Re: Ingold's articles ...

From: DGeorgiou@aol.com
Date: Sun Mar 18 2001 - 10:58:57 PST


Hi Mike and all,

I enjoyed both of Ingold's brilliant papers immensely. His "developmental"
thesis resonates greately with my personal beliefs about development and
learning, and others':

"Learning to throw and catch, to climb, or to eat and drink ..., is a matter
not of acquiring from an environment representations that satisfy the input
conditions of preconstituted modules, but of the formation, within an
environment, of the necessary neurological connections, along with attendant
features of musculature and anatomy, that establish these various
competencies" (p 10, From the transmission of representations to the
education of attention).

A number of years back, NPR broadcast a program on the research on rats that
an experimental psychologist, whose name escapes me, was conducting in his
laboratory (in Boston, I believe). This researcher raised several rats in
isolation (one per cage with just food and water) from infancy to mid-age. He
then decided to put these rats all in one large cage furnished with lots of
devices (such as, a wheel, a tunnel, a ladder, and so on). Before grouping
the rats, however, he took pictures of their brains and noted the number of
their synapses.

Once in the cage, the rats took some time to acquaint with one another and to
carefully explore their new environment. As they grew acustomed to the
presence of the other rats and to the strange devices in their environments,
they begun to socializing and playing with one another, grooming each other,
and using the devices more and more. Several months later, these previously
(in their small single-rat cage) apathetic rats grew extremely active,
physically fit and quite competent at using the devices that furnished their
environment. The researcher took new pictures of their brain and was amazed
to discover that there had been an "explosion" of new synapses that were not
there before, in the pictures taken previously. I believe that this could be
a good illustration of Tim's "developmental" thesis. This also contradicts
the "myth" of intellectual decline (as K. Shaie calls it) in aging people.

Tim's "developmental" thesis would also explain, I believe, why adolescents,
who stay in school in those countries where formal education stresses (e.g.,
most European and former Soviet Union countries) the practice of formal
operations especially throughout the 3-4 last years of high school, do
demonstrate indeed these competencies to a considerable extent by the time
they have reached their 18th birthday. This goes along with Vygotsky's
suggestion that children's informal and formal education through the medium
of language strongly influences the level of conceptual thinking they reach.
If the language climate within which children grow up (direct speech, mass
communication media) is dominated by simplistic or "primitive" language, then
the children will think only simplistically or primitively. But if the
language environment contains varied and complex concepts, then children will
learn to think in varied and complex ways, given that their initial
biological equipment (sense organs, central nervous system) is not impaired.

Doris.



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