Interest and Learning

By Martin Odudukudu

In Interest and Learning, we advance a theory of interest which says interest is neither about allowing students to do what they like nor about imposing tasks upon students. Rather, we point out that interest is about facilitating students to see advantage in relevant tasks. We define interest not in terms of tendencies students express when a student sees and object and seeks to secure it; rather, we define interest in terms of tendencies a student expresses when he finds self in the midst of object/events, and student seeks advantage among events. Thus, we define interest in accordance with original conceptions back of the word interest which has its roots in the Latin or old French language. In other words, we define interest based upon what the French were thinking about when they coined the word, interest.

In French, the original word is inter esse, meaning to be in the midst/center of ones objects or problems. What a reader of this book will find is that one in the midst of object/events, without thinking, is more or less like another object, with little or no knowledge of the events. In the midst of objects, one seeks to extricate self from objects/problems, therefore, one thinks. One begins to differentiate/characterize objects and reclaim self from objects. Differentiating and/or characterizing objects in order to extricate self from them is properly captured in Descartes popular phrase "I think, therefore, I am." In this book, the reader will find that thinking not only differentiates self from objects, but also that thinking helps to defines relationship among object. In other words, thinking that differentiates self from objects (relates to interest) is not the same as thinking that defines relationships among object (relates to desire). The former seeks to determine advantage through concepts but the latter seeks to secure an advantage through objects.

Grasping concepts of person differentiating/characterizing objects/problems in order to extricate self from objects/problems is almost impossible especially because most empiricists believe that human beings are essentially objects; empiricists cannot see how an object thinks and to thus differentiate itself from other objects. The result is that a correct and functional definition of interest has been obscured. Many empiricists do not believe that human thinking is unique and/or is different from contingent occurrences. In this book, we expound a theory of thinking that point out that thinking relating to interest differs from thinking that relating to desire. The former determines an advantage through concepts and the latter secures an advantage through objects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483624310

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Copyright © 2013 by Martin Odudukudu.

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Rev. date: 05/23/2013

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Contents

Introduction

A Problem of Empiricist Psychology

Empiricist Philosophy

Empiricist View of Advantage

Interest and Objective Determination

Chapter One   Empiricist View of Interest

Thinking and Interest

Developmental (Personal) and Situational Interest

Interest Viewed as a Developmental Phenomenon

Interest

Thinking

Learning and Thinking

Human Learning

Chapter Two   Human and Animal Learning

Object-to-Object Interactions

Objective Learning

Objective Content of Inner Sense

Subject and Object of Inner-Sense Interactions

Learning and Human Capacities

Pure Thinking/Determination

Human Learning and Self-consciousness

Chapter Three   Lay Definition of Interest

Fixed Objects of Interest

Chapter Four   Etymology of Interest

Objective and Subjective Thinking

Interest and Human Tendencies

Thinking and Interest

Chapter Five   Thinking and Learning

Insider Epistemology

Consciousness

Objective, Subjective, or Pure

Chapter Six   Interest Example

Thinking and Determined Actions

Pleasure and Pain

Types of Thinking

Object and Purpose of Interest

Chapter Seven   Objective Task Situation

Task Advantage

Task Situations

Objective/Subjective Thinking

Objective, Subjective, and Pure Thinking

Interest and Pure Thinking

Objective and Subjective Task Format

Task Thinking

Goal Thinking

Elements of Pure and Objective Thinking

Chapter Eight   Actual and Virtual Situations

Functions of Thinking in Interest

Interest Development

A Fixed Self and a Fixed Object of Self

The Object Sought and the Self That Must Be Gratified

Chapter Nine   Elements of Interest

Continuous Interest

Actual and Virtual Task Situations

Chapter Ten   Thinking and Learning

Insider Epistemology

Consciousness

Objective, Subjective, or Pure

Chapter Eleven   Object-to-Object Interactions

A Result of Objective Interactions

Objective Content of Inner Sense

Subject and Object of Inner-Sense Interactions

Learning

Thinking May Be Objective, Subjective, or Pure

Pure and Objective Thinking

Benefits of Pure Thinking

Learning and Thinking

Chapter Twelve   Concept Development

Cognitive Types

Elements of Thinking

Attributes of an Occurrence

Interest and Cognition

Introduction

S tudents have too many occurrences that can hinder their learning efforts. Many students do not learn well because they do not see the relevance of assigned tasks; consequently many students do not develop or cannot learn to develop interesting or learning tasks for themselves. Many learning theorists believe that having an interest is equivalent to having an object that is pleasing, fun, or enjoyable. They believe that a task time is the time to sugarcoat a difficult task and trick a student into doing difficult and unpleasant work. To these theorists, one who is engaged in an enjoyable or interesting task does not exert himself/herself. Therefore, in order to change the unpleasantness of learning situations and make them pleasant or interesting, they prescribe learning processes where fun and pleasant things are given out as rewards to students to elicit and capture the students’ interests.

Students do not have equal means to take advantage of learning opportunities in the classrooms. A group of students may operate in the same classrooms and have the same learning opportunities, but they do not have equal access to develop and express their interests. Students engage in tasks for various reasons, including a wish to fulfill a promise, please a family member, be with a friend taking the same class, even pass a test, and so on. A student who engages in a task for a reason other than because he/she sees a personal advantage in it does not determine an advantage of a learning task. Engaging a task for a reason other than because one sees an advantage in it is equivalent to giving up the opportunity to develop and express interest, position self to gain an advantage inherent in task, and achieve a desirable growth. Conversely, engaging in a task because one sees a personal advantage in it is equivalent or due to having being in the midst of elements (problems), engage in identifying and determining optimum advantage, and to extricate self from these elements; that is, to develop techniques, and methods to secure such a determined advantage and achieve a desirable growth in so doing.

In interest, self (an interested subject) is conscious or aware of an advantage (an object of advantage) to self. Here, one (self) would have received and become conscious of another in relations to self. To become conscious of another, self would have been affected and would have had and deploy a means of being at one with another and of sharing an identity with another. This means cannot necessarily be an object; for an object must be characterized as an object in order to represent it as such. One must have a capacity to penetrate into and share oneness or identity with another, not necessarily an object in order to characterize another as an object. In other words, it is in so as self is affected that an occurrence may be characterized as such, but in characterizing and representing an object, one (self) may be operating from an objective or pure (spiritual) level of (consciousness) knowledge. For, without a capacity to penetrate into and share oneness/identify with another and to characterize another as an object, self is uniquely itself, unexpressed and undifferentiated.

The point here is that one (self) realizes itself only in its (capacity) to relate and generate attribute it ascribes to occurrences and to represent occurrences. Self does not exhaust itself in representing an object; self unravels or seeks to unravel itself by determining itself in relations to occurrences, going from one occurrence to another, characterizing them. However, because a representation of an occurrence (through which self unravels its nature) in relations to self is undetermined, in so far as a representation of an occurrence is not an absolute and/or does not fully satisfy a representation of self. Therefore, one who must express itself must seek another occurrence in due time. Accordingly, an occurrence, in so far as it is seen as an advantage, will sustain attention, and it is described as interesting. An occurrence is interesting in the extent it can be seen as means to express itself; that is, as means to gain an advantage. In other words, in self-expression, one seeks advantage in an occurrence that one can unravel. Otherwise, one must move on; one moves from one occurrence to another and one is said to express interesting. Accordingly, in an interest an advantage of an occurrence/object reveals itself or facilitates occurrences, determination, character and characterization of another.

Many of the difficulties we have in understanding students’ interest are because many theorists conceive interest as due to natures and/or effects of external objects. Teachers who believes that interest is due to external object are often found to also believe that students learn better if they could have enough external rewards like candies, cookies and/or pencils. However, a student who is seeking to secure an object or making another person happy/agreeable, without having to first determine an advantage in such action, may express the same tendencies as a student who has determined an advantage; however, such a student could not be expressing an interest. A student who engages in a task to get candy or for the sake of securing an object or of making another person happy/agreeable, without having to determine an advantage in such action, like a student who determines an advantage may also find self f in the midst of elements. However, unlike a student who is determining an advantage, a student who is securing an advantage has a fixed object. Such a student might be learning to placate a sweet tooth and not how to extricate oneself from the elements of a learning situation. The student may not be figuring out an object that is good enough for self; therefore, when such students must operate independently, all preceding gains may not properly connect with his/her efforts. For example, a student may spend much time learning mathematics for a purpose other than his/her interest—say, to please his/her parents. However, when the parents are no longer alive, the student may find mathematics not to be useful to him/her, especially now that he/she really wants to be a linguist or an English Language Arts teacher. One may say that in such a situation, the growth achieved in studying mathematics does not reinforce itself.

A student who engages in learning tasks independently of his/her interest supplants self with another focus or object. A student who engages in learning mathematics to please a family member, for example, may lose such a family member and, therefore, may no longer have a reason or see an advantage to bear the continuing stress of learning the same subject. Similarly, a student who seeks candy as a reward for engaging in a learning task may not remain with such a task if he/she no longer has desire for candy. Accordingly, teachers who neglect students’ interest and who motivate students with external rewards may be helping students to grow in the wrong direction. For when the students no longer have desire for objects that a teacher used to motivate them, the students may find that what they learned during the deceptive motivation may be unrelated to what they now truly want to do. Therefore, skills gained in one situation without interest may not connect with or reinforce skills required to achieve goals and excel.

*     *     *

Many students in our schools have interests in many things and develop in different but uncoordinated directions. With a class of twenty students, for instance, many teachers find that they may have to do twenty different things during instructional time in order to adequately attend to the twenty students. In other words, the questions many teachers are often faced with are: if twenty students express twenty different interests, how does a teacher determine a common trend among these interests so as to engage the twenty students in a common activity and in learning the subject matter? If in-school and out-of-school interests that students have are not the same, what can a teacher do to reduce students’ divided efforts? These are some the questions many teachers are consciously or unconsciously faced with as they strive to help students to learn.

The result of not answering these questions well is that we do not have a clear functional definition of interest. Many teachers may have good intentions to teach well, but without a clear understanding of student interest, their good intentions do not help us much. Many students do not grasp concepts of a subject matter. A teacher may prepare a good lesson plan and teach well, yet many of our students are still unable to grasp and own concepts of the subject matter. The main reason for this is that many teachers do not quite differentiate student interest from desire and are not able to reach out enough to students’ levels of interest and help students to understand and justify the efforts they deploy to accomplish learning tasks. These happen too frequently; students increasingly lose interest in learning activities, and teachers do not facilitate and reinforce student learning skills. Therefore, many students perform poorly in independent tasks and/or tests.

Many students who graduate from our schools sometimes end up never able to develop their interests; they are never able to discover their callings through which they could have made a difference to others and in their lives. Many educators too often take student interests for granted. They neglect processes through which they could help students to master experiences. Therefore, many students bounce from one unconsummated and unclear experience to another, and some are never able to gain stability. Those who become aware earlier enough that the educational processes do not and will not help guide or get them in the direction they want to go often seek to adjust; but not knowing how, they break rules, they grope. They become nonchalant toward learning and they often engage in disruptive activities. They join gangs and frequently engage in fights. Those who are indifferent or unaware of whether or not they are receiving the help they need struggle, but they never really get excited about learning.

Instead of students’ interest, many educators often take the amount of quietness a teacher maintains in a classroom as a standard of whether or not the students are learning. They assume that students in a quiet classroom are learning but that students in an active (a seemingly noisy class) classroom are not. However, students in a quiet classroom may appear to be learning or expressing interest, but such students may not be learning the subject matter at all. While many of the students may be quiet because they are responding to threat of the negative consequences of school rule violations, others may be quiet because it is a group thing to do. Nevertheless, a teacher of a quiet classroom may congratulate oneself, thinking he or she is doing a good job. However, a teacher of a quiet classroom may not be helping students to develop increased interest in learning. Keeping students quiet in a classroom, in and of itself, may be good, but it is not nearly good enough. Helping students to determine and develop interest, though difficult, is required of a true or good teacher.

A student may choose to be quiet in a classroom because other students are quiet; such a student may not necessarily be learning. The student may simply be responding to an event or occurrence in a situation. Such a student is said to express a situational interest (Krapp 1992). Conversely, one may have a personal interest, or interest in which events in a situation correspond to ones in which an individual predetermined advantage. Accordingly, situational and personal interests may correspond to in-school and out-of-school interests. Here, an out-of-school interest would correspond to a personal interest in the sense that an individual would have had the opportunities to dwell upon the subject matters of an out-of-school concern and determine related advantages. But an in-school interest would correspond to a situational interest in the sense that an individual would not have had the opportunities to dwell upon the subject matter of a situational occurrence or concern. In other words, a student who has interest in mathematics may also have interest in gang-related activities. If his/her teachers do not know how to promote one above the other interest, the student would be at risk of becoming a gangster but not a mathematician.

*     *     *

Teaching students without considering students’ interests may encourage them to address current difficulties, but it may not be encouraging students to determine the nature of current difficulties/problems and to learn to understand them. A teacher may consciously help students acquire a capacity required to function in a grade level, in a present situation, but such a teacher would be addressing a learning problem, not an educational one.

Common sense easily guides us in this instance. For example, if a student is being bullied, common sense tells us to address the bullying first before teaching a subject matter. Similarly, if a student is deficient in a language of instruction, a teacher best helps the student acquire efficiency in the language before teaching the subject matter. However, a teacher with a student who only wants to study one subject and not another—play basketball or learn English but not mathematics—but without the wherewithal to educate such a student, may need more than common sense. This could be a case where either a teacher has failed to learn the science for educating a child, or the science was not available in the first place.

A teacher may help a student remove an obstacle that prevents learning and helps the student to learn more. A student may learn or develop a skill in a specific subject/area but not acquire the means to ride on such skill to succeed in another subject area or endeavor. In other words, there is a difference between task skill and task cognition. There is a difference between task skill, or a developed proficiency achievable by constantly and repeatedly engaging a given task, and cognitive skill, or proficiency achieved by constantly continually determining personal advantages. In contrast to task skill, cognitive skill is a necessary precursor to self-motivation. A student who must (encourage himself to) remain with a task requires cognitive skills. Cognitive skill is required to find and determine a need to developing task skill.

One may be motivated by a physical and/or objective reward to develop a task skill, but without cognitive skills, one does not develop skills beyond demands of such a physical reward. A student with a task skill may be motivated because of such skills to engage a task, but a student without cognitive skill will not see any further advantage or reason to be (self) motivated and thus to develop further skills. Accordingly, a task skill leads to connecting with and/or to task through knowledge about how to navigate problems of the task. Cognitive skills, on the other hand, help to connect with task by giving an insight about a possible advantage of task. With cognitive skills, one gains an insight of a personal advantage. Accordingly, a student is encouraged to seek, practice, and develop skills.

When learning is not consciously directed to awaken a learner’s capacity to motivate oneself, and where self-motivation is an unconscious development, one may not know how and why one is motivated to engage a given task. Thus, a student may develop skills in a subject matter, but the student may not know how or why. Therefore, such a student may not be able to equally encourage himself to succeed in another subject area. According to Dewey (1943), one may not be certain about the direction of growth of the student. In fact, a student operating without a conscious connection to his/ her interest may find another subject matter to be impossible or frustrating. Such a student may develop skills in a subject matter or in an area of endeavor, yet unable to engage in a task in another. A student may like basketball or mathematics, yet unable to engage in tasks in science classes or in other areas. Consequently, a teacher may help a student to acquire an ability to function in a present situation, in a subject matter, or in a grade level, but not help the student to develop cognitive skills or a connection to tasks that engender continuous cognitive growth. Accordingly, such a teacher would be addressing a learning problem, but not an educational one, and the student would be learning how to address a present problem, but not a personal one.

A Problem of Empiricist Psychology

Teaching students to define and handle problems in their environments differs from teaching students to handle teacher-defined problems. In the former, a teacher helps students learn about the nature of the students’ environment. Students especially learn that their environment does not remain the same, but that they can determine their concerns, and that this fact remains constant. Students learn to take seriously and develop the only thing they have that is constant, that they can fall back upon, and not their environment and/or problems, which may not remain the same. Consequently, they develop capacities to independently define and address problems. In the latter, the teacher defines and determines the subject matter and how to learn it. Here, however, students learn the subject matter as if they will encounter such situation again in the future. There is an assumption that if the student can address present problems of the subject matter, then they can accordingly address future problems.

Present and future problems, however, are very unlikely to remain the same. In the past, we had horse-drawn carriages; therefore, we needed people who could nurture horses. Now we have cars. We need engineers, not horse breeders. The skills required to handle past problems do not necessarily apply to the present. This may be extended to say that a present event does not serve as carbon copies of a future, and therefore to claim that there is no uniformity in nature.

This is not a new concept in education. Many researchers have written extensively about this idea in different ways. Dewey, in Interest and Experience, pointed out that we drill students to imbibe predigested ideas, and we thereby neglect to help students develop