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EDUCATION AND LEARNING

ARGUABLY:

Learning is an active creative process.

Learning involves the discovery (or development) of relationships among phenomena the learner observes or perceives.

Learning how to learn involves learning how to look for relationships, how to inquire into relationships.

The greater the number of experiences, the greater the opportunity for the learner to learn.

The greater the ability to see relationships, the greater the learning from each additional experience.

The quantity and quality of learning can be increased if two people can share their experiences and their perceptions of them.

 

ALSO:

Writing is a process of thought.

Memories fade with the passage of time.

The mind can focus on only a limited number of phenomena at one time.

Recording one’s observations can serve as reminders, as memory stimulators.

Recording one’s observations can enable one to search any number of
phenomena for relationships.

Recording one’s generalizations about observed phenomena can enable one to search out the relationships among one’s generalizations.

Writing is one of man’s most important learning tools.

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from Max McGee, Palo Alto, California, school system:

The assessment tool “…needs to look like a portfolio students generate over time that reflects their passion, their purpose in life, their sense of wonder, and that demonstrates their resilience and persistence and some intellectual rigor.” [quoted in TIME magazine]

But can they spell? Write an essay? Do independent research (not always collaborative work)? Can they formulate their beliefs? Can they do a literary analysis?

What would Rousseau say?

What do they really have to know to be admitted to X college or university?

Ask: Fareed Zakaria author of In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton, 2015)

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By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in TIME (October 5, 2015, 30-32).

“The joy of college is arguing with others who are equally passionate and informed but disagree. It develops empathy for others and humility in yourself because you will look upon your opponents not as evil idiots but as good people who want the same thing as you: a safe, loving, moral community.

“If you don’t want to read the books [for the course] and develop the skills, don’t take the class. Don’t attend the college. Spend the rest of your life huddled among those who agree with you. But know that that is not thinking–it’s sleeping. Perhaps the Beatles said it best: ‘Please don’t wake me, no, don’t shake me. Leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping.’”

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Ask: “What do I have to know in order to survive (in a world of argumentation)?”

Ask: “What do I need to know, to be a critical THINKER, LISTENER, DO-ER?”

KNOW THIS: 

truth/ probability

fact/ opinion

report/ inference/ judgment

assumption/ theory

open-minded/ close-minded

principle/ value  

belief/ bias/ prejudice

“REMEMBER THIS: A principle is what we stand up for; a value is what we stand around in.”

 

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