Bariers to Knowledge

When my wife and I visited my late father's farm in Mchinji district, in the company of my mother, a relation of mine living on the farm insisted that we pick his eleven year old daughter, to go to school in Blantyre, where I live.

The girl, as it has turned out, is eager to lean, but, although she can just about read the local language, Chichewa, she can hardly speak a word of English, let alone read or write it. In an attempt to teach her the basics of English, I wrote a simple poem I had learnt 40 years previously in stadard 2, and asked her to read it. The response I got was intriguing - she simply burst into tears.

Her mind, her body, her whole sytems rejected the new knowledge. Come to think about it, we are like that to varying degrees. We rejectct new knowledge. And that is the reason why learning is usually a long, tideous process.

I see it in all training sessions that I conduct. Sometimes, I teach music reading to people that have not been exposed to musical notation all their life. The response I get from some trainees is one of near total rejection. I literally struggle to communicate even the simplest of musical concepts.

Knowledge is always packaged in a highly ordered pattern. The problem is that one needs to discover and unpack that pattern for them to relate to that knowledge. If the pattern is not discovered, the same knowledge will appear like unintelligible gibberish to the observer.

I once saw a fish seller in a market tearing off pages of paper from a Physics book and using them as wrappers for sun dried fish. There were a number of important formulae on those papages, but they did not mean a thing to the fish seller. Someone else would have taken the same book and gone ahead to build a nuclear reactor from its contents. But to the fish seller, it was all gibberish.

Learning involves lifting some barriers to the new knowledge. Now, to do that takes quite a bit of work and discipline. We all have these barriers; they are innate to our nature. The lazy or unexposed individuals will naturally fall behind, as others march ahead in the ongoing exercise of acquiring new knowledge.