Today at Shippensburg University I attended a fascinating talk by scholar Dr. Joshua Eyler, who presented on his new book _How Humans Learn_ (you can see him on the second photo). Eyler spoke about the ways science and evolution can help us best understand ways to obtain new knowledge.
The aristocratic clergy writing books at the turn of the eleventh century learned information the same way our ancestors from 200,000 years ago did, and the same way we do today.
This image is of a diagram by Byrthferth, a Medieval monk and scholar from Ramsey, England (d. 1020). It is from his _Enchiridion_, which was a sort of instructional manual that elaborated on many different subjects that Early Medieval scholars thought needed to be understood.
Byrthferth wanted to help his readers learn. This diagram shows a typical view of the cosmology from the Middle Ages: namely, that the human-sized universe was paralleled in the greater macrocosm. (Ancient Chinese and Ancient Hindu belief systems also taught this, incidentally.) The inner circles each have a compass direction written in Greek: east (anathole), west (disis), north (arcton), and south (mesembrios). When read in the sign of the cross, the first letter of each word spells out “Adam,” the first man in the Christian tradition of Byrthferth and his contemporaries. By deliberately associating different arenas of knowledge — the cardinal directions, the macro/microcosm, Greek, and Christian belief — and presenting the information in a sort of cryptic puzzle, readers get to play with the knowledge, and in the process of figuring it out, learn about it.
In what ways are we most successfully learning today?
Source(s): British Library, UK, Becky Lawton, “Learning and Education in Anglo-Saxon England.” Image is public domain, MS BL Harley 3667, f. 8r .
