Now if a teacher would say about this curve, “you see, the sound is in reality nothing but this vibration in the air,” it would be absurd. The results, then, will be something like the “air pressure curve.” What have they, and we, gained through such a curve? The answer may be obvious, but strangely enough I have not found it in any textbook, namely: we have gained exactly what remains of the sound for someone who cannot hear. That way it wobbles through the air until it reaches my ear.Īt a later point, these children will learn to record the wobbling at a place between drum and ear by means of a mechanical sound receiver. The air wobbles back and forth, and that air pushes the other air, and the air next to it, and so on. And how does it “carry”? Their conclusion after a long conversation and experiments: when I beat against the drum skin, it wobbles and the air is pushed away. Air “carries” the sound to us, and that takes time. At last they conclude: arriving later is due to the air. They check the skin of the drum with their eyes, fingers and tongues, they make their observations and say (according to the tape), “it hops and trembles, it trembles and tickles, it almost burns” (on the tongue). For hours they discuss why the sound of a distant jack hammer or of a drum lags so much behind the sighting of the movement. They have a teacher who tells them little (he doesn't talk them into anything) and has taught them to talk with one another and to stick to the point, to say everything they think, but also to think about what they say. Let's listen to a group of nine-year-old boys in the laboratory school of the University of Tübingen. When one impresses on someone that “music is really nothing more than vibrations in the air, warmth as such only movement of molecules, color in fact nothing but electromagnetic wavelength,” it will often happen that the person addressed will nod in agreement, albeit somberly. It is noticeable that this opinion is also not rare today. This can easily lead students to become prejudiced with the old argument about what has primacy: the things themselves (the first appearance, the phenomenal reality) or what we think about them, and over and above them, which means the mindscape of physics.įrom early on the accusation was leveled against physics that it was out to spoil our faith in the senses. Two hundred years ago, Pestalozzi - 36 years old at the time - wrote about it in a letter: “Schools bring judgments before people see and get to know things for themselves.” We risk getting caught in a common and old methodological temptation. We may lose our trustworthiness and credibility. In doing so we put our educational success at risk. It implies that we disrespect our own foundations and those of natural science. I'm convinced that the loss - or disappearance - of freely observed natural phenomena in the physics classrooms of our secondary schools and colleges is not merely a discarding of semblance and show. This is a remarkable finding when one considers how the planets stood around the cradle of physics during its infancy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nobody was there to point to the actual planet. I mean: the very thing, with the naked eye, outside. It is easy to see that only a very small percentage of physics students - five out of a hundred perhaps - have ever seen a planet in the sky or followed its course. The only thing that will be effective in all types of schools is, from the outset, to follow a basic principle and adhere to it strictly: understanding needs grounding in the phenomena. Such an assumption is questionable, both epistemologically and pedagogically, and if we want to prevent this kind of error from continuing, it won't be enough to try to protect a few high school seniors. It seems that most adults who have completed their secondary education take the constructs of physics to be the material or magical “causes” of natural phenomena. Translation by Jan Kees Saltet and Craig Holdrege. The latter publication was used for this translation, and the subheadings were added by us. 90-104) and again in Erinnerungen für Morgen (by Martin Wagenschein, Weinheim: Beltz, 1983, pp.135-153). It was re-published in the book Naturphänomene sehen und verstehen (by Martin Wagenschein and H. It was first published in the journal Der mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Unterricht (1977, vol. This is a condensed version of a longer essay written in German in 1975. The Primacy of Unmediated Experience Martin Wagenscheinįrom In Context #20 (Fall, 2008) | View article as PDF
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