Constructionism and the Renaissance Man
How do we actually learn things? Did you ever truly understanding the things you learnt in school? I explore and reflect on what it means to genuinely understand something, sparked by an intriguing episode from Not Overthinking.
Here are some random jumble of quick notes that I made after listening to Taimur’s spiel on How To Understand Things (‘Not Overthinking’ Podcast Episode).
Hopefully this piece makes sense; I didn’t want to overly polish and curate the thoughts from my initial writing, wanted to keep it authentic and spontaneous without any barriers to publishing. Here it is.
Additionally, I went through and slipped in some ‘Editor’s Notes’ to comment on and explain my thinking in my initial dot points. Might experiment more with this format, seems to work pretty well.
‘Constructionism’ Notes:
Learn by exploration, then by theory
We don't actually learn through 'transferring' data from the teacher to the student (like Instructionism and schooling curriculums suggest).
Instead, we learn by seeing something, then RECONSTRUCTING the thing in our minds to various degrees of success and understanding.
“levels of abstraction”
Most of us therefore don't ACTUALLY understand that many things, especially not the things that we supposed learnt in school
these things were more so 'memorised' in a short hand manner, a definition or such. But upon further inspection or follow up questioning, we wouldn't be able to explain it or justify the reason for it, despite stating that we 'understood' it and could use it in a test.
School forces us to do this - partly with reason - since most of the things that we learn may require a HUGE amount of groundwork to truly understand:
ie. How do plants grow? Simple, they use Photosynthesis that converts sunlight and nutrients in the soil and water into Glucose for energy and growth.
Now - how does that even work? How does some random group of cells convert light rays into glucose? Why does glucose cause growth? Why can some things grow and others cannot, despite being made from the same materials? Why is the plant alive when the rock is dead?
Editor’s Notes: Maybe you know the answers to these questions, but I sure don’t.
We simply learn the ‘tip-of-the-iceberg’ definition for something and then claim to have ‘understood it’; this is encouraged by school for exams and standardised efficiency and its useful in some instances.
Editor’s Notes: ie. large amounts of students and content, need to get general sense of ‘performance’ and improve baseline education
However, this means that most of the time we are essentially lying to ourselves about how much we actually understand a concept.
Taimur said that most of his maths friends (‘smart’ ones - to use that semi-problematic term) have a much higher threshold before they claim that they have 'understood' something; simply by nature of their field, its more obvious to build up logically from step to step.
Editor’s Notes: You can’t ‘feign understanding’ in maths and hard sciences as much as in other fields (like humanities). There is much more of a concrete point at which an incomplete understanding would make you unable to correctly utilise or explain a concept.
You should not deceive yourself; but its so much easier to simply claim that 'I get this'. There is no external force to stop you from lying to yourself when you do it.
Richard Feynmann - “you mustn't fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Editor’s Notes: So much easier to subtly gloss over a concept with ‘I understand’, than to confront yourself truthfully and figure out what it really means. I am infinitely guilty of doing this, especially in highschool.
No external force to keep you accountable to the truth. Needs some kind of honesty and ‘Intellectual Integrity’, as they mention in the discussion.
Constructionism
exploration first - figure out how to do something through trial and error
Taimur's 'Darkroom Metaphor' - you get a much better understanding of a dark room if you stumble around in it, feeling things, taking your time to build your own Mental Model of the construction.
Editor’s Notes: Creates a much more robust understanding of the room compared to if you saw image of the room; your understanding - although requiring more work - is 3-Dimensional, tactile, spatial, etc. Mentioned below.
we construct a MENTAL SCAFFOLDING for the concept in our own minds intiutively.
If someone just gave us a picture, it'd be way faster to see whats in there (instructionism), but we won't have the same depth of 3D understanding. Probably won't recognise the room if shown from a different angle or picture. Don't know the dimensions or what each thing is.
Therefore, we should be doing Exploration THEN Theory - find yourself, then see what people have been saying about it.
Then you will have a basic intuitive understanding that you can start to build up from, in order to not fall victim to the 'clueless understanding' that most of us have from Instructionism.
Extra Notes: ‘The Renaissance Man’
learning by Apprenticeship and example, action and exploration.
Classical education was much more individualised and exploratory, ‘constructionistic’ and seeking truth or mastery.
Contemporary standardised curriculums have completely gone the other way to increase output and overall quantity of results. (Industrialisation and standardisation; training to provide an educated workforce)
Also, the ideal ‘Renaissance man’ would not lie to themselves on how well they actually understand something.
'Smart people aren't necessarily stronger in the 'hardware' aspect, but instead the software aspect - they aren't so quick to accept an unsatisfactory explanation before they think that they have understood something' They demand a real answer that satisfies their curiosity for the truth.
