On Thu, 26 Oct 1995, John Godfrey wrote:
> I sometimes think about whether a parent
> learns more from a 16 month daughter than vice versa.
I did too. And when I tried to tell people about it, they smiled and said
isn't that sweet? as though I had said something emotional and loving. I
was -- as you are -- simply wondering about sober truth. In my own case,
I was comparing what I learned from my daughter, as she learned about the
world, against my years of undergraduate and graduate philosophy work.
It's really no contest. A no-brainer, as I've learned to say sometime in
the last year or so. I learned more from watching Kate learn than from
all the philosophers.
Well... now that I actually put it into words, it's dubious. Let's
change "more" to "at least as much" ;^)
Why is this? How can one even compare? The world in which one studies
philosophy, or math, or Learning Organizations, is after all the same
world into which one's daughter is born. The world I'm trying to make
sense of, reading Aristotle, is the same one she's trying to make sense
of, bumping into walls... .
Surely, I did not acquire any new _concepts_ watching my daughter learn.
Lord knows, we have enough of _those_. Maybe I learned because, for the
first time, I was seeing a _real_ story. Not a rehearsed one, not a
narrated one, not an artfully written one, not a sermon about a parable,
not a parable either, but an _enacted_, _real-time_ before-my-eyes
non-terminating STORY.
These are going on around us, of course, all the time; but when a child
comes, a story begins that one _must_ see.
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
...........................................................................
. . . . There are far *fewer* things in heaven and earth, Horatio, . . . .
. . . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy... . . | _ .