Embodied Knowledge: What it is and Why it is Phenomenally Important

Note: This chapter is excerpted from my first book manuscript. The title of that book is, “The Threshold of Your Own Mind”, subtitled, “A 2020 Vision for Education & School Without Rose Colored Glasses”.

The title comes from Gibran’s poem on education in his book, The Prophet. The profound line from which my title is taken in that poem is:

“If he is indeed wise he does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

                                                    Chapter VIII               

Embodied Knowledge: What it is and Why it is Phenomenally Important

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves.~                                                                                                                            Jean Piaget

Perceiving, a paradigm case of cognitive activity, takes time to unfold and makes direct contact with the objects with which it deals, making it a spatially and temporally extended business. From this perspective, understanding cognition cannot be reduced to knowing what occurs in brains, it also requires knowing what cognizers are doing with their bodies when adjusting to and engaging with features of the world that are afforded to them.

Daniel D. Hutto REC: Revolution Effected by Clarification. School of Humanities and Social Inquiry Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts University of Wollongong NSW 2522Australia

In 1998, two brilliant scientists published a book entitled, “Philosophy in the Flesh”, in which they introduced the world to a radically more enlightened way of thinking about a whole range of things having to do with the way humans come to view and understand the world around them. Their insights and illumination regarding several aspects of thought and human behavior will require decades for even many scientists to comprehend and process fully. The authors are George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a linguist, and a neuroscientist, respectively. Both have a wealth of knowledge and training in other fields.

Our ‘philosophy’ in both our narrower personal attitudes and approach to life and in the broader collective or academic sense of philosophy as an academic or scientific discipline cannot be divorced from our flesh, literally meaning from our individual bodies. This refers both to the particular beliefs and principals which guide our thoughts and actions generally relative to our lives, to others, and to our “universe”, which includes religious or spiritual ideas, and to our unarticulated and mostly unconscious personality features relative to our place in family and society, which are expressed more as feelings or reactions and attitudes, i.e.. trust versus mistrust of others, optimism versus cynicism, and extroverted versus introverted.

Despite generations of having been conditioned to see thought or mental process as completely separate somehow from the physical universe and separate from any part of our bodies or brains, we now know with certainty that we are capable of thinking or cognition only because our physical brains utilize impulses and nerve pathways to transmit perceptions, sensations, and meaningful “information” in a chemical bath, which become short or long-term memory paths. Much of that information relies on metaphorical interpretations built into our language and culture. The science is progressing apace.

A brilliant Descartes was working in the 1600’s with the poorly developed biological and other science of his day, which was not yet clearly distinguished adequately from philosophy and religion. He formulated a view of mind or cognition and intellectual material (knowledge) that was completely independent from the physical universe.

We, especially in the western world, have mistakenly stuck with Descartes’ badly flawed and primarily superstitious conception ever since. The revelations outlined in this new seminal work of genius by Lakoff and Johnson completely reversing Descartes’ logical errors have yet to become more than a blip within the consciousness of a few scientists or ordinary citizens.

Descartes lacked the benefit of the many discoveries to come after his death or the sophisticated tools that scientists possess today to study mental processes and brain functions. His beliefs that thinking and knowledge were somehow externally sourced and transmitted to humans derived directly from ancient philosophical conclusions which saw God as the ultimate source of all knowledge and the “spirit” as a manifestation of God’s influence on man through something akin to what we might call mental telepathy.

According to that ancient view, we are not fully in control of our thoughts. Special messengers or middlemen translate God’s omniscience to ordinary people who must be receptive and attentive. We must be “taught” and given knowledge. Knowledge is to be acquired from others or from their recorded revelations or discoveries, and we merely act as unwitting conduits of that information and esteemed wisdom. We “learn”. We “acquire” education through “study”. As unscientific as it may seem to our eyes and ears now, that is still the foundation for most popular and institutional conceptions relative to cognition in 2023!!!

Anyone reading Lakoff and Johnson’s amazing book will never think of knowledge in the same way again. Until now, the misconceived default position nearly universally for over three centuries has been that knowledge is to be found in external sources, such as texts and scriptures, produced (or reproduced) by human intermediaries such as scholars or “knowledgeable individuals”, who are inspired or informed supernaturally by God. All we ordinary mortals can know and comprehend must subsequently be retrieved from those revered or arcane sources by us as less inspired students, observers, or the curious to make us more knowledgeable in turn.

Knowledge then, in the traditional view allegedly resides (awaits our discovery) in various media, such as books, ancient texts, incisive lectures delivered by prestigious authorities in fields of expertise and in academic journals, etc. Or knowledge may be ostensibly preserved within and ultimately transmitted through other types of media in which stored language or symbols are conveyed and observed by youths, such as in oral tribal narratives, poetry, art, dance, and music.

Presumably, media are utilized in serious study by students for the transference of concepts, ideas, thoughts, or information which they did not originate. It existed prior to their exposure and “learning”. We commonly refer to knowledge as “it” or as a concrete thing to possess, which is packaged and delivered by our educational institutions. According to the predominant view “it” is only something we own by extension when transferred from some outside source to enhance our worth, rather than fabricated through our own creation.

Lakoff and Johnson show conclusively and indisputably, however, that all knowledge is embodied (resides within a functioning living human body equipped with a sentient brain, namely, a person). It is created or recreated by the student or the thinker or observer and is unique to that person. Anything not embodied is NOT knowledge in this technical sense. “It” is not a thing in the sense of a “body of knowledge” that one might seek to possess by some type of osmosis or absorption.

Thought is made possible only when the mind, which is a property or function of, and a manifestation of, the physical brain/body is activated via stimuli (either internal or external) affecting nerves, synapses, and chemical substances (neurotransmitters) circulating within the body/brain. Knowledge results from the interaction of the outside world (which may be reduced as a factor but is never eliminated as a source of input or stimulation) and the inner physical and mental world through perceptions, sensations, cognitive activity (using memory traces) and contact or motion. We cannot “know” and comprehend anything new except through our physical brain and body, which we may or may not translate into language and which must utilize knowledge that we already possessed prior to “learning” something new.

Researchers worldwide are exploring these questions assiduously with major progress at a steady pace. The following quotation illustrates just one approach. One phrase in this account sums it all up. That phrase is: “The body is where learning begins and it is from the body that knowledge emerges.”

Not even in teaching and education is it possible to separate the person into body and mind, the latter being closely linked to knowledge. Yet, where does cognition come from? This question is addressed by Ruyu Hung in her article on human rights teaching and Wolff-Michael Roth in his article on the origins of mathematical knowledge. The body is where learning begins and it is from the body that knowledge emerges. Roth rightly highlights the key role the cognitive processes play in forming knowledge via kinesthesia.

He is concerned with the mathematical knowledge of Master’s students that stems from body movements. What we now know and will in the future know about the world always stems directly from our bodies, since it comes directly from corporeality, and from the associated movements of the body and mind.

Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014: Body and Education: Curriculum Perspectives and Shaping the Lived Body, Themed Issue, Zuzana Bánovčanová, Jan Slavík (Eds.)

The Body in Education, Journal of Pedagogy 1/14, pg. 5

Information in the form of inert symbols is not and cannot be knowledge.

Knowledge is a cumulative, vibrant, and largely personal creation which combines or integrates pre-existing conceptions and mental process with new input, ALWAYS resulting in “knowing” that is alive and different in many respects. Intelligence that is artificial or canned within some medium for later consumption (i.e., textbooks and literature) may contain splendid ideas with which to work, analyze, and pursue goals. However, it is static and lifeless until utilized, felt, interpreted, and re-integrated into a dynamic mental schema.

That which reaches an individual as the symbolic representation of someone else’s knowledge does not become useful knowledge again until the observer has become aware of it and engaged in a mental/cognitive process as a result. The observer may accept or reject parts or all the content as valid and may be conscious of the primary elements though never all. But it is only their perception and processing in real time that makes it knowledge.

Facts and data are merely information for processing by mental activity within the brain/body during contemplation, review, discussion, examination, and rumination. Intellectual acumen and wisdom are not replicated as easily or as methodically as we (or as educators) might like to believe. There are no short-cuts. Each individual has their own process which is never replicated perfectly. Only when someone thinks and discriminates is progress made.

To reiterate, knowledge is not some numinous body of great insight, information, or data that exists in a cloud somewhere to be tapped into by the right equipment or by being tuned into the proper wavelength. There simply is no universal truth that can never be questioned. Any god with a lick of sense would not expect scholars to reproduce knowledge (cognition) intact and unmodified in a rapidly evolving universe.

Knowledge, I repeat again, exists solely within the brain/mind/body of a living and breathing human being as part of a phenomenological whole. Aristotle’s knowledge can be approximated but not duplicated. Einstein’s knowledge died with him. We can only process their words in making our own new and quite unique version or vision of that information transmitted in the form of language or other symbolic representations, which then becomes our own particular knowledge (whether accurate or inaccurate).

There must always be a backdrop or background which forms a lens through which we each see whatever it is we see. There is no such thing as 100% objectivity. When we try to access the knowledge of another person, the input is immeasurably affected by our own store of knowledge, which entails innumerable unidentifiable factors and influences originating in our unique experience and which invariably includes emotionally affected content. ​Remember that.

The word “consciousness” was used casually earlier. Consciousness is a key concept in Lakoff and Johnson’s book, which also takes on a whole new meaning and relevance when one integrates the novel information and insights these authors offer into more ordinary conceptions of consciousness and into what we typically see alternatively as the unconscious mind.

The conscious and unconscious cannot be disentangled with any clear lines of demarcation during ordinary living events or processes. Unconscious thought processes are by definition below the level of awareness and often (usually?) occur SIMULTANEOUSLY with conscious mediation. Cognition includes much that is not linguistic in nature or that is traceable through a language process. Emotion and rational thought are not continually in conflict, as we have been led to believe. They are parts of a holistic experience.

When you or I have taken in what a teacher has given us to “learn” we were not just learning words or ideas. We were utilizing our pre-existing understanding and perceptions (affected by sensations and emotional states) to manufacture a novel mental creation of our own. This creation is modified necessarily in real time by our ongoing cognitive process, which in turn is affected by memory, prior interpretations (or misinterpretations) of data and information, and emotive factors. It is necessarily always nuanced and idiosyncratic, which is to say it has meaning for the student.

We cannot so easily recall our own “thought process” which is connected by concrete symbols, specific ideas, or identifiable images. Nor can we somehow simply retrace our cognitive steps perfectly, although that is always worth trying. Thoughts are manifestations of incredibly complex internal processes and intricate physical nerve networks in the context of a moving, or at least previously or potentially mobile, living body. Concentrate. Focus. There is much, much more going on there than you can imagine or intuit.

It is safe to assume that it is impossible for all cognition that a person experiences during a specific period to ever be brought “to the surface or into consciousness” for deliberation and examination as linear thought. It simply is not possible, even by intense concentration, to retrace a seemingly infinite number of signals and pathways within the brain, in the way that one might identify all elements and all aspects of a certain concrete problem or working thesis which can be mapped and identified on a fully conscious level and put into a diagram or context. Thinking is much more involved and convoluted. Your brain is NOT a fancy Rubik’s Cube or a system of computerized data.

Indeed, we cannot even say that we have purely conscious thoughts that are not invariably accompanied by related unconscious and unidentifiable cognitive activity which is completely ineffable and inaccessible. Emotional “feelings” or a background of mood and qualitative sensation are never totally absent or unimportant, and ideas or conceptions which are little more than vague shadows pop in and out of our view. There is no such thing as purely rational and unitary cognition that has no emotional “shadow” or coloring. How are you feeling right now? Have I been too redundant?

Excitement is exciting and motivation is motivating because things are happening internally which are physical as well as cognitive. Feelings derive from various hormones or chemicals ebbing and flowing below our awareness activated by experience and perceptions, resulting in memories which are altered by both motion and emotion, and which are often too fleeting or vague for us to “put our finger on”. (Note this common use of metaphor to suggest a kind of touching or directing of attention.) Are you feeling the excitement of discovery yet?

Total and persistent concentration on a single conscious cognitive level wherein processed language predominates to maintain a continuous flow of logical thought in a sentient self-dialogue, minus the continual interaction or influences of indistinct feelings, traces of belief-based or attitudinal thought from the recent or distant past, and without touches of mental images or vague perceptions or “inklings” that reside below the level of awareness, is simply not humanly possible for any extended length of time, if at all. We are not living computers! Inform your professors.

We think while we feel (or more likely because of what we are feeling) and we have multiple complex processes involving memory and “knowledge” going on simultaneously, much if not all the time. Some compelling research suggests that emotions precede cognition, rather than the other way around, as has always been supposed in the past. Theorists are exploring how feelings or chemical substances generate or cause and influence thinking. What happens with your mind when you see or visualize your partner or your child or when you suddenly feel love or desire?

Those processes involve impressions and ideas, or both specific and non-specific memories and “impulses”, or electrical (or electro-chemical) brain and body activity, which register consciously only partly and only through intentional effort and deliberate attentiveness. Neuroscience is abuzz with this work. I do not pretend to understand much of it.

We discover that much more of what is referred to as knowledge and what we conceive as mind reside within an intricate sensorimotor system of nerves, synapses, and chemicals that are part of the brain and body or that are connected inextricably to the body parts that are not brain (the mind/body connection which has previously been only poorly understood and only partially accepted).

“Muscle memory” was only an early first step. We understand enough now to know that huge changes in how we look at learning and education in the context of neurochemistry are coming toward us at breakneck speed. Mental maps position the body or objects and shapes in a mental space which probably contribute to all learning experience.

Lakoff and Johnson agree with other researchers that unconscious process is roughly 90% of cognition, and conscious process is typically 10%, give or take, and probably changing constantly, minute-by-minute for the individual. Mind that is fully tuned in to its own process and able to recall, track, and alter its process at will, (as in the current common understanding of our awareness and thinking), is much more mythical than real. Your motivational guru may advise you to reflect and meditate, and that may help you focus. But be aware of the inherent limits to such exercises.

Embodiment is anything but an exotic or esoteric concept, nevertheless. It is a safe bet that Sir Isaac Newton had had the experience of rolling down a grassy knoll or hanging onto a tree branch and dropping to the ground. Or, he surely had some other familiar physical sensation of gravity or experience with magnetism that made the falling apple especially significant for him at a particular moment. He was once a child and probably also had those sensations as an adult.

Early physical sensations and precursory memory circuits unquestionably helped Newton make the cognitive connections that led to the idea of gravity as a force with which to be reckoned. The following is one summary of the need to allow for or involve physical activity and for the manipulation of objects and of the body consistently, and of the inseparability of mind, body, and social interaction, particularly in learning or teaching endeavors.

Although enactive approaches to cognition vary in terms of their character and scope, all endorse several core claims. The first is that cognition is tied to action. The second is that cognition is composed of more than just in-the-head processes; cognitive activities are (at least partially) externalized via features of our embodiment and in our ecological dealings with the people and things around us.

Krueger, J. Enactivism, other minds, and mental disorders. Synthese (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02133-9 (From the Abstract)

Corporal knowledge is real knowing, and it is the only real knowing. It is felt by the body and preserved or remembered within the body. It is useful (and essential, as in ‘the essence of’) for building a deeper or greater knowledge that can be appreciated, explored, and expanded.

\

Cognition, and Therefore Knowledge is in Large Part Metaphoric

Possibly all that we know is known by the application of metaphors from our physical existence and experience. Anyone who has fallen or taken a spill from a moving bicycle has an embodied knowledge about gravity which needs little explication with descriptive language, pictures, or diagrams by which they reached a basic comprehension of the underlying concept. One metaphor for gravity might be pulling or attraction from one thing to something else, as in magnetism. We do not fall up unless we are in a spacecraft. We do not fall down; we are pulled down.

We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking.

R. Buckmeister (Bucky) Fuller

If we want our children to move mountains, we first have to let them get out of their chairs.” ~

Nicolette Sowder

Children more than ever, need opportunities to be in their bodies in the world – jumping rope, bicycling, stream hopping, and fort building. It’s this engagement between limbs of the body and bones of the earth where true balance and centeredness emerge.~

David Sobel

The direct physical sensations and experience of the human body are the first and best teachers. They are the origins of our intelligence and knowledge. We only become capable of thinking about concepts and are aware of “reality” and relationships in our universe through the interaction of our bodies with our environment, physical and social.

Ideas of full and empty, open and closed, directionality, time passage, freedom or constriction, movement or inertia, balance, temperature, pain or exhilaration, leverage, connection, rotation, light or dark, vision or blindness, inside or outside, good or bad, fresh or stale, and seemingly a million others are only available to us for construction and reconstruction in cognition after we have known via our OWN senses and organic functions within our OWN world some rudimentary or fundamental information about “things”, spaces, time, and life. We organically and automatically utilize metaphors for these things to draw parallels or “see” analogies and to understand all manner of concepts or cognitive ideas.

Indeed, life is defined by movement and physicality. Without the vibrations in atoms and organic matter of every form, there would surely be no life and no growth. The beating of the heart is a vibration. The word “vibrant” is a description of a radiation of life-force from an actively alive being.

There are vibrations at every level throughout the universe which affect our physical bodies in various ways, and which occur within our bodies. Vibrations are absolutely essential to our existence. Light is vibration. Sound is vibration. Breathing is a kind of vibration. One author of a book read in my youth prescribed dance as the only viable means for humanity to get back in tune with nature. He decried the lack of dance in our modern lives. He passionately believed that declines in such natural and integrated movement in space is, or will be, the potential source of our ultimate demise. He may very well have been right.

It has been well understood for no small space of time that memory is embodied. Memory is knowledge that is exclusively one’s own recording of events or of data points that have become available to the individual as internal information for possible later use or reminiscence.

Early psychology studies of memory confirmed that it involves synapses within the brain which have connections to other synapses and nerve networks affecting organic parts or larger primary organs allowing us to repeat movements or activities more or less automatically or to reflect back on our personal history and experience, anchoring us in time and space. That was just the beginning. Philosophers and psychologists have talked about a primary version of “embodied knowledge” for decades, but understanding for most was apparently limited to something akin to “muscle memory” until quite recently.

We know that memory is generally split into short-term and long-term memory. Either can be influenced by things both within and external to the body, i.e., an odor, a taste, or a sound. Memory may also be factually in error or degraded over time by any number of factors, all understood as things affecting the elements of the physical body or perceptions via the senses which created the memory initially. Still, memory is only a part of cognition or of learning. Educators test memory while failing to understand that they cannot so easily test the more significant elements of cognition and intellectual process.

No one imagines that their vivid and sometimes detailed memories could ever be represented by mere words in a book or by pictures painted, even by themselves (from memory), with a degree of vitality and intricate detail anywhere near equal to their internal vision and recall capability, although some movie directors and painters do an admirable job of trying. “Memory work” in school, while a valid technique for certain rote learning, is of limited value if not buttressed by thorough immersion in a holistic pattern of comprehension and application or potential application.

Piaget Had Something to Say About This, of Course!

Here is what one scholar reports:

Piaget contends that the formation of mental structures are in fact personal constructions, not mere copies of reality. To know an object is to have acted upon that object. Pg.231

The Active Nature of Knowledge Formation

Perhaps the most fundamental principle of Piagetian epistemology is that knowledge is equated with activity. Piaget states that:

…to know an object is to act upon it and to transform it. …To know is therefore to assimilate reality into structures of transformation, and these are the structures that intelligence constructs as a direct extension of our actions.

All of this to the epistemologically significant point that knowing is not a picture-taking process; it does not consist of copying the external world. Indeed, quite the converse is true: knowledge is a process of mental activity that reconstructs the external world.

In this sense, a case can easily be made that what is known-both in terms of content and mental process-determines what is perceived. …it can be argued that comprehension determines perception.

Saied, Jacob, H., (1982). Piaget and Education: Aspects of a Theory. The Educational Forum, XLVI, pp. 221-237.

Similar ideas are also revealed elsewhere:

Maturana – “learning is not a process of accumulating representations of the environment; it is a continuous process of transformation of behavior through continuous change in the capacity of the nervous system to synthesize it – if man changes and lives in a changing frame of reference in a world continuously created and transformed by him “- then the fixed body of knowledge we hold up as the goal of education might not even exist.

From: Mercogliano, C, In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids’ Inner Wildness (Beacon Press 2007).

Mercogliano does not specify the exact source in his blog entry. He may have obtained this quote from this source he had mentioned earlier, cited here:

Maturana, H. R. (1980a). Autopoiesis: Reproduction, heredity and evolution In Zeleny, M. (ed.), Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures and Spontaneous Social Orders, AAAS Selected Symposium 55, Westview Press, Boulder, CO.

Do we really have an adequate definition for “intelligence”? These same authors suggest that we have a long way to go, and they provide a very provocative analysis for a starting point.

For a more in-depth analysis, one might wish to research the following concepts referred to above and described below:

Maturana & Varela fleshing out ideas of autopoiesis (self-making) – Prigogine & Capra – independently coined the term – self-organization: the intrinsic means by which living systems regulate themselves and evolve while in a continuous state of flux. ie: termites building nest – there is no externally conceived plan and no leader. The nest is autopoietic; in effect, it makes itself.    p. 31

Can anyone imagine that there would be ideas such as “curved space”, the space-time continuum, or the General and Special Theories of Relativity had Einstein not jumped through hoops, climbed trees, danced, or walked, run, and played in a carefree manner in wide open spaces as a child? Would any of the great mathematicians or physicists before or since have been able to formulate extraordinarily complex theories, or visualize in their “mind’s eyes” how they connect with inert mathematical formulae, without having lived a rich and active life with direct connections to the physical environment? (Mind’s eye is yet another metaphor that we understand if we possess vision.)

The precursors to the kind of limitless thought, imagination, and creativity that such great minds accomplish are most definitely the consequence of bodies exposed to a world that cannot be seen or experienced from the inside of a classroom.

It has been more than fifty years since various critics of our schools first complained that many educators (so-called) were treating education as a simple process of filling up empty heads with information, as if children were the “blank slates” on which teachers could imprint their special knowledge and as if knowledge were a tangible, identifiable, and determinate thing. Some see education and knowledge as a type of commodity to be purchased. Valiant efforts have been made over generations by many aware people to counteract that sort of pervasive misperception. However, success for those well-meaning people has been extremely elusive.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

                                                                                                            Socrates

One reason progress has been stymied repeatedly is because of the difficulty educators have with thinking of knowledge in accordance with the latest science. We have barely scratched the surface here. Their (pathetic) inability to trust children to seek (create) knowledge without prodding, browbeating, and coercion generates a massive mental block for them and everyone else. Attempts to frame it as something students can get from others without creating their own iterations typically fail. There are other reasons which must be discussed within a more elaborate framework, later, elsewhere.

Somatic Knowing – Knowing by the Body

“Knowing by the body, or “Somatic Knowing” is another useful and informative term for this sort of phenomenon. Jonathan C. Matthews, Professor of Education wrote about this as a serious issue for educators in 1998. Here are statements from his article:

Though a moment’s reflection makes plain the interdependence of the biological, the psychological, and the cognitive, our propensity for seeing and elaborating differences within the experiential continuum tends to lead us to believe and act as though the categories that we assign to these differences have independent, often oppositional, concrete identities. This mistake leads to the central, damaging error that the mental is separate from the physical. This deeply ingrained, mistaken notion causes educators to see bodily activity as a distraction from the dispassionately rational, objective observation and cogitation that are the supposedly necessary and sufficient conditions for human thought. Such misconceptions serve as the tacit rationale for anti-body and therefore miseducative-school traditions and practices.

Matthews, J. (1998). Somatic Knowing and Education. The Educational Forum, 62.

Amen. Amen. Amen! Mind and body are an inseparable unitary whole. Academics are still completely obsessed with and attached to a perception of cognition which is solely mental, rational, objective, and authoritatively sourced, however. They fret about the distractions caused by the physical world or by myriad interruptions and the students’ activities and bodies-in-motion. They jabber on with jargon about child-centered learning. But they invariably see unidimensional children who do not and cannot exist. The research never breaks through the authoritarian/bureaucratic barrier to be effectively applied.

There is an overwhelming amount of highly sophisticated research and academic literature on this still revolutionary orientation. However, it remains for the most part in circles far outside of the circle of educators and school administrators. The following is one more quote about somatic learning from one more paper which reminds of the relevance of this relatively new way of thinking and the failure to even begin to implement it in schools.

A somatic approach to education implies education that trusts individuals to learn from and listen to the information they are receiving from the interaction of self with the environment. Somatic or embodied knowing is experiential knowledge that involves senses, perceptions, and mind-body action and reaction. Western culture has been dominated by the separation of cognitive knowledge from embodied knowledge and the distrust of bodily knowing. Recent developments in mind-body research and feminist and postmodernist discourse have turned adult educators' attention to somatic learning.

From: Kerka, S., Somatic/Embodied Learning and Adult Education. Trends and Issues Alert.

​

Knowledge, in the still predominant view is presented as a set of facts that are principally immutable and objectively correct according to an accepted standard and consensus (usually by “experts”). This view is baked into the cake. However, that perception has serious flaws. The facts are clearly not set-in stone, despite attempts to make them uniform and compatible, and regardless of a perceived need to agree for pedagogical purposes.

If for example a biographer with a slight liberal bias and one with a mild conservative bias each write a biography of the same historical figure using the same records, letters, and interviews, they will inevitably differ in how they see, interpret, and portray the subject and the consequential events of the careers and lives of their subject, regardless of professional ethics and capabilities. Black and white and grey always emerge depending on a variety of factors.

Which one is right? Who should decide? How can we know, and what do we do when “experts” disagree? Must we trust a supposed “official” state approved curriculum designer with such fine discriminations and choices?

Even with respect to the great mathematicians and physicists and their monumental discoveries, there will always be gradations and shadings in how ideas are condensed and portrayed by themselves and by others as text or as formulae in books and records when certain aspects are broken down or analyzed for further understanding or for posterity. That anachronistic brand of pedagogic “knowledge” is often on some very shaky ground (one more handy metaphor which we all get because of physical experiences involving shaking or references to earthquakes). Interpretations invariably involve controversy and conflict, depending on where they intersect with the real world. Such pedagogy can only devolve into dogma which inhibits new knowledge when given that undeserved status.

Students, Like All of Us are Social Animals

The central tenet of this book is that there are corollaries to school attendance mandated by law which all lead to negative consequences for students. One such corollary is that there must be a top-down organization because force underlies the entire enterprise. Failing to appreciate how that force perverts every aspect of the experience has got us to a bad place. Attendance law is not just an inconsequential or incidental fact. It determines every aspect of the school experience and sets those lamentable things in stone.

One of the most sad and destructive consequences of this is the inexorable trend toward isolating students and preventing spontaneous interaction between them, which threatens to erode both the knowledge-based and policy-based authority of those in charge. It is a common complaint whenever one faces issues having to do with traditional schooling that students feel distinctively alienated, alone, and misunderstood, despite being surrounded by peers and having mostly empathetic and attentive teachers.

In the same vein as embodiment, which implicates the whole body in learning and development is the crucial role played by social interaction. In an article entitled, “The Social Construction of the Human Brain”, Leon Eisenberg, M.D. discusses how integral social interaction is to people of all ages. While he does not write specifically about education, his message is highly relevant to learning and teaching theories.

Dr. Eisenberg writes,                                           

There is no mental function without brain and social context. To ask how much of mind is biological and how much is social is as meaningless as asking how much of the area of a rectangle is due to its width and how much to its height or how much of the phenotype is due to genes (nature) and how much to environment (nurture).

Earlier in the article Dr. Eisenberg writes,

            …Biochemically, the brain modifies its own responsiveness to incoming stimuli.

He is talking about the newly discovered (1990’s) malleability of the neuronal connections. He then goes on to “The Ontogenetic Niche”.

Nature and nurture stand in reciprocity, not opposition. All children inherit, along with their genes, their parents, their peers, and the places they inhabit. …development unfolds in an ecological and social setting that, like its genes, is species-typical for the organism. The ontogenetic niche is a legacy that structures development, a crucial link between parents and offspring, an envelope of life chances.

Eisenberg, L. (1995). The Social Construction of the Human Brain. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152, pp. 1563 - 1572.

My reading of the article strongly suggests that the habitual and oppressive interference by teachers with the more organic and routine social exchanges between children in close proximity removes them effectively from “an ontological niche” that is absolutely essential for optimal healthy development. If students are engaged, their interactions will be instrumental in mutual discovery, and when concentration on a task or lecture is a voluntary choice, they will discourage distractions and interruptions themselves. (See “Tolstoy’s Essays on Education”, edited by Weiner.)

The “envelope of life chances” extends through school age, of course, and traditional schools are designed to rip apart that envelope and replace it with nothing much of personal value to the child. Punishing a child for “talking to her neighbor” in the adjacent seat is an insult, an injury, a crime, and a travesty.

Yet another study (below) confirms that, “cognitive and evaluative processes are always embedded in basic states of mood and episodes of bodily affection”. In other words, the common habit of thinking of emotions and rationality as being opposed or incompatible with each other is passé and harmful.

Social factors cannot be minimized or ignored without negative consequences. Feelings, emotions, and affective states are incredibly important in the learning and educational processes. These researchers also believe that emotions are less a consequence of thinking or cognition, than a source of it, if I have understood them correctly. I lack access to many of the full texts and have not been able for various reasons to read from beginning to end. They also say,

Existential feelings are of fundamental importance for the entire constitution of the social realm. They frame the background of our current affective states and also include feelings that concern social settings such as feeling generally respected or unwelcomed, confident or distrustful, and so on (Stephan 2012, 158). They modulate how we perceive and experience social encounters in the first place. The notion of existential feelings further elucidates the inseparability of cognitive processes and emotions and their intra- and interbodily interrelations. Contrary to the classical appraisal theory, cognitive evaluations do not precede or simply trigger the occurrence of emotional episodes (Lewis 2000, 41–42). Rather, cognitive and evaluative processes are always embedded in basic states of mood and episodes of bodily affection.

Tewes, Durt, Fuchs 2017 The Interplay of Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture

Knowledge MUST be created anew by each student and scholar. That is one of the facts of life. Some may find this disconcerting or confusing. It requires a different way of looking at education, school, and many of the edifices and traditions of our culture and society. So be it.

If children create knowledge, then to habitually and rudely repress their activity and connectivity to fill a supposed void with abstract information inhibits knowledge in their lives and in the world. A student is a scientist, a scholar, and a fount of knowledge in training. By trying too aggressively to give them knowledge, we inhibit their manufacturing of their own new version of knowledge and harm them (and society) in the process.

We can continue to undermine our most significant foundations for the future by following the dictates of an established intellectual and educational hierarchy, or we can acknowledge that things change continuously, along with the awareness, insights, interpretations, definitions, and formulations by which we each see the world and communicate our sight and insight to others. Our refusal to change and our failure to learn or to accept the science and insight which is available to us now in spades is a formula for catastrophe. To change any of this and all of this we must first change the laws which are the basis for how schools operate.

This next quotation is a clear statement of what I have also tried to convey in the pages of this chapter. It illustrates that these discoveries are relatively new in educational circles and that, despite their relevance and appeal to researchers, they are not finding their way into practice in schools at any level, except in unusual circumstances.

In this chapter I deal with a topic that has become a serious subject of educational theory and philosophy only recently, viz. the human body. As a rule, the very fact that learning and teaching are events in which we are involved as bodies, i.e. as people made out of ‘flesh and blood’, has been disregarded, if not repressed. If educationalists have paid attention to the physical dimension of human life at all, the body appeared in a stereotypical, negative way. This is, the body is regarded as an object of distrust that should be kept under control by installing harsh disciplinary measures. As of recently, however, a revaluation of human corporeality seems to have occurred, i.e. increasingly corporeality is taken to be an important factor one should take into account when theorizing education. As such the body has been (re)discovered by educational philosophers, even though in the day-to-day practice of learning and teaching it often remains forgotten.

Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014: Body and Education: Curriculum Perspectives and Shaping the Lived Body, Themed Issue, Zuzana Bánovčanová, Jan Slavík (Eds.)

The Body in Education, Journal of Pedagogy 1/14, pg. 5

SUMMARY:

It has often been said that knowledge is power. There is great truth in that statement. However, knowledge is not merely what we have been taught to believe. The following is my best summary for a definition.

Knowledge is an amalgam:

-          of the sum of information provided via symbols and language(s) to an individual, processed by that individual and accessible as memory or usable information.

-          of the perceived and intelligible second-hand discoveries and knowledge from others in the form of conceptual wholes, as conveyed through some comprehensible medium.

-          of “facts” and insights as discerned through perception and direct observation, research, and thorough analysis obtained from various fallible human or other sources for personal utilization, and

-          of words of wisdom and insight from those going before us, combined with the fresh wisdom, experience, perception, thought process, science, and feeling that we each generate continuously as sentient individuals doing our best to form particular understandings and a holistic and comprehensive worldview.

We each formulate our own answers to questions and problems in our personal world. To wish for some other way is to reject human nature. A curriculum which supplies all the answers to questions it has identified in advance deprives students of something precious.

Teaching is not about answering questions but about raising questions – opening doors for them in places that they could not imagine.” ~

Yawar Baig

Whatever we find “out there” in our travels or studies may have been intended to encapsulate the knowledge that someone else has accumulated. We are wise to do our utmost to preserve the genius of an Einstein, or a Newton, the Dali Lama, or the heroes of classical literature.

However, it is especially unwise to imagine that generations of children can absorb the knowledge of the leaders in various fields of endeavor with adequate precision and acuity and to become truly knowledgeable without having created their own personal knowledge that is exclusive to them first and that is to some extent non-transferrable or non-transmissible.

For the record, we have developed an incredibly complex and confounding set of beliefs and myths about schools and education over the millennia which are simply false. Our “systems” are dysfunctional in many respects. Many children are poorly served or badly harmed as a result.

The first lesson every child should receive in school is that they will be creating their own knowledge. They will own that knowledge and their education, and they will build on it for as long as they have a functioning brain. No one forces them to own what is integral and foundational.

We use our senses to “make sense” of the world. Our senses are the physical means by which we sense what is in our physical and sensory environment, which includes our mental and emotional environment, as well, and which must be translated within our brain/body as useful information. There is no wall of separation whatsoever between the physical body and the mind.

The reader’s senses, i.e., the five primary senses, and intuition or any other senses that exist, presumably by this point have sent a clear message to your brain after reading the above that all knowledge is indeed embodied. It should be clear that the framing of knowledge, which we have in schooling now as primarily disembodied, is not only in error, but extremely dangerous for the future of all people.

For each person’s body/mind, that specific knowledge is somewhat special, unique, and non-transferrable. It is part of memory and part of an awareness and a worldview which necessarily changes over time and at times, even moment to moment. This is the framework inside which the foundation of personal freedom and liberty and justice for all is poured. Knowledge is cumulative. But at each point in time, the individual must be trusted as a credible source unless proven otherwise.

There is something precious and sacred in respecting the individual’s capacity to understand and operate upon the world with as little interference and resistance as possible. The framers of our Constitution surely understood and embraced this fundamental concept even in the 18^th century when they placed a special premium on liberty. They did NOT exclude children. Democracy does not work if children do not have and fully experience maximum liberty.

While the neuroscience research discussed here is relatively new and revolutionary, many insightful observers and educators have previously understood well, if only intuitively, and have formerly tried over many generations to apply those same fundamental principles suggested by their novel revelations, only to meet phenomenal resistance and frustration from traditionalists. Power has always been in the hands of a small number of officials and bureaucrats whose main preoccupation has been keeping students in school and keeping them in line.

That resistance to the application of science and common sense in institutional settings comes primarily from the bureaucracy and from the authoritarian structures that exist primarily because of compulsory attendance laws. Until those counterproductive and unconstitutional laws are eliminated, no amount of learning or empirical studies will enable us to make meaningful changes to our institutions.

Attendance laws require institutions with built-in factors which preclude many of the conditions necessary for knowledge acquisition based on individual initiative as described herein. There is no way to substitute for initiative or to manufacture it under compulsion. There is no way to pretend that compulsion is not actually coercive, corrosive, paternalistic, and manipulative.

Without initiative, engagement is contrived and conditional. Initiative is the engine that drives knowledge acquisition, and knowledge acquisition further feeds initiative. Movement is essential. A healthy body and mind allow the embodiment of knowledge, which most of traditional schooling cannot help but compromise.

Education can and will be contaminated and diluted by people who try to impose a set of ideas and beliefs. Knowledge can and will be distorted by misinformation and delusions propagated, whether for good purposes or bad. This essential message regarding the ability and need children have to create knowledge cannot be delivered and made real to them when they know that they have been removed from society and involuntarily incarcerated in an isolated place specifically designed to deliver only what others have chosen to provide, and when their main obligation is to blindly follow orders, without proper incentives or visible and comprehensible justification.