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Chapter 1: The Rhythm of Learning
- State University of New York Press
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Chapter One the rhythm of Learning I begin with an account of Whitehead’s three stages of education. My approach is not to provide a close reading of first one and then the other of the two relevant essays, first “The Rhythm of Education” and then “The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline.” Rather, I draw freely from them both in offering an interpretation of each stage sequentially: first Romance, next Precision, and finally Generalization. Brave new Worlds Whitehead argues that the first stage of learning should be that of Romance, in which students are encouraged to explore in as wide ranging and adventurous a way as possible the natural and cultural worlds in which they live. The mood is appreciative and inclusive. The stage of romance is one of “first apprehension” (“Rhythm” 17), says Whitehead. It is marked by our initial “awakening to the apprehension of objects” (19), to an awareness of the objects of immediate experience comprising the content of our world. As newborns, this world is narrow, composed of our aching hunger, an offered nipple, and softly cradling warmth. That inchoate world slowly expands as we grow, coming to include the noise of our own crying, flashes of movement, cold touches and smooth textures, smiles and hugs. Eventually it encompasses the sticks and stones, chairs and tables, cats and dogs, fathers and mothers of the everyday commonsense world. Romance is an occasion for delighting in this world immediately around us, savoring its flavors, basking in its sunlit embrace. Openness to the world as we find it is only a partial characterization of what apprehension involves, however. For Whitehead’s world is pro9 10 Modes of Learning foundly holistic, its individual objects internally related to each other. So romance is more than an awakening to things; it is also an awakening to an “appreciation of their connexions” (19). There is more to the familiar than meets the eye. The objects of our experience, we come to realize, have an “import”: they come redolent with “unexplored relationships” (18). What we apprehend “holds within itself unexplored connexions with possibilities half-disclosed by glimpses and half-concealed by the wealth of material” (17). For everything we encounter, there is a “more” it conceals , a terra incognita still to be disclosed, a world vivid with novelties, a world of such unbounded plenitude that nothing can be noticed without whatever is next to it catching our attention and evoking our response. Hence “interest is the sine qua non for attention and apprehension” (“Rhythmic Claims” 31), and so education at all levels should constantly root and reroot itself in the same fertile soil—the inherently interesting, wonderfully alluring thises and thats of the world around us. As an infant, I turn my head toward jingling noises and circling movements , cooing at their presence and crying when they stop. I reach out for an object myopically glimpsed and bring it to my mouth, taste what it’s like, and from the resulting sensation discover that it can be delightfully sweet or unexpectedly bitter, deliciously slippery or repulsively rough. At first, I don’t generalize: I experience this-here-now sweetness and then this-here-now bitterness. I suck the world in or spew it out, and remain as curious as ever about how it might taste when next I get it to my mouth. As I become a toddler and sense the permanence of objects, I look for the bird to whose morning song I have awakened, wondering when the sound stops where it has gone and why it is hiding from me. Perhaps if I fall back to sleep, when I reawaken it will have returned. Or perhaps it only sings when I have arranged my stuffed animals in a circle properly attentive to the magic of its melody. While playing alone in my backyard, an unturned stone becomes a mystery I must set about solving. Its smoothly rounded visible surface promises a smooth completion on the unseen portion of its circumference . But this promise comes with a titillating hint that the underside might have a different shape altogether and might even afford access to creepy-crawly worms or pale curled tubes of plants it has been holding prisoner. At least that’s what a stone’s underside disgorged the last time I turned one over, even though, come to think of it, that wasn’t so for the stone before that one. And thereby is kindled the mystery of the stone I now...