The Difficulty with Learned Notions

When we talk about wilful ignorance, an individual chooses to remain ignorant on account of his beliefs or prejudices. This type of ignorance poses challenges of alarming proportions to the teacher. It would help to deal with this challenge by determining exactly those deterring beliefs in question that act as catalysts to a change in direction. Wilful ignorance in adults is more often encountered as they carry a baggage of experiences complicated enough to demean any attempt at progression in the learning curve. It is not uncommon to hear someone say for instance, “my education began after my graduation”. Bertrand Russell said, “Men are not born stupid. They are born ignorant. They become stupid by education”. After I quoted this view of Russell to an entrepreneur friend, he replied, “I am glad I escaped education.” Speaking of wilful ignorance where beliefs come in the way of learning, it is worth considering a joke about Sir Isaac Newton after he discovered why apples fell from trees. He went to the Church and shared with them what he had discovered to which the clergy replied, “Go and find out why oranges fall.”          

In children wilful ignorance can be present but it is usually on account of lack of interest. This lack of interest is in reality more of apathy towards the written text. The teacher cannot expect that a child must show interest as the written text does not appear to have either tangible value or entertainment value. The teacher cannot associate a child’s intelligence with responsiveness to the written text at large. One must understand therefore the nature of ‘appearance’ not so much from a philosophical point of view but more so from a cognitive perspective. Any philosophical understanding of ‘appearance’ is at best subjective as the pursuit of unravelling the mystery of perception is even to this day the holy grail of Physicists. Although many conjectures have arrived at demystifying ‘perception’ the phenomena of ‘appearance’ has not earned any unanimous understanding that can be said to be devoid of tentativeness. David Bohm, the physicist spoke about perception and clearly explained why understanding it in its absolute sense is a mirage of sorts. In education, appearance is a matter of cognition. Its root cause is a feather of subjective mystery. Even if we are not taken away from the real world to the wonderland of appearances’ secret origins we undoubtedly can view the responses to appearances as they affect a learner’s sense perception. We can understand how a certain response is elicited by appearances. The written text may not elicit the kind of response that a toy does because the former is seldom associated with fun. It is divorced from the notion that you can play with text as you can with a toy.  The formal teacher does not allow this and the seed of stereotypes toward learning and text are sown during these early years of development.     

Distraction has little to do with wilful ignorance. Most of what one calls distraction is the result of the diversion of energy from the focal point which is from the instructor to different stimuli that is usually more intense. If the stimulus, extraneous to the instruction, is more intense than the instruction per se, the learner tends to get distracted. This distraction as you can see is perceived to be lack of focus but in reality it is the instructor who needs to ensure that the environment is insulated from unwanted stimuli. If that is on the whole not completely possible than his instruction can do with overriding intensity where any extraneous stimuli such as noise or background visuals go pallid in comparison. 

Let us say that the instructor in a classroom tries to throw light on the nature of chemical compounds. The learner is expected to pay attention to what is being said. If the learner finds it difficult to hold attention to what the instructor is trying to explain than it means that the learner is playing a passive role. Suddenly there are two students distributing advertisements outside and they talk to each other aloud. The learner gets distracted by this unwanted stimulus and loses focus in the process. What has happened here? The learner is perceived to have got distracted. Why did this happen? The learner played a passive role in the instruction process and the instruction was difficult to accommodate. The intensity of instruction was negligible compared to that of the sudden extraneous stimuli and therefore heads turn around.