As, many of you know I am a teacher and therefore I study
education and knowledge. The point of being a teacher is that you create and
disseminate knowledge. My job depends on the transfer of knowledge. This means
that knowledge comes from somewhere and gets transferred to another place (my
lessons to their brains). There are a number of perspectives about knowledge.
We can have moral knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, factual knowledge, procedural
knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge. Each of these is learned experientially.
There is a missing type of knowledge though; it rarely gets
attention or is studied academically. The one that is missing is innate
knowledge. As a teacher, I believed that knowledge is gained through
experience. For a student to learn, for anyone to learn something, they need to
read it, hear it, and ultimately experience it (a teacher generates learning
experiences for their students). Basically, my senses interpret the outside
world and put it in my head and learning takes places and knowledge is gained.
The point of having knowledge that just exists is ludicrous and defies logic.
But this account of knowledge building does not account for a priori knowledge. I know there are
reflexes. (Reflexes aren’t vis-à-vis knowledge; they are more mechanical than anything)
The question can be: how can you learn something, if you don’t perceive it through
your senses? Innate knowledge did not compute for me because, I know, that
knowledge is a learned experience that comes from the outside in. How can a
person know something without ever experiencing it?The interesting part about innate knowledge is where does it come from. Why did this flood of reflection come over me? Well, I never heard a baby coo before; what is a coo? I’ve seen the word in books, but when I heard my son coo, I knew instantly what it was. Instant exhilaration swept through me, even though the coo lasted for a second. That sound is in my memory. Somehow, I knew what it was.
Having a child makes you think and see things differently. Maybe
there is a store of knowledge in my head that I am unaware of. It makes you
think how does it get in your head. DNA can only contain a finite about of
information, how does innate knowledge transfer? It defies the whole notion of a priori. I guess it is like Bluetooth;
I don’t know how it works, but it does and I am amazed and grateful that it
does.
