2. A meaningful learning
We can think about something, speculate about it, establish cause and effect links with other things or events, categorize it in a class that satisfies the intellect according to logical criteria and rules. If we succeed doing that, we generate consistent learning from the perspective of thinking, i.e. an understanding which can be communicated intelligibly to another mind, judgments of the right or wrong order, knowledge attested by the mind. This is what happens when we seek for instance to demonstrate a theorem of geometry. Of course, doing so does not preclude experiencing emotions superbly significant—
and of considerable importance in teaching to the point that they profoundly influence educational choices—but ... collateral!
We can also develop an emotional relationship with the object of learning, speak to it from the heart, through feeling, as when very often we are listening to music, and, of course, as in our love affairs.
This is our ability to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, which is expressing, between the good and the bad, our aesthetic and moral sense. The theorem of geometry is no longer only the result of a hypothetic-deductive reasoning, but is combined perhaps with the feeling of pure pleasure provided by the elegance of the demonstration or, conversely, with the arrogance of a teacher towards those put off by the difficulty. Still richer links can be established when it comes to “learn” an animal or another person, since a proper and reciprocal emotional communication can then be established between the learner and the object of learning. It is in this way that empathy develops during training in a medical profession, in addition to the clinical knowledge of the various conditions of patients, or that a child learns to care for his or her pet.
Moreover, as with the mango or the orange, we can establish contact with the learning object through our senses, we can touch it, smell it, taste it, hear it, watch it, feel its weight, its strength, its volume, its density, we can move it, manipulate it. Carpenters embody the so-called Pythagorean theorem in the form of a wooden triangle three foot high, four foot long, with a five foot hypotenuse. Fitting the triangle at the intersection of two walls checks in a gesture its squareness. This is concrete geometry. In the case of a piece of wood, by looking at it they can determine its essence, finish, quality, they can estimate its length, its degree of residual moisture, they can even “weigh” it. Sensing is at work. Imagine a professional cook at a vegetable, fish or meat market!
In a more mysterious way, finally, we can get in almost magical contact with the object of learning, at least without premeditation. Suddenly an idea arises, as if knowledge were given to us or, more likely, as if our mental processes continued to function muted, below the threshold of consciousness. We perceive what is not, somehow, we transcend reality, we guess, without our reason interfering. At once, truth has occurred to us, that we need later to test with the other psychological functions if we want to convince our fellow of its correctness, since intuition, like sensing, can be misleading. It delivers truth, however, in the same manner and with the same force of persuasion than the latter.
These four psychological functions are means available to the human being to probe the world;
and we shall readily admit that the knowledge of an object developed using each and every one of them would be particularly rich. Besides, a substantial part of this learning will probably have occurred in the unconscious, as we often realize it, but later when we use the knowledge, we did not even know that we knew! Conversely we shall also admit that when only one psychological function is activated in a learning process, the resulting knowledge is not only quantitatively poorer, unless a huge compensation is made by this function, but, above all, it only manifests the nature of this psychological function: the intellect is not moved by a poem, even sublime, it analyzes it! Compared with photography, we then contemplate a monochrome knowledge.
Of course, we each have our own preferences among the four psychological functions, which we exercise more or less skilfully. Generally, we tend to use first our favourite for all our learning, the one we master best and in which we have the most confidence. And we neglect the others. It would be more accurate to say that we belittle them. As a consequence, we present a specific psychological profile that characterizes us, a learning style that reflects our preferences, more or less adapted, unfortunately for many, to the types and conditions of learning that school, employer or society will impose upon us.
But when we use successfully the four psychological functions to grasp an object of learning that allows the four types of relationships pertaining to these functions, the richest possible knowledge accessible to a human being is developed, altogether intellectual, emotional, tangible and transcendent. If, in addition, the various aspects of this knowledge have a congruent character, i.e. if they complement each other in a consistent way, a high degree of significance will result in the learner, giving to this knowledge a very high degree of stability. As a consequence, to negate or modify substantially this knowledge will end up being particularly difficult.
If, on the contrary, it is not possible to use all our psychological functions to approach a learning object, as it is often the case in science for instance—we do not feel the rotation of the Earth, there are no more dinosaurs, the electron is a useful concept but quite abstract—what can we learn of this object and what is this knowledge worth? Almost nothing, at least compared to the knowledge we can have about a mango or an orange, because it does not link directly with our human experience of things within reach.
As for our emotional relationships with such learning objects, they are at best aesthetic, or very indirect, being associated with circumstances and people or with a collective enterprise more or less impersonal.
True, we have of those objects a sophisticated intellectual knowledge, thanks to the conceptual formalism to which they are related, but literally no empirical knowledge as scientific experience do not put our senses in contact with the objects of learning as such, but with the measuring instruments we use to corroborate or refute our hypotheses about them.
3. From real to virtual
As we have just seen, the characteristics of the object under study limit the scope and richness of the learning that we can do about it so that it is not always possible to use all our psychological functions to grasp it. It is to overcome, at least partly, these limitations that we develop tools, techniques and technologies because they allow us to circumscribe to a certain extent the objects under study that otherwise would escape us much more. Admittedly, the resulting knowledge is limited because not all the learning modes of the learners have been engaged, but it appears much better than it would had been possible to achieve without these devices. It is also entirely representative of the learning that most schools, colleges and universities encourage as they rarely look for really complete knowledge.
Conversely, the chosen means and modalities to learn may also limit learning. That is what the school does, for example, whenever it replaces a real object, potentially available, by a model or representation of it, necessarily more abstract, like a photograph, drawing, text, simulation, equation, speech..., i.e. any language or anything that allows to study the given object under the particular aspects selected by the school, without requiring a complete knowledge of it that the school, in any event, cannot produce on its own.
These two types of limits, related to the learning object itself and to the means and modalities of learning, both create a truncated learning product compared to what we have called a complete knowledge. Of course, this does not really surprises us because we easily encounter in these types of limits the conditions for study and research in which we have been immersed for the past few centuries.
Gradually we have learned to recognize as such the substitutes or alternative models of the objects that we had to study without confusing them with what they were intended to represent. We do not get troubled.
Artificiality, virtuality and reality remain distinct still, we do not pull the wool over our eyes, though photography, but especially cinema, has begun, for some time now, to fool our brain.
Then came the special effects. Computers everywhere, more powerful every day. The World Wide Web. Smartphone's. Multifunction tablets. Social networks. Blogs. Online courses. Books online.
Music online. Colleges and universities online... “Friends” online. As soon as one wishes. A few clicks away. And many dollars!
The space has disappeared, suddenly, swallowed in the moment. One does not travel anymore where things are, things just come to us. At the speed of our desire, which thus disappears. Of course, things only have the appearance of reality, but what a realism! In three dimensions soon generalized and, if one wishes, without these small flaws that bother, corrected by software that know more than us about what we should like, and probably sooner than we might think in all languages without any accent. A world so perfect, so accessible, so faithful to what we would like it to be, that we shall refrain going in the street for fear of regressing! Because we believe in it. We believe that what we see on the surface of this technical layer—of a thickness from now on hardly imaginable by the very people who design and develop it—is the reality, as concrete as the bite of a dog in our calf, or whatever you want to imagine of a similar order. But the reality is that we are facing models, simulations, images, highly sophisticated artificial representations that pose as reality.
Meanwhile, the learner, real and with good faith, without even realizing it, finds himself immersed more and more in a constructed environment, a kind of decor that evolution never taught him to inhabit as such. His school loses its walls, a few at a time, teachers are multiplying, outside the walls, they appear on the screen, in his hand, on one of the walls that remain, and some are famous. Students are in class, but anywhere, and then anytime. Sometimes alone, sometimes several; often they do not know.
Because there is this hole in the solid frame of the world, this enormous and unfathomable hole, where everything that makes life can be found, including others, including yourself: Internet! The school is no longer the protected place that it used to be under the care and guidance of a relatively small number of people that we had to trust, by necessity, to lead us where they had chosen for us to go, but an open
divide. The student does not escape through the window, he simply goes out, where he does not know, in lines of ones and zeros. The hole is not black, quite the contrary, it shines! But it sucks, let us dare the hyperbole, just as much!
The student then exercise at least some psychological functions without discrimination, unsuspecting, naively believing that what he perceives in front of him is indeed as it is through the looking-glass, at the original source of his perception, irretrievably since a significant part of his learning remains unconscious.
Knowledge fragments, and shrinks, it becomes incongruous, without the learner knowing it. It decays, it loses its unity. Would it be sick, by analogy? Schizophrenic? In any case, it runs the risk.
Psychological functions do not all relate to the virtual world with the same ability.
Thinking deals with abstraction, and fortunately can help to make sense of things. It understands that what a human sees and hears, what he feels in a virtual world is a representation that may or may not correspond to what he usually considers reality. It accepts without complaint that no other human being is behind the computer playing chess with him, other than the programmers and specialists who developed the software used to play. It concedes that the videos produced to illustrate the structure of atoms or atomic nuclei are crutches, at times at the border of deceit, because we have no way to come into direct contact with these “famous unknown”. It is with good faith of course that we attribute to them properties observed at our scale of magnitude and interpretable by us, but literally incompatible with what our most refined knowledge of these entities implies. We have a problem, as we here come close to the very limitations of simulation.
Feeling is vulnerable because it operates only to the extent that it can rely on significant prior knowledge of the beings and things represented virtually. Otherwise, it projects and assigns to the learning object emotional features that the virtually represented object arouses in him, activating the same psychological process that advertisers seek to activate in us when they present to us as true a so-called perfect face artificially obtained from an ersatz painfully human; it fantasizes. Much unspoken information transits in a real interaction, including about what we still do not know how to simulate, such as touch and smell, as well as what we can perceive intuitively of the learning object. Feeling can be exercised over all this, and inform the learner of the outcome. But how can it reach significance if it has no access to this unspoken information, if it does not know a priori enough of the real object virtually represented?
Senses are down to earth. They never perceive intention, but always a limited number of properties, concrete, measurable, tangible, directly attributed to the sensed object, although these properties actually show the relationship between the object in question and the sensors in the human body rather than the intrinsic characteristics of this object. Colors and flavors do not exist in it, but in the interaction between certain physical and chemical constituents of the latter and the visual and gustatory apparatus that give rise to them in us. In the virtual world, we perceive the movements, colors and sounds that make up this world, that offer to our senses a substitute of what they are supposed to represent. In the real world, in addition, we see the material support of these representations, which reveals the substitution. But we never find the originals—unless they are in the same room with us, rather silly redundancy, but no longer astonishing considering all the screens in place in almost every theatre.
Inevitable confusion between the real and virtual worlds should therefore come as no surprise when, as of now, the quality of the substitutes amazes!
It is always risky to speak of intuition, probably too closely related to the subliminal to be easily understood. We do not know how it proceeds, nor how to control it. We only know how to benefit from its action, if we trust it. But how does it behave in a pseudo-world, in a hybrid world, when the virtual
“weighs” of all its stimuli on our being? Do we know it? My own intuition suggests that it probably runs into similar lures as the senses, with similar effects; and, like them, it may be mistaken. My intuition might be right.
Taken together, the product of these four psychological functions applied to a largely virtual object of learning, i.e. highly mediatized, could be monstrous. Failing to proceed from a full original object, but rather from a more or less complete object transformed by technology, it would be the result of potentially incongruent responses from the psychological functions involved in the learning process, being exercised on literally different subject matters. A deformed learning product would ensue from this process, that we would only recognize as such with hindsight through thinking which, as we have seen, is less easily fooled by technical tricks than the other psychological functions.
Otherwise, the danger is real to attribute to the resulting knowledge a value that it does not deserve: the simulation of a chemistry or physics experiment, even remarkably successful, still remains a simulation; life and death in a video game are not life and death, but the result of a set of rules properly programmed and applied; the written message from a computer to another one is addressed to one or more persons of real blood, flesh and bone, who read this message and interpret it as humans do, but the one who sent it perhaps is not who, when and where he claims to be!
4. Conclusion
Distance learning, networking, hybrid, synchronous, asynchronous, online learning... as we know it today and as it continues to evolve, is at the forefront of technological development underway since already several centuries; more precisely, as anything that evolves at an exponential rate, at the forefront of the latest developments. Therefore, using anyone of its modalities—from now on, almost always—a truly astonishing technical layer isolates the learner from ordinary human reality, the one we had been prepared to through evolution. To young people, who quickly become accustomed to the world in which they live, whatever this world is, this ordinary human reality becomes potentially suspect, even undesirable: where you have to wait to get what you want, and answers to your questions, where ignorance, even anxiety accompanies the freedom of the other, the one who is neither a mailbox nor a Facebook account nor an avatar in Second Life or in whatever “metaverse”, nor a “resender” of text messages or tweets, nor a position instantly locatable by GPS, where you have to travel physically to visit other countries and other people, where time flows into duration, and space into distance. This technical layer to which it is so easy to get used to, at least partially, yet creates two dependencies: psychological, as just illustrated, and financial, which speaks for itself.
Since 1971, according to Moore’s law, the power of computers doubles every two years, which means that in 2015, they are 4,194,304 times more powerful that they were 44 years ago. To give an idea, although I have absolutely no valid representation of the meaning of what you are about to read, it is as if your annual salary of 1971, which we assume was 6,000 €, had increased in 2015 to over 25 billion euros, and that in two years, in 2017, it would have doubled once more reaching over 50 billion euros! Very candidly, if that had happened to me, believe me, I would be one more misfit, socially totally incompetent. This is nevertheless what we all live in the area of information and communication technologies, and in its most spectacular manifestation: Internet.
Is it good or bad? One has to make his own mind. But the pace of change is such that we can never keep adapting. It has probably been a while since we stopped adapting; properly, I mean. And the pace of change itself accelerates exponentially, as a totally uncontrolled car. Human beings, the learners in our case, then board an uncontrolled technological device of which no one knows the destination, knowing barely the direction taken in the short term, a technological device without identified conductor, multi-headed, with an elusive body, a hydra of some sort, that a Hercules to come will have to defeat.
Catching sight of the beast, it will be more difficult than the first time! More details on the topics treated in this communication can be found in Gagnon (2013, chap. V).
References
Gagnon, R. (2013). Éduquer après Carl Gustav Jung suivi de Métaphores et autres vérités. Québec : Presses de l’Université Laval.
Jung, C.-G. (1991). Types psychologiques. Geneva : Georg Editor S.A. (original publication in German, 1920).