Grant Holland wrote at 06/26/2013 09:11 AM: > If one wants to "teach" someone else, the most productive route is to > attempt to *evoke* elements that are already in that persons internal > mental construct - rather than to directly try to alter it. You've got > to try to entice its "guardian" (the learner) actually do the altering. > After all, "educe" (the root of "education") means to "pull from out of" > more than it means to "introduce into".
Excellent point. I find myself resorting to this way of thinking more and more, especially in the context of giving presentations. There's never quite enough time to slog through the rhetoric it would require even _if_ a guided tour would work. (I've found that such guided tours don't work unless the audience is willing to play along ... which is rare.) The best I can do is say things so that the resistance between what I think they already think and what I'm trying to get them to think, is minimized. ;-) > Of course, "educement" requires mostly a 1-1 relationship between > "student" and "facilitator" - like mentoring, apprenticeship and > tutoring. Unfortunately, such an approach is not scalable. If we want to > indoctrinate the masses, these kinds of personal relationships between > "student" and "teacher" don't scale to that volume. I'm not sure I agree with this part. Of course, quantitatively, I'd have to. But qualitatively, it's reasonable to imagine taking advantage of logistic infection. If I can infect 2 people, and they each infect 2 people, etc. That may not scale _fast_ enough (given the length of a professional lifetime, say, 20-30 years). But at least we can talk about the speed of the spread. And I think we might even be able to achieve some sort of logistic growth with serial tutelage, depending on the domain. Yeah, perhaps stone masonry requires an entire professional lifetime for an infection to take hold. But surely other domains take less time. We can't all be as infectious as Richard Feynman, of course. But surely some of it scales, right? What we need are more people to embrace themselves as "advanced students" with a responsibility to serially engage, 1-1, other students. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella Float away from those horizons ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
