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Unique Artifacts apply to
children as well as to adults and explains the stages of Piaget.
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Thanks to Jean Piaget, we know a lot about how children
construct knowledge. His stages of development of knowledge are well documented
in children across a wide variety of societies and cultures. The sensori-motor
stage runs from birth to 2, at which point most children begin to speak
in sentences and become pre-operational. At about 6 years of age,
children become concrete operational and are able to apply and use
standard operations on symbols and conventional classification. Lastly,
between 12 and 14, children become formal operational and start to use
logic, abstract metaphor, and formal reasoning. If we look at the new things
children do at the onset of each of these stages with the inventions at the
start of the periods of knowledge, the connection between the pattern of
knowledge in children and in human history is plain.
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Concrete Operations
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Concrete operations uses
plural symbols - empire knowledge meets 6 year-olds
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At the onset of concrete operations, children's learning
explodes suddenly. They "get" reading, going from words to
sentences nearly overnight; they learn do mathematics, count to any numbers,
add and subtract, tell time, follow calendars, understand sophisticated
classification, play their own and adult games with complex rules, and work
together in large organized groups on major projects. They even draw with
standard methods, often that they invent, and they draw full-featured human
faces and figures in profile or frontal poses. These knowledges match those
of the empires. It is uncanny how close the resemblance is. The inventions
are the same!
The inventions are the same because the tools are the same - both concrete
operational children and "empire" adults use plural symbols to construct
knowledge, symbols based on sameness. We can teach concrete operational
children to read and write because they can use a few symbols, common elements,
to represent all words. They invent well-defined representations in their
drawings because these are visual underlying symbols that remain the same
throughout a wide variety of pictures. They can do mathematics because they
can use number and operation, categorical symbols, and see these same
elements as common to anything that is countable. And they can play rule-based
games because games are built on symbols, fastened by rules which are entirely
independent of the players. A quarterback is a position and a type of player,
and an touchdown is a well defined rule for the interaction of these players.
We could, in fact, call concrete operations the game phase. Concrete Operations
is the use of rules on symbols. To have rules, symbols must be constructed on
sameness; they must represent a class or category. Thus the knowledge
constructed or learned by 6 to 12-year-old children and by the empires
appears, and is, fundamentally the same.
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Formal Operations
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Formal operations is
singular universals - Greek knowledge and 13 year-olds
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Formal operational children search for truths; construct
proofs, attempt to build logical systems, use variables, and start to argue
formally and universally. Their entry into formal operations is accompanied
by explosive growth. They change before our eyes both physically and mentally;
suddenly making arguments and explanations that are adult-like abstractions;
they enter into conversations about religion, society, evolution, politics,
and all manner of philosophical subjects. They can make and follow a long,
logical argument. They can learn to solve logical puzzles, and they can use
variables. We can teach them to prove geometric theorems, to be critics of
essays, and to understand abstract metaphors. Their inventions, their
interests, and their reactions are very much like those of the early Polis
Greeks. They are formal operational, they use universals instead of symbols,
seeking truths and logical meaning.
The universal enables formalisms, proofs, logic, abstractions, theories,
and, of course, true metaphor where an entire idea is given broader meaning,
universality, by being associated with a new word. Like the Polis Greeks, the
world of logic for formal operational children starts with singular
universals, absolute truths, and individual visions of themselves and their
world. They become very independent, creating their own rules of behavior
which they consider logical. They form identities separate from the family,
around local universals, local "guilds," joining gangs, and forming
small but very strongly defined groups. And they love making new rules for
society- formed to be just, ideal, and equitable. This is the singular universal
as the unique artifact for constructing knowledge.
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Pre-Operations
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Pre-operations is singular
symbols - tribal knowledge and 2 year-olds.
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We do not find it at all odd that developmental psychologists
call the pre-operational period "the magic years." Most children burst
into language between two and two-and-a-half-years; jumping, nearly overnight,
from using just a handful of individual words to speaking in sentences with
rapidly expanding vocabularies. They tell stories, develop rituals, believe
in magic, make up names, fashion fantasies, recognize traffic signs, become
fascinated with familial relationship and kinship systems, and create
elaborate magical formulas and mythical explanation for all sorts of things.
They construct stories and explanations that are "magic" and ignore
the constraints of the real world. They personify objects and natural forces,
telling us "the thunder is angry." They confound fantasy and reality,
cause and effect (the clouds make the wind). And they invent names out
actions. Their magic orientation, their new capabilities, and their
inventions- including their art - look just like those of the tribal
societies. They are using symbols for the first time, and whether their
symbols are borrowed or invented, they are recreating the world. While their
language certainly has a mimicry component, must of their syntax is of their
own invention. Their creations and actions and those of tribal peoples are
very similar in form and in kind. They even like to dress-up, decorate,
engage in socio-dramatic play, and tell action stories.
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Children and Adults- The
Connection
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Knowledge building in
children and adults follows the same pattern because both are based on the
same tools - that is - the same theory applies to each.
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This connection between the development of knowledge in
children and the historical development of knowledge is not, definitely not,
part of that weary ontogeny-phylogeny debate. The issue isn't one of
recapitulation, but rather that the pattern to the development of knowledge
in both children and in intellectual history is constructed with the same
tools. Children and adults construct knowledges that are fundamentally the
same, because the sequence of unique entities and entities, sites and
fasteners that both use is based on uniqueness and cannot diverge. Thus, the
patterns we find in their respective development of knowledge must be the
same. The Unique Artifacts theory applies to the construction of knowledge by
children just as it applies to the construction of knowledge by adults.
What is different, of course, is the nature of the knowledge that is
constructed. Children replicate the adult construction of physical artifacts;
they make pictures, build block buildings, dress up, cook pretend food, dig
ditches in the sand, carve shapes in clay, and invent all kinds of things
that mimic our adult creations. But they do not create the kinds of
wonderful, complex, and profoundly beautiful artifacts that adults do. They
may build knowledge artifacts out of the same kinds of tools, but they do not
build the same qualities of knowledge. They do not have the patience,
maturity, or skills to do so. It is no different for conceptual artifacts than
it is for physical artifacts, the tools and the types are the same, but the
results are different. What is clear is that forms of these artifacts, no
matter how crude or fine, are totally dependent upon the tools that are being
used, and these tools follow the same, the exact same, patterns of
uniqueness. The unique artifacts from which humans construct knowledge are
the elements of all knowledge.
Children seem to have natural mental maturations at Piaget's key ages, and
if their society has enabling entities, they naturally jump to the next step.
Indeed, if we were to analyze the development of knowledge in children more
carefully, we would actually find the same pattern of phases we found in
historical knowledge. These are not fully delineated in Piaget's work, but
they are not difficult to articulate when we look at how and what we teach
children at each grade level or at how they behave before formal schooling.
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Sensori-Motor
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The Sensori-motor stage is
pre-symbolic and does not have a comparable phase in the Pattern of
Knowledge.
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I did leave out the definition of a phase that exists in
children but does not have a counterpart in the Pattern of Knowledge. Sensori-motor
is the stage from just after birth to 2 years of age and the one that Piaget
studied the most. It is the stage before formal language, where words are
things and drawings are scribbles. It must represent a different entity, one
that I would call the sign entity. While a symbol is a name for a
piece of experience, a sign is that experience. It is a fixed representation,
inflexible and immutable. A sign is fixed to an experience - to being hungry,
thirsty, afraid, happy; or it may be fixed to a thing - a "teddy"
or "blankie." For most children up to 2 years-of-age, words are
simple signs and actions as well as the few words they say are the way in
which such signs are represented. This entity was undoubtedly the same as our
pre-symbolic ancestors used, and probably the one that underlies learned
animal behavior in chimps, dogs, horses, and other species. Though it is a
new entity, it has the same sequence of phases as the other entities - phases
that can, with minor exceptions, be connected to Piaget's sensori-motor
stage.
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