Dear Joao

Thank you for your response. Yes, I am somewhat familiar with
Montessori's work due to two reasons. one is my study on children and
other my study on senses.

I had independently arrived at the understanding that 'true' learning
is a biological process when I began to study how children learn in
non-literate communities. In fact, my hunch about learning as a
biological process actually came from another of my favorite topic
which is aesthetic sense.  My work with rural artisan communities has
given me the hint about the sense of beauty being rooted in our
biology and it was a natural progression to see the biological roots
of learning also. This naturally led me to explore senses which are
the tools that life has given us to make sense of the world. In fact,
I stopped reading for a couple of years and I really began to
understand how senses actually function. This is what I call as
'knowing by being'.

What pissed me off with Montessori was with the 'Montessori method'
she made to teach children. 'Method' is against biology. It is
mechanical application- or what is wrongly called as a mindless
application. In fact, it is the body's role that gets removed when we
resort to the method as  'method' can only be taught to the mind
directly.

I think the biggest shift that happened in human social evolution was
with the introduction of literacy as unlike any other shifts, that is
from cavemen to hunter-gathers or hunter-gathers to farmers the use of
senses and the autonomy in learning was what got denied. Dependence on
Literacy to know the world took the life out of the process. That is
the denial of biology in making sense of the world.

Montessori was rediscovering some obvious facts that it is through
senses that we make sense of the world. But in the context of
modernity, it seems that what is obvious is not so obvious!

Jinan


On 22/01/2019, João Ferreira <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Jinan,
>
> You wrote
>
> "Actually, this is emotional blackmail and not really about learning.
> This emotional blackmail is what everyone is proposing in order to
> improve education. Either you shower love or you give them good marks,
> cheer them up..........
>
> Please look carefully at this situation. The emotion of love is for
> the one who is teaching and what is being 'learned' is something else.
> So there is fragmentation between emotion and 'learning'.
>
> This is bound to happen when the content of what one is supposed to be
> learning is absent. This is precisely the problem that modernity is
> doing. The body is experiencing the emotion and the mind is 'learning'
> what is being taught. Emotion is not really connected with the content
> that is being learned!
>
> What is present is what we experience!"
>
> While I generally agree with the thrust of what you write here I
> nonetheless can't help but feel you're being somewhat imprecise about
> modernity.
>
> Also, it is difficult to comment on your statements without knowing to what
> age bracket you are referring. We may generally agree that the impulse
> toward learning is innate, that is, it is an evolutionary outcome, a
> biological preset shared equally among all human beings and accessible to
> all regardless of culture, language, or age; but still, surely we can agree
> that a one-year-old has different learning needs and abilities than a four
> or five-year-old who has already acquired and mastered the fundamentals of
> (oral) language?
>
> Regarding modernity, I find echoes of your thinking about education in the
> groundbreaking work of Maria Montessori (a modern-day scientist by any
> standards); from empirical observation and experiment, she articulated the
> principles that drive children towards learning about the world. According
> to Montessori, these principles are innate and the child (I'm referring to
> up to two-year-old children) needs only an adequate environment and a
> non-interfering adult to learn, and indeed attraction to specific objects,
> animals, details in the environment or particular activities seem to be
> driven from within and could be described as a 'love' (but perhaps more
> accurately labelled as 'curiosity') towards something external.
>
> You will probably know about Montessori already, but I would encourage you
> to revisit her studies.
>
> All the best,
>
>>
>
>
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-- 
Jinan,
TEXT DISTORTS, DIGITAL DESTROYS, WORLD AWAKENS
http://jinankb.in/
http://existentialknowledgefoundation.org/
http://rethinkingfoundation.weebly.com/
http://sadhanavillageschool.org/
https://www.youtube.com/user/sadhanavillagepune
https://www.youtube.com/user/jinansvideos
www.re-cognition.org
https://independent.academia.edu/JinanKodapully
09447121544


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