"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
"When he moved from Germany to Switzerland at the age of sixteen, Einstein spent a year at a school that emphasized independent thought, free action and personal responsibility. He thrived in a learning environment without rote drills, memorization and force-fed facts.
Based on the philosophy of a Swiss educator named Pestalozzi, the school helped students move through a series of steps from hands-on observations to intuition, conceptualization, imagination and visual imagery.
“Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly,” wrote Pestaslozzi, and “the learning of numbers and language must be definitely subordinated"
...It was at this school that Einstein, age sixteen, started picturing what it would be like to ride along a beam of light.”
One problem is not everyone has imagination--just like there are some photo-memory people there are those with no capability of 'picturing' anything in their mind.
Another is that people's mental imagery is probably very different, how can you teach it directly? If the school is good at getting people to discover that mental imagery on their own it will probably work out, but it's hard to teach it to someone who doesn't share it. (I'd love to see some other psychology studies on this, I think I first ran across the view from a Feynman video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y&feature=BFa&#... )
We all played with building blocks, no? Frank Lloyd Wright credited Froebel Gifts, a type of building block, as being instrumental in his early development "For several years I sat at the little Kindergarten table-top... and played... with the cube, the sphere and the triangle—these smooth wooden maple blocks... All are in my fingers to this day..."
Anyway, here is a study summary that may be of interest.
"Building Blocks is a NSF-funded PreK to grade 2 software-based mathematics curriculum
development project, designed to comprehensively address the most recent mathematics standards. Building
Blocks materials were created upon explicit design principles and a nine-phase formative model—they are
truly research-based (details are provided in Clements, 2002a; Clements, 2002b; Sarama & Clements, in
press)... The materials are designed to help children extend and mathematize their everyday activities, from building blocks to art to songs and stories to puzzles...
...The results are illustrated in two graphs. We computed effect sizes using the accepted benchmarks of
.25 as indicating practical significance (i.e., educationally meaningful), .5 as indicating moderate strength,
and .8 as indicating a large effect (Cohen, 1977). The effect sizes comparing BB children’s posttest to the
control children’s posttest were .85 and 1.44 for number and geometry, respectively, and the effect sizes
comparing BB children’s posttest to their pretest (measuring achievement gains) were 1.71 and 2.12.
Therefore, all effects were positive and large. Achievement gains were comparable to the coveted “2-sigma”
effect of excellent individual tutoring"
> We all played with building blocks, no? Frank Lloyd Wright credited Froebel Gifts, a type of building block, as being instrumental in his early development
We've all played with building blocks, but few of us are Frank Lloyd Wright. Of course, the difference here is that he played with them for several years whereas I'm told I played with them but can form no crisp memories of such an event. (I don't have many crisp memories from that age and I'm cautious of vague memories without additional witnesses just being made-up.) I don't imagine I would have enjoyed being forced to play with them up through 6th grade, nor have been more Frankish, so I'm finding it hard to believe him that it was the blocks themselves that made Frank different. (Though after a little reflection, I do remember extensions to building blocks through maybe 6th grade, such as the rubber band pegs, various polygon plastic 'biscuits'[1], plastic-log-cabin-building cylinders, and connectible cubes. As well as 2D jigsaw puzzles at home and we had a couple neat 3D puzzles in 6th grade. I never liked Lego but I like Minecraft.)
[1]Actually, apparently these things are the 2D "building blocks" referenced in the study whereas Frank seems to be talking about the 3D "building blocks" that are actually big and blocky.
Not everyone has imagination? Bullshit. You could argue, perhaps, that not everyone has strong imagination, but everyone certainly has imagination. Unfortunately, imagination is something that is severely underrated and overlooked in today's academic world.
I can't find a link now, but something I read on HN a while back said that it has been demonstrated that the capability to mentally picture something is variable across the population, with some people lacking the ability entirely. IIRC, in the late 1800s, there was some debate as to whether the "mind's eye" actually existed as an experience separate from the mental recitation of the words describing such an experience, and it was eventually found that the opponents of the mind's eye idea did not have the ability themselves.
I'd appreciate it if someone who knows the right keywords to search for could find the original reference, and correct me if necessary.
See nitrogen's post. The gp didn't mean imagination so much as internal picturing. I'm not sure about children but some people lack this ability the same way others are better with turn by turn directions than a look at a map.
"When he moved from Germany to Switzerland at the age of sixteen, Einstein spent a year at a school that emphasized independent thought, free action and personal responsibility. He thrived in a learning environment without rote drills, memorization and force-fed facts.
Based on the philosophy of a Swiss educator named Pestalozzi, the school helped students move through a series of steps from hands-on observations to intuition, conceptualization, imagination and visual imagery.
“Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly,” wrote Pestaslozzi, and “the learning of numbers and language must be definitely subordinated"
...It was at this school that Einstein, age sixteen, started picturing what it would be like to ride along a beam of light.”
http://sparkmygenius.com/2007/07/myth-busted-einstein-on-edu...