In this summary article, Psychologists Show Experience May Be The Best Teacher For Infants, we read:
Researchers have found that infants who had an opportunity to use a plastic cane to get an out-of-reach toy were better able to understand the goal of another person’s use of a similar tool than were infants who had previously only watched an adult use a cane to retrieve a toy.
This result agrees with the Thomistic position, including my truer-to-Thomas existential version and also the pragmatic version of Walter J. Freeman as discussed in these earlier blog entries: What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? and What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Existentialism. We shape our minds by active responses to our environments and to greater parts of our world as we learn to think abstractly. When we’re responding to an environmental need to heat our house, we learn how to use a wedge-ax to split wood with short verbal instructions from our father and then a lot of practice. After several sessions of exhausting effort, we can learn to use such a tool in a more efficient and sustainable way. On the more abstract level, we shape our minds properly by, for example, reading a worthwhile book, maybe on American foreign policy under FDR, in an interactive way, pushing that non-present author to answer difficult questions and imagining ourselves in the place of Herbert Hoover or Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Chiang Kai-shek.
This is one of the problems with classroom instruction as currently practiced. It’s a passive and non-effective way of learning in which the over-burdened teacher is trying to push pre-processed knowledge into the heads of thirty students of varying talents and interest and maturity. This is also a problem with any teaching efforts of the various science or history or religious channels on television. I know some who try to interact with the programs they watch, taking notes and writing down questions to look into or to discuss with friends, but those viewers are few and far between. This passiveness is also a problem with so much of our popular literature which doesn’t engage and challenge a reader even in the way of higher-quality mind-candy such as Agatha Christie novels.