the game presents, for it is understood during playing that a player is free to reach the game's objective in any style he chooses. As long as he abides by the rules of the game, he may swing, stand on his head, or fly through the air. In fact, any unusual or extraordinary way of playing is loved and applauded by his fellow players.
Playing a game is psychologically different in degree but not in kind from dramatic expression. The ability to create a situation imaginatively and to play a role in it is a tremendous experience, a sort of vacation from one's everyday-self and the routine of everyday living. We observe that this psychological freedom creates a condition in which strain and conflict are dissolved and potentialities are released in the spontaneous effort to meet the demands of the situation.
Any game worth playing is highly social and has a problem that needs solving. Within it there’s an objective point in which each individual must become involved, whether it be to reach a goal or to flip a chip into a glass. There must be group agreement on the rules of the game and group interaction moving towards the objective if the game is to be played.
Players grow agile and alert, ready and eager for any unusual play as they respond to the many random happenings simultaneously. The personal capacity to involve one's self in the problem of the game and the effort put forth to handle the multiple stimuli the game provokes, determine the extent of this growth.
Growth will occur without difficulty in the student because the very game he plays will aid him. The objective upon which the player must constantly focus and towards which every action must be directed provokes spontaneity.
In this spontaneity, personal freedom is released, and the total person, physically, intellectually, and intuitively, is awakened. This causes enough excitation for the student to transcend himself, he is freed to go out into the environment, to explore, adventure, and face all dangers he meets unafraid.
The energy released to solve the problem, being restricted by the rules of the game and bound by group decision, creates an explosion or spontaneity and as is the nature of explosions, everything is torn apart, rearranged, unblocked. The ear alerts the feet, and the eye throws the ball.
Every part of the person functions together as a working unit, one small organic whole within the larger organic whole of the agreed environment which is the game structure. Out of this integrated experience, a total self in a total environment comes to support, and thus establish a trust which allows the individual to open up and develop any skills that may be needed for the communication within the game. Furthermore, the acceptance of all the imposed limitations creates the playing, out of which the game appears, or as would be the scene in the theater.
With no outside authority imposing itself upon the players, telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, each player freely chooses self-discipline by accepting the rules of the game ("it's more fun that way") and enters into the group decisions with enthusiasm and trust. With no one to please or appease, the player can then focus full energy directly on the problem and learn what he has come to learn.
Approval/Disapproval
The first step towards playing is feeling personal freedom. Before we can play (experience), we must be free to do so. It is necessary to become part of the world around us and make it real by touching it, seeing it, feeling it, tasting it, and smelling it, direct contact with the environment is what we seek. It must be investigated, questioned, accepted or rejected. The personal freedom to do so leads us to experiencing, and thus to self-awareness (self-identity) and self-expression. The hunger for self-identity and self-expression, while basic to all of us, is also necessary for full development.
Very few of us are able to make this direct contact with our Creative Experience reality. Our simplest move out into the environment is interrupted by our need for favorable comment or interpretation by established authority. We either fear that we will not get approval, or we accept outside comment and interpretation unquestionably. In a culture where approval/disapproval has become the predominant regulator of effort and position, and often the substitute for love; our personal freedoms are dissipated. (It’s the real purpose of inculturation through the school.)
Abandoned to the whims of others, we must wander daily through the wish to be loved and the fear of rejection before we can be productive. Categorized "good" or "bad" from birth (a "good" baby does not cry too much) we become so enmeshed with the tenuous treads of approval/disapproval that we are creatively paralyzed. We must see with others' eyes and smell with others' noses.
Having thus to look to others to tell us where we are, who we are, and what is happening, results in a serious (almost total) loss of personal experiencing, (and thus learning ability). We lose the ability to be organically involved in a problem, and in a disconnected way we function with only parts of our total selves. We do not know our own substance, and in the attempt to live through (or avoid living through) the eyes of others, self-identity is obscured, our bodies become mis-shapenen, natural grace is gone, and learning is affected. Both the individual and the art form are distorted and deprived, and insight is lost to us.
Trying to save ourselves from attack, we build a mighty fortress and are timid, or we fight each time we venture forth. Some in striving with approval/disapproval develop egocentricity and exhibitionism; some give up and simply go along. Others, like Elsa in the fairy tale, are forever knocking on windows, jingling their chain of bells, and wailing, "Who am, I?" In all cases, contact with the environment is distorted. Self-discovery and other exploratory traits tend to become atrophied. Trying to be "good" and avoiding "bad" or being "bad" because one can't be "good", develops into a way of life for those needing approval/disapproval from authority. The investigation and solving of problems becomes of secondary importance.
Approval/disapproval grows out of authoritarianism that has changed its face over the years from that of the parent to the teacher and ultimately the whole social structure spouse, employer, family, neighbors, etc.). The language and attitudes of authoritarianism must be constantly scourged if the total personality is to emerge as a working unit. All words which shut doors, have emotional content or implication, and attack the student's personality, or keep a student slavishly dependent on a teacher's judgment. This must be avoided. Since most of us were brought up by the approval/disapproval method, constant self-surveillance is necessary on the part of the teacher to eradicate it in himself so that it will not enter the teacher-student relationship.
The expectancy of judgment prevents free relationships within the classroom. Moreover, the teacher cannot truly judge good or bad for another, for there is no absolutely right or wrong way to solve a problem: a teacher of wide past experience may know a hundred ways to solve a particular problem, and a student may turn up with the hundred and first. This is particularly true in the arts.
Judging on the part of the teacher limits his own experiencing as well as the students', for in judging, he keeps himself from a fresh moment of experience and rarely goes beyond what he already knows. This limits him to the use of rote-teaching, of formulas or other standard concepts which prescribe student behavior.
Authoritarianism is more difficult to recognize in approval than in disapproval, particularly when a student begs for approval. It gives him a sense of himself, for a teacher's approval usually indicates progress has been made, but it remains progress in the teacher's terms, not the student’s own. In wishing to avoid approving therefore, we must be careful not to detach ourselves in such a way that the student feels lost, or feels that he is learning nothing, etc.
True personal freedom and self-expression can flower only in an atmosphere where attitudes permit equality between student and teacher and the dependencies of teacher for student and student for teacher are done away with. The problems within the subject matter will teach both of them.
Accepting simultaneously a student's right to equality in approaching a problem and his lack of experience puts a burden on the teacher. This way of teaching at first seems more difficult, for the teacher must often sit out the discoveries of the student without interpreting, or forcing conclusions on him. Yet it can be more rewarding for the teacher, because when students have truly learned through playing, the quality of learning will be high indeed!
The shift away from the teacher as absolute authority does not always take place immediately. Attitudes are years in building, and all of us are afraid to let go of them.
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