Telesis "...an ancient Greek word signifying the achievement of a steady progress towards an objective through careful planning & the intelligent use of resources"
Learning is a process of constant adaptation to one's environment sustained by internal intellectual mechanisms responding to messages transmitted from our senses. It is also a process which results from people probing their environment as a result of internally motivated actions. The response to such actions provides yet further input to the learning process.
Charles Darwin
Darwin's paradox
In the Frank Sulloway's book, "Born to Rebel - Birth Order, Family Dynamics & Creative Lives", there is considerable evidence relating the ability to apply knowledge and the uncovering complex relationships to birth order. To bring this statement into focus a citation made by Frank Sulloway is useful. This is a passage from a letter from Charles Darwin to his son in 1871 (E. Darwin, 1915, 2:207) in which he states:
"I have been speculating last night what makes a man discover of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever - much cleverer than the discoverers - never originate anything."
The mundane interpretation of Darwin's observation is that those who know more seem to see less whereas those who know less seem to see more. But this interpretation is far too simplistic simply because it is on the basis of individuals having detected hitherto undetected patterns that many major scientific breakthroughs have been achieved. In other words those who are have been "judged" to know less in fact knew a lot more than was realized.
Reference: Page 201, Chapter 21, "Individual Identities" in "The Briton's Quest for Freedom - Our unfinished journey", McNeill, H.W., HPC.
Knowledge acquisition a unique process
Each person from birth and throughout their life travel in time along a unique pathway. This cannot be described by statistical analysis of the conventional form but rather only on the basis of recording the specificity of each person's experience. This specificity can be described on the basis of locational-state theory which can, for example, explain why an intelligent child might not pass a test at a specific age and yet a less gifted child would pass the test and be labelled as "clever" or "intelligent".
Constrained and free acqusition of knowledge
Quite often "taught" individuals and those who are subjected to rote learning can do outstandingly well in formal tests. On the other hand there are individuals whose personal culture is one of learning as opposed to having information and knowledge presented to them by a teacher in a pre-defined sequence, according to assumed standards and within a specific time frame.
A predominant determinant of this type of difference between individuals is a child's birth position within the children of a family. There is considerable evidence to show that rote-based learning inhibits discovery because it is devoid of context which can only be established by understanding the logic and structure of a domain; this takes time. On the other hand, rote content becomes more than self-evident to those who have taken more time to learn of the logic and the structure of a given domain and thereby understand its context better.
Learning systems
Learning systems can take on very different formats. Some run somewhat like an automated process where the outcome of a lesson (process) is assessed to measure the degree to which lesson content has been memorised (internalised) and understood. On the other hand, there are many individuals who are better adapted to a process where they are told what the learning objective is and then provided with the resources to discover for themselves how to obtain the objective. There is no scientific evidence to demonstrate that one approach is superior since appropriateness depends upon the individual culture of each person and this has no direct relationship to intelligence.
