Chapter 13
Learning
The great adage, that “You can take the horse to the pond, But it is the horse that should drink the water” fits into several of the life situations. That fits well, in education scenario too.
Teaching is taking the horse to the pond and learning can be compared the horse taken to the pond, drinking the water.
A Tamil poem on education says that: At the best, a good teacher would be able to impart, one fourth of what he knows (to the student). A good student, can absorb, just a fourth of what he is imparted.
Then, one can extrapolate to know what would students learn, with a combination of, a teacher who uninterested in the job and a student who does not like learning, With best of intentions, tools and techniques, not all the teaching becomes learning by the students.
A parallel can be drawn from a mother making a sumptuous food and a child with worms in their stomach. How ever tasty the food is prepared unless the child is hungry, it cannot consume, digest and well nourished.
Learning comes from hunger for knowing. The hunger can be driven from economic needs or inquisitiveness to know. But the hunger should be in place.
Can you force feed the knowledge?
There are methods of force-feeding nourishment to a body (such as glucose fed through veins) by medical fraternity. Such a method is not invented in Engineering education to force feed the skills or knowledge.
One need to create hunger or thirst for knowledge. That can be done by communicating with the mind of the student.
There is no other short cut to imparting knowledge.
There are two components involved in Educating a person:
What constitutes the learning skills?
(1) Store and retrieve:
We are equipped with two kinds of mind,. A conscious one and another is subconsciously mind. (These two are Comparable to RAM and Disk storage in a computer system) Internalizing the learning is transfer of information or knowledge from conscious mind to subconscious mind.
Conscious mind, like system RAM, is volatile. Contents of conscious mind gets erased with time. On the other hand the content of subconscious mind does not.
Often contents of subconscious mind is not retrievable by conscious mind, as it gets in deeper and deeper (into subconscious mind). A hypnotist or a conscious effort can dig out information stored in subconscious mind. The knowledge stored works but not visible to conscious mind.
The contents of subconscious mind becomes out nature. Even though conscious mind may change with events and circumstances the contents of subconscious mind does not. Some human problems like kleptomania, repeating a mistake even one one is conscious of it are attributed to contents of conscious mind.
With repeated trails by conscious mind, certain themes or behavioral patterns gets into sub-conscious mind.
Now on, our discussion will center around Conscious mind alone..
Conscious mind & Learning: Basic ability to store and recall whatever one reads or hear. Most people can store only very limited information. Also that they cannot remember them for long.
You can compare such minds to leaky tea cups. Larger the cup and lesser the leakage makes one a better learner.
The ability to store and retrieve can be improved to a great level through regular memorizing practices as early as three years.
Many Of the middle class children are trained to learn by-heart, poems, voluminous prayers in alien language, nursery rhymes, mathematical tables. Given training in one or the other of fine arts. vocal music, string instruments, painting, drawing and traditional dance forms.
These come as a part of the culture and for all that many of them may not know yet, the important role these training play into their children’s life.
There are also instances where the poorest of poor perform extremely well at school. Often, those children are driven by a desire to raise above their poverty.
(A friend tells me about his boyhood days when he had a classmate belonged to a very poor family. He lived in a hut and there would be pigs moving all around. He was so brilliant at studies that he would visit him at his hut to learn something that he did not understand. This boy grew-up to become a district collector).
(2) Mind reflexes: We understand bodily reflexes.
You see some object slipping off your hand and as a person with quick reflex would catch it before it falls on the floor. Most games and sports call for quick bodily reflexes.
Mind reflex is comparable to bodily reflex where, when you see / read / hear, you are able quickly recall similar or connected information from the mind so that it would bring a beneficial effect to the person.
(3) Organising thoughts in the mind .
These are mind related activity and non- physical. Some amount of imagination is required to understand and develop the skills.
I compare our normal way of storing and retrieval of information to dumping cloth, documents inside a box. This way, it takes a lot of time and retrieve when needed. Keeping the all related documents in separe files, hanging the cloth in a wardrobe with a hanger can be compared to keeping information in an organised way in the memory.
I had a lot of difficulty to convey until I conducted an experiment with small children during the last summer holidays.
The Experiment:
My grandchildren and their friends aged between 4 to 10 took part in the following simple experiment. They are study in a popular public school and had rich English vocabulary.
I asked every children to write, without consulting each other, as many English words they knew.
To my surprise, they would write some 30 to 40 words. Then the children were allowed to consult others. Now the number of words they could write nearly doubled.
The following day, I asked them to write words from specific places, such as objects in a house. Then what they would see in a hospital, public places like parks, shops, schools.
The third day I asked the same set of children, to write whatever the words they new, the result was amazing. Even after three hours, they were writing non-stop. The words each one could recall and write exceeded some three thousand.
What difference did the children made on the third day?
On the day two, they learnt and put to use the technique of storing information in an organised way. For instance, words in a sequence, based on the place of work, activity in different work places and the like.
On the third day, they recalled the words with a great ease.
The same way the information can be stored in an ordered way in memory to recall them fast. This is a way of improving mind reflexes.
(4) Filters: We intercept messages going across. Read news items and all of them contains information. Unfortunately every media focuses on sensationalism. Often these have no historic value,. There may be a lesson to remember extracted from the news but certainly It is not worth remembering every detail that makes the news.
There could some statistics on entertainment and sports which some people are proud to remember and display them in their discussions. Certainly there are better things to remember than these statistics.
Ideally, the teaching might have an element on Filtering-out information irrelavent to one’s life. Because they block the space already too small.
How do we do that?
Mind can be imagined of interacting with the bodily sensors like ear, eye, tongue, touch and nose. Information from each and every sensors flow to the mind continuously. The mind has a limited storage capacity. So it will accept or reject on the basis of a few questions, How important is this message?
Is it going to .save life from death or destruction?
Will it Improve quality of life? Would it help meeting the goals?
If any one of these questions did not result in a positive answer, the mind rejects saying:
Already the storage is full. I cannot store any more.
Why are we forgetful?
Newer information occupies the place of older ones in our limited mind space.
So filters are necessary..