Learning. It's important. And ubiquitous.
In fact, let's talk about learning!
So I'm in college now, and this semester I accidentally signed up for a class on the history of learning. How does one accidentally sign up for a class, you might ask? To which I would answer, "It fit my schedule and I needed one more GE credit."
I had no idea what the class was about before the first day, besides that it was called the "history of creativity and learning". Coming up with the money for the eTextbook was the first exercise in creativity that this class taught me, because of course the eTextbook cost just as much as the print one would have (because it's 1981 and a 5MB drive costs $3,500 dollars*).
*no, seriously, it would have. I found that here: http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
It turns out, though, that the history of creativity and learning is pretty interesting. Seeing the changes in how people viewed learning and truth throughout history has been intriguing, especially when all of that background can be put into context in today's world.
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| This is Plato. He's pointing at the sky because he discovered it, much to the chagrin of his less-observant colleagues.** |
I liked the contrast between the great thinkers of the past: there were the philosophers in ancient kingdoms like Greece, people who eschewed any kind of formal experimentation because they believed that passive observation and logic was the least intrusive form of learning; religious leaders of the medieval period who taught with a claim to spiritual authority, only to have new religious reformers claim that the written word of God was the ultimate source of truth; political thinkers who tried to merge the ideas of the Enlightenment with the government, either through reform or revolution; natural philosophers who built on the science of the past to create new theories and explanations for how the world works. These and many other groups all were trying, essentially, to come to the same conclusion: what's the best way to learn?
And all of them had good points. To an extent.
In fact, with that in mind, one thing I think is kind of odd is how we always assume the newest idea to come from "Science" is the best conclusion, and automatically does away with previous ideas. In some cases, it should take over from what we previously understood. Once we knew as a population that disease was transmitted by microorganisms, previous ideas about the causes of disease, like the theory of miasma and the theory of imbalance in the body's "humors", were proven wrong.
But those theories had part of the right idea. The theory of miasma, for example, proposed that disease rose with bad smells from rot or swamps and so on. It was a misinterpretation of the observation that diseases seemed to proliferate in places which were not clean, places like swamps, sewage, and slums. When we automatically assume superiority over people of older times because of the time in which we personally live, or because of scientific advancements or discoveries, I think it does them a disservice. Even today, there are things that we don't know, and ways that our experiments and discoveries might be flawed. I'm sure that in a hundred years, there will be people who think of us as just as uncultured as the Greeks who were using leeches to get rid of "stale" blood in patients.
In conclusion, because this might have gone too long already:
Being afraid to consider new ideas is narrow minded, but pretending to be intellectual by doubting absolutely everthing from the past is just as dumb.
That's my thoughts on learning; see you next time!
-Sam
**also, I know Plato didn't discover the sky. Everyone knows that was Socrates. Plato did, however, discover the day-night cycle of the earth, which was useful for explaining why it got so dark every 12 hours or so.
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