About Genesis

A very interesting principle that helps to shape education is the principle of Genesis. The principle of Genesis can be seen in the development of the human fetus. It follows all the stages of human evolution but the process takes nine months instead of millions of years.

The most interesting scientists that researched genesis can be found in Russia. They lived in the time of Stalin and tried to cope with Marxism.

Their names are Lev Vigotsky, Yury Lotman’s (the Semiosphere), Vernadsky‘s (the Biosphere, now called Gaya) and of course Bakhtin‘s (the Logosphere). All of them felt that we are reaching a new “jump” in the genesis of our “systems” (thinking, living and commun-ication).

Vigotsky believed in the Genesis of Education. To educate a person we have to teach him all the important stages in the development of a certain science. The only thing we have to do is detect the Major Events or “Jumps” or “Phase Transitions” so we can speed up the process.  

Vigotsky argued that the human evolution is largely connected to the development of tools. If we want to learn more about the Major Jumps of  human culture we have to look at the genesis of our instruments including our “tools of the mind”.
 
The other important issue of Vigotsky is Context.
 
People learn when they are operating in the same context the science is applied. The major learning process is Exploration, making mistakes and learning from the mistakes.
Education is only successful if the teacher stretches his pupil a little bit. He (or she) has to Push (Challenge) the learner into a higher State of Understanding to make the next step and to explore a new territory of Understanding.

Bahktin, Vigotsky, Vernadsky and Lotman all believed in a Cyclic system that suddenly moves to a new level. At this moment we would classify their science as Chaos Theory.

If Bahktin, Vernadsky and Lotman and Vigotsky are right we have to prepare ourselves for a new step (Gaya, The Semiosphere, The Logosphere, The Internet).

This step will bring Cooperation on a New scale, Earth.It is not very clear if the new cooperative structure will guide us of if we will guide the structure ourselves.

I think the first thing is happening. We are already confronted with the ”New Wave” and the Wave is increasing his strength. It will “Blow Away” all the Old structures like a Tsunami.

If we look at human cultures the same pattern is visible. We have-to move (!) to certain stages to reach the next stage of development. We cannot enforce Democracy on a culture that is in the stage of the Kingdom or the Tribe.

The same happens in the field of economics and the market. The capitalists are enforcing free trade but they protected their own trade when they were in another stage of their development. We have to accept that the development countries are able to protect their trade because we (the West) did the same thing long ago.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Biology, Completed, Cycles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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