Children learn language as readily as they do, and in the ways in which they do, because there are strong constraints built into their nervous systems; such constraints powerfully affect the ways in which they initially refer to the world, categorize objects, and interact with other individuals.
(Howard Gardner: The Unschooled Mind: 7)
We say that children must start by learning simple things and advance into more complex things. This is true, but with some explanation. Evolving from simple to complex occurs in learning content, like moving from arithmetic to trigonometry. Evolution of any sort only occurs within a context of inherent rules and structures and constraints. But the really simple things are structural, bones shaping every piece of content and reappearing to mold and constrain every level of its complexity. Education calls this appearance and reappearance a spiral curriculum. And its principle of construction is one where, as Northrop Frye observes, "the same structural elements of a subject are repeated at progressively more complex levels." (On Education:53) Roughly speaking, then, there is what children consciously learn and what they unconsciously absorb, and what they absorb is accomplished more easily and has greater effect because it is closer to how the intelligence is actually built and operates. But what the child understands unconsciously must be translated into a language of consciousness. That is what learning and education should do.
Again we do not receive an education, but express one. What we receive is instruction, (in-structure) the putting of form into our intelligence. In-struction evokes what we already know but do not know that we know until we have a form for it to be re-cognized. From the ages of zero to five years, so much is learned and assimilated and put to immediate use. Without question, the greatest learning occurs during these years. And it is not mere learning of facts, one after another, much as a foreign language is often badly taught. No, some of the greatest feats of intellectual daring and effort are made and met during these first years, such as the grasp and use of language and number, two “languages” that enable the child to understand the world.
I distinguish two kinds of subjects to be learned. First, are what we can call tool subjects, such as language and math, words and numbers —the languages of the human and natural sciences respectively. The other kind of subject is a content subject, such as history, biology, sociology and chemistry. Tool subjects are both content in themselves—we have English classes and Math classes--and tool for other subjects. I mean they allow the other subjects to be learned, for they are the communication medium for these other subjects. All subjects are forms of discourse. Language itself is the one discoursing. Most education is language education, the learning of discourses.
Yet, designating language and math as tool subjects is something of a misnomer, for it makes them important only to the extent that they help solve engineering problems. I believe that language and math come out of us first, achieve outer form and return to us in the form of instruction, not because they are mere tools, the hammers and saws of knowledge construction, but because they are scepters of ruling power. In teaching words and number we are not just teaching the means to speak and count. That is what they are for many, but for children they are occult mysteries, and learning them has all the inner ceremony of entry into a secret society, making children initiates in the sacred rites of magical control of the world by bestowing upon them talismen of knowledge. These are not simply subjects but runic inscriptions, wizard spells and incantations capable of transforming Nature into something human. It is no wonder that such spiritual potencies were not discovered by men, but first brought to humanity by the gods.
They were first brought forth from us by the holy, divine educators. One of the great myths of every people is a story of the coming of words from the gods: whether Adam of the Judeo-Christian tradition; Thoth of ancient Egypt; Cadmus of Greece, or any other myth telling of the initial appearance of language, or its writing, among a people, such as Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs of central Mexico or Deganaweda of the North American Iroquois tribes.
Those who believe that articulate speech evolved from the grunts, howls, snarls and coos of early humans are speaking of language's organic beginnings, the outer evolution of an innate, spiritual power, for all things have both a spiritual and a material origin. The spiritual origin and inner evolution of human words is the progressive Word. The Qur’an says: “The God of Mercy hath taught the Qur’an, hath created man, hath taught him articulate speech.” (Qur’an 55:1-3) Words are the basis of all the verbal disciplines, and the deepest forms, the meaning structures, of words are metaphors, similes, and symbols. All these come originally from scripture. But they are also inherent biological constraints and resonating structures that help to define humanity and what it can do.
The lead quote from Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind explains that there are biological constraints upon our very nervous systems that are necessary for language to be learned at all. Constraints do not limit creativity, rather, they enable it. For, though biological constraints regarding language exist, human beings have generated a vast number of languages and an infinite number of sentences and all of them have been learned and generated by children operating within the same constraints, unless we are to assume that different people can only learn different languages. There are theories like this, but most of them are racist in overtone.
Too, every language is a perceptual boundary that enables culture and defines a people. These outer boundaries on perception, called cultural assumptions or a world-view, are also ways and paths of growth, metaphors for the biology from which they arose and grew to reflect. The biological and the cultural form a double-mirror that enables collective consciousness. Chomsky changed the study of language by dividing it into a deep structure (constraints within the structure of language itself) and surface structure, the outer expression of language competence. While children learn vocabulary, and can be taught the rules of grammar and syntax, what they absorb from language is its deep structure—the view of the world held within the grammar and syntax of the language. Language competence is the generation of more complex expressions of the possibilities in the deep structure, the unfolding of latent perceptions within the perceptual possibilities of the structure.
Children learn not language but language skills. But as they progress to higher levels of language competence, as they come to understand and master the rules, conventions and constraints of language, they gradually become absorbed into and build a symbolic world. At that point, language changes from subject to be learned to creative power that can be used to make discoveries about the world and to transform it, for following the creative poetic process is the same as following Nature. We discover, ultimately, that structures of physical nature and the human reality are linked in a common destiny, making discoveries in nature also into discoveries of human nature, because in the symbolic dimension of knowledge natural objects and human thoughts and emotions are metaphorically identified—the storm howling outside mirrors the storm raging within. If we change one, we can change the other. That is the magic of words.
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