Differences in Mechanisms of Learning between Indian & Western systems
This is a really interesting article about mechanisms of learning in Indian (and eastern) systems and western systems and the inherent differences. It also explains, at a very base level some aspects of our two cultures & societies.
Very interesting (albeit a bit heavy and scholarly) read as it is especially relevant to our children who are/will be undergoing these experiences.
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A mode of teaching, I said before, forms the way one learns. Stories are paradigmatic examples of our methods of teaching. Therefore, the form our learning actions exhibit is one of mimesis. This suggestion generates some surprising, non-trivial implications. Here are a few of them:
1. If mimetic learning is to succeed, meta-reflections about both what one is learning and how one is learning have to be avoided. In the best of cases, one realizes that one has learned, and that too only long after the learning process is completed. Such meta-reflections can only be avoided, if mimetic learning is the dominant learning scheme in a culture.
Consider what could happen otherwise, i.e., if there were many different learning schemes of equal importance or where, for example, mimetic learning is subordinated to other kinds of learning. The learning subject must have information present somewhere in his system which tells him whether a particular way of learning is appropriate in the given situation. Decision requires to be made both about what one wants to learn, and how one learns. One is forced, as it were, to be reflexive.
Perhaps, an example would prove instructive. Consider the way reading is taught in our cultures. In terms of efficacy, there is little to be said in favour of the superiority of �Western� methods as against �our� methods. Theoretically, the situation is equally bleak: existing pedagogic methods are through and through suspect with respect to psychological theories. In the most used teaching-to-read methods, the pedagogy of reading in the West rests upon what is called �structural analysis�. This involves an analysis of the structure of the words, i.e., an analysis of speech structure and word structure, both graphemically and phonemically. That is, one speaks out a word loud and one is taught to break it up into its constituent phonemes, which are then mapped to graphemes. Previously, a child used the word �cat� and made itself understood. There was nothing mysterious or puzzling about the word; it never occurred to the child that it ought to reflect about that or any other word. As it reaches appropriate levels at school, it is taught that �cat� is not the same thing as cat; the former is a word composed of phonemes k/a/th and that they correspond to the graphemes c/a/t; and that the word itself refers to the concept of the animal so named which, in turn, picks out an animal, etc. This process is deemed crucial to recognizing novel words.
For our purposes, the point of this example is the following: the way one is taught to read in the Western culture forces a child to think about what it is saying, how it is segmented phonemically, i.e., it is forced to become conscious of what it is doing, and to do consciously what it was doing all along without being aware that it was doing it. In the most used Western teaching-to-read methods, learning to read entails acquiring meta-level knowledge about the knowledge the child already had, viz., of its native language. In other words, it is taught to reflect consciously about its very learning itself. This is not limited to the pedagogy of reading alone.
2. The previous point helps generate the following hypothesis: socializing children by means of stories stands in some direct relation to the growth of reflexive selves. If it is the case that selves are reflexive in Europe, stories can only have entertainment value. The greater the degree a culture encourages the growth of reflexive selves, the less are also its stock of stories (legends, myths, �fairy� tales, etc.) A culture which stimulates reflexivity in its members cannot sustain stories as models.
3. There is another, albeit related, point to the previous hypothesis. In a culture where �selves� are not reflexive at all or are only partially so, but one whose ideal (or �self-image�) is governed by that of reflexivity, stories continue to be important but in a transmuted form. They continue to depict events and situations, but are powerless to teach. That is, they retain their instructional nature without being able to instruct. There is such a genre in Western culture: utopian thought. They are instructional in nature without really instructing. (That is exactly what the moral imperatives, the �oughts�, are.) They depict events and situations which are not �real�, i.e., not the �is�, but outside of it, viz., in utopia. They depict �non-real� situations and events with the explicit claim of doing so. Because of this, they can continue to exist only if they entertain and that depends on the �aesthetic� taste of the population at any given moment. The modern day utopian thought is known well enough to all of us to recognize it as so without doubt: science fiction.
4. If we learn to be moral beings through mimesis, it means that moral and ethical actions must be susceptible to being mimed. Contrast this stance with that of the West: a moral individual (an ideal priest or, say, Jesus Christ) is inimitable in principle. That is, a moral individual is actually a message, which does not say �be like me�, but one which proclaims �hope� for the humankind, brings �glad tidings� so to speak. And the �hope� is that the presence of such an inimitable, exceptional individual will �save� humankind. If one is �righteous�, it is not only because that is the way to one�s �salvation�, but more importantly, because the salvation of humankind depends upon the �righteous� being present amongst them. One is �moral� so that other �sinners� may be delivered from their �sins�. Such figures cannot influence daily life positively, but do so negatively viz., as examples of what we ordinary mortals, cannot be. They are, literally, the embodiments of �ought� and, as such, outside the �is� (Not every human being can be an ideal priest or even, as the examples tell us, ought to be one.)
In Asia, such an �ought� is no moral example at all. A moral action must be capable of emulation in daily life and only as such can someone be an �example�. Moral actions are actions that a son, a father, a friend, a teacher, a wife, etc., can perform as a son, a father, a friend, a teacher, a wife, etc. Either moral actions are realizable in this world, and in circumstances we find ourselves in our daily lives or they are not moral actions at all. Therefore, those real or fictitious individuals whose actions we mime and who are, consequently, construed as �exemplary� individuals cannot find themselves �outside� our world, but in situations analogous to our own. (Such a view is consistent with our models of �self�, for obvious reasons.)
5. This suggests that the role of moral authorities in these two cultures is different. In the West, the moral authorities are rigid principles without mercy or forgiveness. All talk of autonomy notwithstanding, moral �decisions� are totally heteronymous. One has to reflect not only about the principle one has to apply, but also judge whether one has correctly applied it. As a consequence, moral domain becomes one of judgement. The objects of judgement are and can only be conceptual ones, viz., theories. To say that some action is moral is to say whether or not the description of that action satisfies some or other moral principle. We have noticed this already. Moral life gets impoverished by being reduced to a principle (e.g. utilitarianism) or by being at the mercy of another�s �judgement� (e.g., that of a priest).
In Asia, by contrast, the immediate physically recognizable authority figures (parents, teachers, elders) are also figures of moral authority. Mimesis in moral action requires figures recognized as moral authorities. Consequently, in a culture dominated by mimetic learning, not only do such authorities play an important role in regulating moral conduct, but are also so recognized. That is why, I suggest, parents, teachers, elders, ancestors have such a privileged position in our culture. They are not only familial or socially recognized authorities, but are individually recognized moral authorities also.
6. If socialization involves mimesis, and families are the primary units of socializing a human infant, the success of the socialization process depends very much on what the family exactly models. That is, an individual can be taught to �live with others� if and only if, the family stands for, or represents the significant details of the social environment. The family, in its important details, must be continuous with the moral community at large. And, I submit, it does.
Not only this. In a peculiar way, this sheds some light upon the �sternness�, or �harshness� considered typical of both family life and teaching situations in Asia. One is being prepared for life, when one is brought up as an offspring and a pupil. Between them, the parents and the teachers must prepare the child to act morally when it goes �out� as an adult to meet the world at large. That can only be done if the child faces a wide variety of situations during its growing-up process, and sees the ways in which �others� are going to construe its actions. Parents and teachers must, in the full sense of the term, stand for and represent the rest of the community. To allow parental love and indulgence to �interfere� in this process is to fail in discharging the moral obligation that one has assumed towards one�s off-spring, viz., that of socializing the child. Consequently, one�s family is also one�s sternest and harshest critic. If one passes this test, the belief is that one can pass any other test. Hence the descriptions of an ideal father or teacher: �harder than the diamond, softer than a flower�.
The contrast between family as a ��moral arena� as Asian culture sees it, and family as a �Haven in a heartless world�, as Lasch titles his book on family, cannot be sharper. In Western families, one is to experience love, one learns to be oneself. One becomes one�s true self, and learns to let the others be. The socializing or educative role of the family is secondary, it is derivative. Its primary task is to �protect� the child from the �cruel world out there�. If it prepares the child to face up to the cold and indifferent world, it does so by providing that �love and understanding� which gives the child the courage to �go and get� what it wants. It is taught to be �itself� in all circumstances. Family is one�s only oasis in the desert of social life.
In one case, family is the moral community; in the other, it is different from and other than the social world. Mimetic learning sheds light on the how and why of the former, partial and incomplete though it is as an explanation.
7. One other aspect of moral authorities is worthy of mention. Learning by mimesis, as supported by our model of �self��, involves that the moral action of others can shame you into performing a moral action yourself, i.e., the actions that others perform/have performed can guide and instruct you in the course of your life.
Contrast this with the attitude in the West. Not only are moral individuals inimitable, but they also �ought not to be� imitated for yet another reason. Because one�s action expresses one�s self (in whatever form), and to �be one�s self� is the guiding value of a life, the actions of such moral individuals are seen as expressions of the �moral selves� of those individuals. In such a case, a specific moral action ceases to have an instructional or pedagogic significance: it is only a psychological curiosity, i.e., it can tell you something about the kind of person that someone is.
While in one culture, a moral action could be seen as raising the question �how is that an instruction for my actions?� In another culture, it raises the question �what kind of a person must he be to do what I would not?� To get a flavour of this difference between our two cultures, I would suggest to those of you who have seen the film �Gandhi�, and in a position to talk to someone from the West who has also seen the film to do so. You would be surprised at what you can learn from such a �coffee-shop� talk. Consider, in this regard, what Einstein said of Gandhi�
8. By its very nature, Mimesis is a reproduction of existing actions, i.e., it essentially conserves. A culture dominated by mimetic learning must, perforce, exhibit a very strong pull towards conservatism. Our cultures are essentially conservative. Tradition, the past, etc., must weigh heavily on all those who are members of such cultures. And, I submit, it does so in our case.
9. The other side of the same phenomenon is what happens when our cultures meet with those of the West. There is a partial exchange of authorities, not their total disappearance. The tendency is towards an imitation of these, new, authorities. We could look at the �Westernization� of our youth or at the fact that the Japanese have earned the label, often used pejoratively, of being �very good imitators�. We imitate the West not because there is some �iron law of capitalism� which compels us, willy-nilly, to be like them but because that is our way of learning. This might shed some light upon why one Indian community survived by adapting itself to the West, whereas another got exterminated by failing to do so.
10. Despite a considerable technological development in Asia much, much earlier, scientific theorizing (as we know of it today) emerged within the Western culture. A hypothesis that can be generated to throw some light on this phenomenon is this: mimetic learning is restricted to performing actions that are perceived as being performed by others. Novel or new actions result primarily by performing a familiar action in novel circumstances and secondarily by transposing actions performed in one domain to another. While mimetic learning is transposable, it remains essentially limited in scope. It is a �scheme� of �social learning�, if you like. It is relatively inflexible in the sense that it cannot be transposed to learning about the �Natural world�, unless in the form of modelling �natural events� in human artefacts. But this does not suffice for scientific theorizing. Crudely put, there is a kind of rigidity or inflexibility to our learning which is, to some extent, due to the lack of reflexivity in our learning.
There is something more that requires to he said in this regard. As I am not very clear about it myself, I will merely mention it in the passing. Consider this question: what notion of knowledge should we have, if we would want to consider mimesis as learning? Or, what notion of knowledge do we have, if we learn by mimesis?
It cannot be analogous to the interrogative, questioning, probing processes, which are seen as being characteristic to scientific theorizing. One cannot put constraints on Nature, and force it, as Kant put it, to answer our questions. There can be no mimesis in such circumstances. So, if this is not the notion of knowledge that we have, what else could it possibly be? My answer will be very vague, because that is all that comes to my mind. Mimetic learning involves being ready and alert to identify learning situations; such situations do not come with labels attached to their sleeves. Some situation, any situation, can be a learning situation; someone, anyone, can teach you; some action, any action, can be exemplary. Whether or not you learn from such situations, persons and actions depends upon you construing them thus. No person, for instance, performs an action with the sole intention of teaching you; he is performing the obligations he has assumed. Even where his obligation is to teach you, you can but learn if you construe it as a learning situation.
In a world, then, where fleeting actions and events can teach, and where �teachers� do not come with professorial chairs, there your readiness to learn is crucial, if you are to learn at all. It means that you have to be alert lest a teacher or an action passes you by, and open so that you may �see� what is being taught. Because, literally, anyone or any action may teach you, you will have to be fundamentally open to all situations and actions.
Cognitive attitude, thus, appears to involve these dimensions of readiness, alertness and openness to being taught. Though these dimensions and the construing activity are active, they are also �peculiarly passive�. For, consider: if learning is sub-intentional, what is taught depends on that which you construe as being taught, and your construal itself is a function of the dimensions involved in cognitive attitude, then the cognitive attitude itself can only be characterized, if we say that it involves �readiness, open-ness and alertness to�� You cannot fill the blank with a constant, but can do so with a variable or with �all events, all actions, and all persons at all times�. Equally, you may as well leave it open. We do have a word, which captures such an open-ended attitude: receptivity.
Though this word does capture the �passive dimension� involved in such an open-ended cognitive attitude, it does so by stripping it of all its active dimensions. It must be clear from the foregoing that our cognitive attitude is not, cannot be, totally or even fundamentally passive. That is why I said that it is �peculiarly passive�. We could put it this way: cognitive attitude appears to involve openness and readiness to, God I hate this word, being revealed to. Consequently, knowledge seems to require some kind of an action, which happens to you as you go about in the world.
If it sounds mystical, that is because it has something to do with mysticism. But, not quite the way it may appear at first sight. It could be the case, I will come back to this point last, that mimetic learning involves the using of the right-hemisphere of the brain (for right-handed people), which is also the seat of mystical experience.
Be it as this may, one will have to return to explicate the conception of knowledge implicit in our cultures. Though vital and crucial, it will have to wait, perhaps, for that time when there is greater clarity all around.
11. What does it mean to grow up an Asian then? Application of mimetic learning scheme, if it can be called that at all, requires that one develops the ability to discriminate finely. One has to sort out, so to speak, situations and actions in such a way that one is able to distinguish between emulable-in-this-situation from the emulable-in-that-situation. Not all aspects of an event and action is, can or should be emulated. In other words, we grow up to be members of our culture by acquiring finely tuned set of discriminating criteria.
How do we acquire these criteria? Again, the answer cannot be other than to say, by mimesis. It is, if I may nest operations, mimetic schemes within mimetic schemes. Some of the patterns are preserved in our cultures by the multiplicity of cultural institutions: son, friend, pupil, father, wife�etc. As we slowly grow into maturity, we become some of these, and we learn to become these by taking as models those who went before us, those who are our contemporaries and so on. As these institutions overlap, so do our schemes, meshing and intermeshing with each other, generating and sustaining a culture, which none understand but all admit to being a gestalt of �unformalizable and refined codes of conduct, rituals, ceremonies, etc.�
Events and actions must loose their clarity and simplicity, when multiple and often incompatible models are said to model the same situation. They must become complex and essentially ambiguous. Indeed, I claim, they do. One expression of this situation is the extra-ordinary productivity of our culture with respect to �religions�.
12. Speaking of religions brings me to the last observation that I want to make. Again, it is a hypothesis generated by the preceding points. One of the characteristics of Western culture is the kind of importance it attaches to language. It is believed that everything is knowable, and what is knowable is also sayable, even though various thinkers like Kant, Hayek, etc., have warned against such a presumption. We need not choose sides on this debate for now. But to the extent this is believed, the education of people involves placing a very heavy emphasis on expressing things in language.
We know that human brain consists of two symmetrical hemispheres. Each of these appears to specialize in some kinds of tasks: the left-hemisphere of the right-handed people (or the right-hemisphere for the left-handed), for example, contains the speech area. Linguistic, logical and mathematical abilities or, in short, linguistic and analytical skills are more or less localized in one of the two hemispheres (I shall speak only of the right-handed people from now on and, hence, of the left-hemisphere alone, when I talk of the seat for linguistic, etc., skills.). Because �intelligence� refers basically to the development of linguistic and analytical skills, a culture which places great importance on �developing intelligence� has to emphasize such activities as its educational focus. It is also the case that one of the supreme ideals of Western culture is that of �rationality� (Of course we are all for �rationality�; who would want to be irrational in this day and age, except the irrational?) An action or a decision is rational insofar as it instances some or another rational principle. To be �rational�, to be �moral�, etc., is to act and judge according to some or other principle.
In such a culture, the left-hemisphere must be called into play more often than the right-hemisphere of the brain. The right-hemisphere, for its part, is the seat of emotions and passions, intuition and creativity, etc. In a culture where the ideal is the subordination of passion to reason (people like Hume notwithstanding), there the ideal is the subordination of the right to left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere is, of course, not �stupid�, i.e., it is not just a boiling sea of �animal passions�. It simply does not have the linguistic ability, speaking figuratively, to �express itself�.
It appears reasonable to hypothesize that education in our cultures trains us to call the right-hemisphere into play more often than is the case in the West. Consider, for example, the realm of moral education. If stories and not the �principles� are the how of our moral actions, �understanding� such stories cannot take place without calling in the right-hemisphere of the brain. It must be said at once that �understanding� is not being used here in the sense of being able to answer questions about the stories, after being told one. Many people in the field of Artificial Intelligence are busy writing programs, which, it is claimed, display such ability. Rather, it is being used in the sense of taking it as an instruction for action. (It could be said that this is not an insurmountable problem, but I will come to it soon.) The stories, as I said, depict events and situations from life-situations, or consequences of actions performed by identifiable figures. As stories, they have to be appealing, and possess a definite order and structure. The order cannot be felt, and the appeal would be lost in the absence of the right-hemisphere, even if the left-hemisphere has to be called in to say exactly what the order or even the appeal consists of.
Perhaps it is the case that in the early years of childhood, the infant primarily uses the right-hemisphere of the brain to learn even while its left-hemisphere is being stimulated. That could be the reason why they are open to all situations, while displaying precisely the kind of cognitive attitude that I spoke of earlier. As any number of studies have shown us, the openness and creativity the children normally display fall very sharply within two years of beginning to attend school. The estimates go so high, psychologists speak of a drop of over 98% in the creative capacity of children within the first two years of their schooling, that it seems reasonable to assume that the dominance of the left-hemisphere of the brain over the right leads not merely to development of some skills (in this case, the development of linguistic and analytical skills), but, more importantly, to a different way of learning altogether.
An extreme example might help us appreciate the point better: it is not impossible to think of a computer making moral decisions. That is, it is not impossible to write a computer program which embodies some ethical theory or another, and contains instructions about how actions and events should be analyzed. It would be a mammoth job, and it is also true that one does not know today how such a program would look. But should it be possible to do so, the decision arrived at by the running of such a program on a computer would represent the pinnacle of what would be considered a moral decision. That is so, because moral decisions are the results of possessing an adequate moral theory.
There is no way we could represent our notion of morality in a computer program, unless it be in the form of some complex induction rules. But we are not inducing any rule whatsoever from the stories which depict moral actions or moral orders. We are not reasoning the way it requires to be represented, if written as a program: �A did X in situation Z; my situation is analogous in some relevant details; therefore, provisionally, I ought to do X as well.�. We could not be doing any such thing, if we learn through mimesis. You could, of course, represent our ways of being moral as thought it was an application of an inductive rule or even a set of them. This will tell you what your notion of the moral is, but not what we do when we act morally. (This is one of the reasons why, I believe, our notions of being moral differs both from situational ethics and from casuistry.).
This is not a pro or contra argument regarding whether computers �feel� or �think�. It is simply to say that the Western concept of the moral can be simulated on a computer whereas our ideas of the moral cannot, unless as a �weaker version� of its Western counterpart. It may turn out that I am wrong; until such time, I will believe that moral actions in our cultures cannot be divorced from the personal, experiential dimension whereas the Western notions can.
Whether this satisfies you or not, I believe that the point I want to make is clear: In the West, one is moral purely on conceptual grounds. On these grounds alone, can one not be moral in Asia, without the affective and the emotional being somehow involved.
There is a second, bolder, hypothesis to be made which I have already hinted at. Mimetic learning involves using the right hemisphere of the brain. There is some plausibility to this hypothesis as well. As I said before, to say or analyze what one is doing when one is miming is not to be able to mime at all. This �saying� or �analyzing� involves the left-hemisphere of the brain, which is where these skills are localized. Once such a process is initiated, the left-hemisphere assumes dominance. Consequently, the latter becomes more �passive� with the failure to imitate as a result. In this connection, think of the studies about the fall in the creativity of young children when they start attending school. It is in contact with an environment, which places such a premium on developing linguistic and analytical skills that children cease being creative. Creativity, we know, is the capacity of the right-hemisphere.
Now, whether one can localize mimetic learning in the right-hemisphere or whether using stories as models requires using both hemispheres, at least this minimal hypothesis can be reasonably accepted: learning processes in Asian culture involve calling the right hemisphere into play more often than is the case in the West. But, it requires to be said in order to prevent misunderstandings from arising, that does not imply that Asians are not �logical or analytical� or that Europeans do not �feel�. We have an extensive history of logical and linguistic analyses, and no one is suggesting that Europeans are born without right-hemispheres, much less that they do not use it. I hope this is clear!
Should this minimal hypothesis be true, it sheds light on another phenomenon characterized as typical of our culture, viz., the phenomenon of mysticism. The seat of mystical experience is the right-hemisphere of the brain. Our culture �trains� its members in the use of this hemisphere more often and more regularly than the West. Consider one of the unintended side-effects of this �training�: over a period of time, a statistically significant number of people will begin to report to having had the kind of experience we term as being �mystical�. This phenomenon will have to show some kind of regularity, i.e., it must happen regularly, over some significant period of time to some of the members of the group. While isolated reports, which come in now and then, can be discounted as being insignificant, it is not possible to do so when the same, or very similar report becomes something of a regular feature in a society. However it may get �explained�, the explanation cannot by-pass the phenomenon. It is experienced as something that always seems to occur, i.e., as something that seems to be a significant experience in its own right, a legitimate or even a very natural experience, which is culturally relevant to the community itself. I put to you that the acceptance of such experiences is preserved in our culture by making the mystical experience the very core of our religions.
By the same token, contrary must be the case in a culture like that of the West. And that is indeed so: �mysticism� has always been at logger-heads with the established religions. To be sure, this does not explain much. But, it does appear to shed some light on what requires to be explained.
This situation, if remotely true, would explicate the two differing notions of wisdom in our two cultures. In one, wisdom (sophia) is primarily theoretical in nature. In the other, wisdom is primarily practical in nature. In both, they are standards of excellence: someone who knows the truth is the wise one in one culture: in the other, it is someone who performs exactly the right action in the right circumstances. True, neither of these ideals is the exclusive property of either. But it does not take away, I trust, the point about the ideals of human existence as they differ between these two cultures.
I found this article posted on the following forum: http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index.php?/topic/49-indian-perception-of-history/
