#5 Goethean Psychology is Multiple meanings sounding-together

From the mss:  On Beyond Waldorf, 

1. Team Human K-12 Education; 

   Goethean Psychology Applied to Child Development and K-12 Schooling; 

   Some Assembly Required

   The wholes we have in mind

A great wisdom of Goethean Psychology, thru Waldorf theory-method, is exercising your capacity to hear multiple meanings sounding-together in a greater whole.

The classic example here is naturally, a tuba or trombone, sounding alone may not sound like much; yet, as part of a chorus of instruments, in an orchestra, a tuba or trombone can add magnificence.

The way we make the maximum sense of any music, orchestral, choirs, commercial pop songs--is by listening to hear all the components sounding together. In acoustic guitar playing, this can be as simple as hearing vocals and music sounding together.

The phrase "sounding together" sometimes "sounding-together" seems to come from Rudolf Steiner but Mr. Google has no conclusive evidence.

Now the time comes to expand "sounding-together" beyond and outside of music.

Did you grow up in a latitude with all four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, then spring again? If you did you subconsciously hear all four seasons "sounding together" in the word "weather."

dg-portmanteau

port·man·teau

quote 1. a large trunk or suitcase, typically made of stiff leather and opening into two equal parts.

2. a word blending the sounds and/or combining the meanings of two others, for example motel (from ‘motor’ and ‘hotel’) or brunch (from ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’).

"podcast is a portmanteau, a made-up word coined from a combination of the words iPod and broadcast"

The word "weather" can be conceived of as a portmanteau" of multiple significant seasons treated as one thing.

The greatest artistic presentation of hearing multiple meanings sounding together? Right here:

:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:

We Are Blind Men Groping an Elephant

:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:+:=:

quote The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes but in having new eyes ~ Marcel Proust

In exploring Team Human K-12 ed, we are blind Men listening to explanations sounding together until the whole is more apparent in our individual conception (inner) and our group consensus (outer).

We are all blind when it comes to things that can't be seen. Who is not a "blind man" when it comes to "love"?

Education is also invisible, intangible. For those humble enough to admit their blindness and still determined to handle the mystery with both hands, I offer...

quote THE BLIND ~ MEN AND THE ELEPHANT (A Hindu Fable)

It was six men of Indostan

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the elephant

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation

Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side,

At once began to bawl:

"God bless! But the Elephant

Is very like a wall!"

The Second feeling of the tusk,

Cried, "Ho! What have we here

So very round and smooth and sharp?

This wonder of an Elephant

Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,

And happening to take

The squirming trunk within his hands,

Thus boldly up and spake:

"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant

Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,

And felt about the knee.

"What most this wondrous beast is like

Is mighty plain," quoth he;

"Tis clear enough the Elephant

Is very like a tree!"

The fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,

Said, "E'en the blindest man

Can tell what this resembles most;

Deny the fact who can,

This marvel of an Elephant

Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun

About the beast to grope,

Than seizing on the swinging tail

That feel within his scope,

"I see, "quoth he, "the Elephant

Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion

Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right

and all were in the wrong!

MORAL

So oft in theologic wars,

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance

Of what each other mean,

And prate about an Elephant

Not one of them has seen.!

John Godfrey Saxe (circa 1860)

The above poem is the strongest artistic representation I know of “hearing the explanations sound together.”

I invite readers of this book to begin this exercise, if they have not already begun. Why?

Education is also invisible, intangible. For those humble enough to admit their blindness; yet, determined to handle the mystery with both hands, Steiner had this to say:

quote If we desire to appreciate an idea...with great precision, we can only really grasp it by approaching the subject from different sides, then observing the different aspects and facets together. In music, something we are all familiar with, a single tone does not reveal a melody. In a scientific investigation it is the same way: no single characterization of an intangible matter can represent the full...content. ...ln former ages this was called "hearing the different explanations sound together" (RS, Balance in Teaching 44—45).

Team Human K-12 education has never been described before. The blind men and their elephant is a wonderful metaphor for pulling together, synthesizing, a psychology, methods and curriculum of Team Human education.

Original target of the poem's satire

Q: What target did the original poem have?

A: Taking to task competing religious and metaphysical orthodoxies for their narrow-mindedness and mutual intolerance.

Saxe pokes fun at how each religion has the "holy man's disease," believing their truth to be the one and only truth.

Today, we are blind men groping the intangible of a better, more holistic, public education. Why not listen to other blind men groping the same animal as we?

The cure for the "holy man's disease" is the same for religion or any other intangible. We carefully report our experience; then, listen carefully to what others have perceived of the same elephant. I wonder how many people now have the patience to acknowledge their own blindness; and, have willingness to feel out a subject by touch, by direct personal experience. It's can be a slow process.

Which is the part and which is the whole?

What did the blind men above get tangled up in? Each of them in the poem lost track of which was only a part and which was the whole.

Their second error? Assuming their piece was the whole of the elephant.

A famous rhyme shows this trap from another angle:

quote Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men,

Couldn't put Humpty together again!

Originally a satirical verse about English politics a couple centuries ago, the rhyme has out-lived its original political context. Why?

Evidently Humpty was unable to hear all his own-pieces sounding together again. Linear-sequential thinking does this to anyone habituating him or herself to linear thinking.

Humpty Dumpty expresses the anxiety, consternation and puzzlement all of us feel at age three, or six, or nine, or puberty when the bubble of childhood bursts; and, we begin to see the world as more complex, with more pieces than we have been used to manipulating. The naive child looking at the world as one whole--once lost, the old view can't be re-constituted, put back together again, the same way. Tom Wolfe put it more abstractly, "You can't go home again."

More generally Humpty Dumpty reminds us of two things, the loss of innocence;

and, the danger of taking apart the whole prematurely, for curiosity's sake: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

"Whole to part" vs."part to whole" thinking

Occasionally thru this text, quotes noted with page numbers only are from the 1966 English edition of 'A Study of Man' lecture transcripts, revised as noted for clarity.

quote If we want to come near to what is present in human nature, we must be clear how all separation is preceded by unity.

If we were to stop at cognizing only the unity of a subject, then we should learn nothing further about it. If we never differentiated, the whole world would remain vague ... This suggests why those persons who want to grasp the world solely in terms of abstract unities see the real world dimly, gray on gray.

On the other hand, if we only differentiate, continually separating every piece from every other, we should never come to further knowledge either. We would only have a collection of parts. The essence of the whole could still elude us.

Which is more important when a specific decision needs to be made, the whole or the part?

The capacity we exercise here is usually called "discrimination." However, in the realm of matter and quantity if discrimination is ONLY exercised, all that is not-matter seems to not matter and not exist. Then we have materialism (revised diction and paragraphing from SOM 1966 pg. 115).

Two approaches to large jigsaw puzzles

A 500 piece physical jigsaw puzzle on a table can be assembled two ways. You refer to the completed picture on the box first, last and always, arranging individual pieces on the table in their approximate position suggested by the completed image.

This is working whole-to-part. Start with the whole, the goal, connect each little part back to the whole image.

Or you can ignore the picture, put it away, never look at it, and work strictly from the pieces. You can look for similarities, make categories, grouping by color, texture and so on. Once you have all your pieces in categories, what two piles must be adjacent? Which third small pile must be adjacent to the combined first two? Trial and error is valuable here. You gradually buildup connections between possible adjacent pieces. Over time the larger whole image emerges slowly, categories coalesce. Finally each little piece is revealed to be an integral part of the whole image.

This is working part-to-whole. The pieces come first, the whole image comes last.

Pop Quiz: (1) Which kind of thinking is more used in crime scene investigations?

(2) Which kind of thinking is more used when writing a love letter?

(3) What other example applications of each of these two kinds of thinking can you and your teacher training class come up with?

Tension always exists between these two approaches, experiencing a whole system's unity; and, attending to differentness within the system. We might also ask, could the jigsaw assembler above use BOTH strategies, alternating between them? Why or why not?

How might you apply the above to teaching Grade Three? For me, the whole is the stage-developmental readiness of the children this semester. The parts are matching academic content, songs, poems jokes, moods, assignments to those needs.

Q: Isn't this what all K-12 schools do?

A: No. Historically from 1880-1990 conventional public K-12 admins used primarily part to whole thinking: The curriculum is in a book. The children must be matched to the curriculum so by the end of the year they complete it.

The part-to-whole approach to K-12 ed is closely related to the Procrustean Bed teaching story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

Q: How did K-12 ed get into the Procrustean Bed business?

A: This began in earnest when Natural Science took K-12 ed for its fourth wife, discussed further below.

This in turn had its origins in efforts to teach intelligence (logical sequential thinking, mathematical intelligence) to children before its natural time in child development.

Q: This is all nice--how does it apply to K-12 kids?

A: The above ideas bear very directly on the task of developing existing and new potential intelligences in children.