The Creation of Knowledge Vs. The Learning of Knowledge
A related issue concerns the traits that enable the creation of biologically secondary knowledge and thus culture and the extent to which these traits overlap with the ability to learn knowledge created by others.
Stated differently, Is the goal of education to have children recreate the process of discovery, to learn the products of discovery, or some combination? Some educators have advocated a focus on the process of discovery without full consideration of the constellation of traits and opportunity that contribute to the creation of secondary knowledge (e.g., Cobb, Yackel, & Wood, 1992). In fact, research on creative-productive individuals suggests that the full constellation of traits that facilitate the discovery and creation of secondary knowledge is rare and not likely reproducible on a large scale (Simonton, 1999a, 1999b, 2003; Sternberg, 1999; Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2005).
Read more about this topic: Evolutionary Educational Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words creation, knowledge and/or learning:
“Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist’s work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation. Art is the laboratory for making new men.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so;
Yet strive so, that before age, death’s twilight,
Thy Soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will, implies delay, therefore now do:
Hard deeds, the body’s pains; hard knowledge too
The mind’s endeavours reach, and mysteries
Are like the Sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)