Colin Turnbull says the soul is "that which opens the mind." Bob Samples calls science a ballet of the mind. To create children who are scientifically literate, we must give up the protection of the illusion of certainty and be open to risk and authenticity. Surprise is the birthplace of learning. Surprise is a disruption in one's belief system, or an admission of ignorance. A real question in education is, "How can we manage surprise so as to learn from it?"
There are access routes to multiple intelligences. Since children tend to act the way they are expected to act, they often substitute conformity for learning. How often they're exposed to learning experiences is key. Ambiguity is the heart of real learning, but our traditional educational system stresses exactness and specificity. We should allow children to be free to discover discrepant events. At the beginning of true learning, children go to the playful domain (right brain) when left to discover on their own; then they'll go over to left brain for validation, then back to the right, and so on. This is the map of learning - back and forth until so much order persists that playfulness is terminated and proposition yields to fact. We need to educate so as to keep this cycle churning.
How can we encourage creativity so children can imagine surprises? How can we help keep children open minded all the way through the educational experience so they won't simply reach conventional conclusions and can instead discover "surprise"?
It is important not to discount the personal experiences of each child. Children can call upon widespread experiences and vast knowledge.
A surprise with implications for education is that stroke victims can be helped by ignoring the disability and focusing instead on calling out qualities of information that were stored in other, non-injured parts of the brain. Samples believes that every part of the brain knows everything any other part of the brain knows, so we can teach people to distribute experience rather than to isolate it. When people believe they haven't lost their mental capacity, they recover faster. They tap into learning that existed before, and create access routes into different realms. This can be applied to children's learning too. In a way, stroke victims are analogous to disenfranchised children in schools.
A vital first thing to do is to construct experiences that will get students into nature. People are designed to learn in a variety of ways, and nature is a perfect source.
The authoritarian model of education seeks to create people who have a high capacity to reason and can control their unconscious. A reliance on Newtonian order says "this is the body of knowledge you must know." Authoritarians want to require everyone else to have same experience base as they did - a rational neurosis.
"Consciousness is what you pay attention to. If you want to change your consciousness, just pay attention to different things."
Learning is evolution
One model of learning styles is based on personal preference for these different qualities:
An evolutionary model of a value prejudice field:
We should get biological metaphors into the education system to balance the effect of over indulgence in Newtonian metaphors.