To live as a human being is to live through the
existence of others, and in relation to others. Established
before us and bound to continue after us, culture absorbs
newcomers who not only begin their existence through their
parents, but who also get to know culture and to adapt to it, or
revolt against it.
Education starts with the experience of the absent, the
non-immediate, the successive. In other words, it implies
experiences resulting from comparisons, imitation of actions,
and formation of individual patterns corresponding to human
biological characteristics. Only much later comes the use of
language, of adjectives, adverbs, and the generation of
conventions and metaphors, some part of the body of literacy,
others part of other languages, such as the visual. With the
constitution of the family, education begins, and so does
another phase in labor division. The initial phase probably
marked the transition from a very small scale of nomadic tribal
life to the scale within which language settled in notation and
eventually in writing. The generality of sequences, words,
phonetics, nouns, and actions was reached in the practical
experience of writing. The language of drawings, resulting from
different experiences and supporting the making of objects,
complemented the development of writing. When the scale of
humankind corresponding to incipient literacy was reached,
literacy became the instrument for imparting experiences
coherent with the experience of language and its use.
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