Learning From The Inside Out
John L. Waters
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Learning From The Inside Out
John L. Waters
May 10, 2001
Copyright 2001 by John L. Waters. All Rights
Reserved
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Submission 2
May 10, 2001
Learning From The Inside Out
While talking, Kim moves her arms and hands.
While listening to music, she moves her arms and
hands. Sometimes the girl takes a pen and draws
graceful figures as the music is playing. Kim is only
three years old. Body movement helps Kim talk, think,
and express herself. Moreover, when she goes to the
beach with her family, Kim enjoys the roar of the surf
and the warm sand under her bare feet. She runs on
the sand, playfully making orbits around her older
brother. Moreover, rather like the track of the Earth
around the Sun, and the track of the sun around the
galactic center, the track of this little girl
contains an immense amount of information. The thesis
of this paper is that spontaneous body movement
augments other kinds of intelligence.
A similar upper-body kinesthetic art can be
produced as children sit at their desks and draw and
write freely without fear. This spontaneous art is
the record of one or more drawing instruments held in
the hand or hands of a child as the little person lets
his or her arms and hands move without thinking and
without fear of being reprimanded for acting stupid or
silly. What is tapped is the often-hidden inner mind
of the child, which has been called the subconscious
mind or the unconscious mind. We'll call this method
of accessing the hidden intelligence "learning from
the inside out."
Learning from the inside out should be
considered as a complement to the traditional methods
of learning. This intuitive art is already being used
when a person improvises at the piano or wanders about
in the garden when baffled by some difficult problem.
However, as a person remains seated while drawing
spontaneously, the inside-out learning process remains
active in the dominant hand which does the writing
associated with thinking. Shoulder, arm, hand, and
brain work together to help the student remember or
intuit the answer.
Effective as this method may sound, today's
school children aren't encouraged to produce
spontaneous drawing movements. In fact, in
contemporary elementary schools the children are
graded on how quickly and how accurately they copy
letters, numerals, and other models presented by the
teacher. To be praised and to obtain a high grade,
the children actually concentrate on disciplining
their brains to move their hands so that what appears
on the paper looks like what the teacher has drawn or
written on the blackboard. For example, if the
teacher has drawn a facsimile of an apple, the good
young copyist produces a drawing which suggests an
apple, not a bicycle, a tugboat or a baseball cap.
Moreover, on the same day, in language studies, the
same child will be required to produce facsimiles of
the letters A, B, and C, and the numerals 1, 2, and 3.
Soon after all this class work, during
physical education class, all the children will be led
outside, and they will play a game whose strict rules
have to be memorized. Some of the children will learn
the rules quickly, and these children will be praised.
But other children will be ridiculed because they
can't learn the rules or follow them easily or well.
At other times during the school day, back
in class it is the same. Some children will be slow
at copying the alphanumeric forms. Humiliation and
intimidation is the rule. Moreover, the art of being
intelligent in the creative sense isn't being taught
daily to these children. As a matter of fact, this
art is being suppressed daily by the school's constant
emphasis on learning more and more set patterns which
must be followed every day. Furthermore, each and
every day at school the same physical and mental
confinement is emphasized for hours at a time. Many a
joy is denied. Many a talent is stifled. Many young
children really feel intimidated at school.
Because of the old conventional pedagogy,
after I've been invited to give a presentation and I
stand in front of a high school or college class, the
students regard me with consternation. Even if they
say nothing, they keep asking themselves: "What IS
this man doing? What is he trying to SHOW?" The art
I produce helps me demonstrate the method which is
complementary to the traditional method of learning in
which the good students quickly reproduce images they
see or hear. In my lectures and demonstrations, I
show how spontaneous drawing movements can help in
solving difficult problems.
Consider how spontaneous drawing might help
you sove a problem that is difficult for you. For
example, suppose you're trying to remember the
quadratic formula. Let this uninhibited drawing
movement take your attention away from straining your
brain. Take some scratch paper and a ball point pen
and draw something without any idea of what you are
going to draw. For the purposes of this thought
experiment, imagine that you happen to draw something
which suggests a rocket ship to you. You ask
yourself, "What has a rocket ship to do with second
degree algebraic equations." The answer is not a
great deal, and that's the point. You're taking a
little excursion away from worry and frustration, like
the mathematical genius Henri Poincare did when he
went on a bus ride and discovered an important
mathematical idea.
Henri Poincare's excursion helped him relax
his mind and help it work better. Many books on
creativity feature this example. You might not be a
mathematical genius, but the same brain-relaxation
technique Poincare used is being made available to you
now. Furthermore, you have the advantage over
Poincare. Back in the times he was living in, the
educators didn't understand or teach this cognitive
aid.
Realistically, educators know that young
children who let their bodies move without thinking
about what they are doing are likely to bump into hard
objects and be injured. Furthermore, in spontaneous,
careless play, youngsters are likely to hurt someone
else or break something. Therefore, the first lesson
in learning from the inside out is that you do it in a
"free space" which is free of potentially injurious
objects. Your scratch paper on which you are drawing
is a free space. You can't hurt anything by just
relaxing and letting your pen hand move freely.
The idea is to encourage a person's
unconscious thoughts and feelings be expressed, so
that the individual knows these exist and so that he
or she knows more what his or her inner joys and
talents are. The liberated person will feel more free
and move more gracefully. In this state of relaxation
and inspiration a human being will find and express
his or her special joy and hidden talent.
Spontaneous drawing movements helps a person
discover, develop, and demonstrate a suppressed
talent. However, you may be negative and say
emphatically, "Well I just KNOW that I'm not really
talented." But the truth is, you've not yet tried the
experiment. You're jumping to conclusions without
being scientific about yourself. Furthermore, you
might be cheating yourself.
One way for the scientific community to test
this art method of learning from the inside out is to
study a population of 100 identical twins over a three
year period. In each twin pair, one twin will be
helped to master the method and the other twin won't.
The expectation is that each twin who is exposed to
this method will discover, develop, and demonstrate
some special joy, skill, and talent that the other
twin doesn't discover during this time period. Being
genetically the same, this will suggest that the
aptitude was present in each twin, but the
conventional way of teaching blocked the talent.
Since the twins live together, however, the
anticipated result is that the twin who uses this art
daily will assume a leadership role and show his or
her sibling a special talent they both share.
Learning from the inside out should be
considered a complement to the traditional methods of
learning. This intuitive, kinesthetic art can be
taught to a child by encouraging the young person to
improvise at the piano or some other musical
instrument. Furthermore, a child can be encouraged to
draw or write without having any preconceived idea or
plan in mind. Yet another way to help a child learn
this intuitive art is to encourage him or her to care
for a pet animal and play with the beloved creature
several times a day. Although a naive adult might
consider this to be a waste of time, the foregoing
arguments suggest that spontaneous play with a tame
animal can lead to a substantial improvement in a
child's cognitive ability.
John L. Waters
johnlwaters@yahoo.com
The information on this page represents that of John Waters and not
necessarily that of Humboldt State University. John Waters takes full
responsibility for the information presented.
This page is maintained by: John Waters