A critical question for teaching children (or anyone) is how to simultaneously 1) keep teaching grounded in the child’s own experience and 2) move the child as far as possible, not letting immediate experience be the limit on how far he can go in his knowledge.
A brief comment on each of these conditions:
The fact that #1 is important is a very profound topic about which much can be profitably said, but let it suffice to observe that being able to say the right words (an “answer”) in response to other words (a “question”), is not knowledge (what to call this “kind of knowledge” is up for a talented coiner of phrases, but “rote” knowledge might be useful). True or real knowledge depends upon some experienced contact with reality. An quick and easy way to distinguish which kind of knowledge is possessed is whether or not someone can explain or say a particular “answer” in a variety of ways—in “other words”. If he can do this, then obviously more is possessed than mere words; rather some thing is possessed or grasped, and the knower is therefore able to use any words available in his vocabulary that may evoke that thing to the questioner.
About condition 2, I take it for granted that man is capax universi—man is “capable of the universe”, of the whole of reality. Aristotle says that man is all things potentially. Another way to put the point is that man’s mind is not inherently barred from grasping anything, provided he be able to access it. Of course, we aren’t able to know how man atoms are in the Sun, but this is not an in-principle problem, it is a practical problem, a practical limit to our knowledge, not a problem inherent in our minds. But even a more modest claim than capax universi–say merely that man can know far beyond his immediate experience–taken along with the principle that knowledge is good, results in point 2. We want as much knowledge as possible, and remaining limited to immediate experience would leave too cramped a dwelling for the soul of man.
So to sum up, we want to extend our knowledge (or our child’s) as far and wide as possible, without becoming unanchored from experience.
The answer to this quandary is a little thing called indirect, mediate, or derivative experience.
For example, I may not have ever experienced a Hippo, but I have experienced a Rhino, a pug dog, and a pig. With guidance from a person who has experienced a Hippo, and who knows the present limits/resources of my experience, I can take the greyness, size, and texture of a Rhino, along with the structural build and shape of a pug, along with the rotundity of a pig torso, and build a fairly accurate derivative experience of a Rhino. The task of the teacher in this scenario is to reach into my present experience, utilize the pieces/parts/raw materials that are there, and guide me in constructing a Rhino (within my mind) using those raw materials that lie within me (for I have nothing else to use) which I had previously acquired through my own experience.
I think this is a fairly common practice and is intuitive/instinctive/natural for most people when trying to convey a new thing to someone else. One could call this method or principle of teaching “Guided Re-arrangement” or something of the sort. This guided rearrangement allows a person to derive a “new” experience (and therefore grounded knowledge) from the elements of old experience.
A more powerful and profound principle for reaching into someone’s experience to extend his knowledge I am calling “Subtract to Add” and will explain it in the next post, though as a hint I have also used this principle in the present post.
