LEARNING (Systemic)
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 1894 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Human sciences, Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
A set of ways and means to acquire an integrated understanding of ourselves, our society, our environment, and all the significant interrelations which connect them.
What we need — all of us — is a meta-knowledge, a way to look at this complex world in all its stances and to understand what is going on and what may, possibly, happen.
Let us however not be blinded by high-sounding “meta-knowledge”. Many of our forefathers did possess at least something of it, passed along by their cultural heritage as “popular wisdom” (fables, proverbs, myths, scriptures, etc.). These tales and sayings proposed, in a covert way, quite general interpretations for many events. This is precisely what our actual instructional and educational process does not offer anymore. Our excessively specialized and micronized knowledge bars us the understanding of global situations, which is precisely what we must recuperate.
We all became all-out mecanicists-voluntarists easily devoid of common sense. The dominant scientific paradigm led us to conceive and understand everyone of our projects (material, personal or social) as a rather simple “machine” that we construct on the base of some linear cause-effect principle in order to reach some clear-cut and defined result. Most of us never doubt that such aims will be necessarily attained, just in the way we did plan our project. Nevertheless, we now have thousands of examples of precisely the opposite.
This is because we ignore, at least in our practice, nonlinear multiple connections, and have a very deficient perception of time dimensions (which leads us to unwarranted extrapolations).
Systemic learning should aim at the creation of a good understanding of every kind of complex systems.
Generally speaking, this suppose the intuitive and later on, the rational appreciation of their constitution, inner workings, their transformations and interrelations among themselves and with their respective environments.
General systemics and cybernetics offer an ever widening set of isomorphies, models and methods to obtain such results.