What is the Difference between Knowing and Understanding?
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February 22, 2013 •
I recently read a discussion on LinkedIn about this question and it reminded me of why the arts are so important to preparing children for their future.
Knowing in its traditional North American definition, means being familiar with something. Having the facts in your mind. You know how to drive a car, but do you understand how the car works? You know your husband, but do you understand him?
Understanding involves connecting the facts with a context and grasping how, when and why something exists or occurs. I think most of us know more than we understand. There are also, of course, things we will never fully understand.
One of Einstein’s jewels of wisdom was that, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Knowing is just the beginning, and understanding is the end goal.
How do we promote understanding?
I believe we understand through experience. There are some things you cannot understand until you experience them. For example, when I studied statistics in University, I practiced using formulas and interpreting results with random sets of data. However, it was not until I collected my own data and had to use the formulas to interpret what the data meant, that I began to understand how these formulas worked. As part of my thesis I had to write an explanation and do a presentation about the wider implications of my results.
Because the data was something I cared about and had worked hard to collect, I began to see the power that statistics had to change the way we see the world. Before this, I had seen statistics as something very boring that I was forced to take in school. If I had not experienced the practical implementation of statistics, I would have never gained an understanding of how important they are.
Art and Experience
Arts education, although it may not be traditionally defined as experiential education, fits the definition very well. When you are engaging in arts education you are learning by doing. Experience with the facts helps to cultivate understanding. You are increasing your understanding of the way things work by engaging with ideas and materials in many different ways.
Arts education encourages understanding by encouraging experimentation and trial and error. This process encourages children to take what they know and ask, “what does that mean?” “why?” and “how do we communicate the facts to our audience?”
Designing a Stage Set
Let us take, for example, a set design project. As a group of young people begin this project they already know how to paint and they know that their sets will create a mood for the show, but it is through the process of creating the set, that they begin to understand how choices of colour and brush stroke change the feeling of the set and how the set interacts with what is happening on the stage.
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The distinction you make between knowing and understanding is consistent with research I’ve been reading about the brain! Multisensory inputs increase the probability that neurons in different parts of the brain will “wire together” and “fire together” (Hebbs Law). Ray Kurzweill, one of the pioneers of the AI movement, in How to Create a Mind, has argued convincingly that multidimensional connections between entire brain modules, as opposed to individual neurons, are what enable the neocortex to interpret sensory inputs as unified wholes in a flash of insight. The far too common habit of teaching one-dimensionally, with closed contruction question formats, single right answers, often at developmentally inappropriate levels of abstraction, is probably why American students have so much trouble with Algebra, which according to Van de Walle requires a
relational understanding of math. Designing a theatre set involves the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Moreover, excitement of putting together a production should activate the Amygdala, providing emotional reasons for students to pay attention. What you are saying makes total sense.
I recently have been reading a book “Playmaking with Children” by Winifred Ward.
Here is an excerpt from the book: “A child learns best what he experiences. Though we still may see in too many classrooms a dependence on verbal symbols, it is safe to say that leaders in the elementary field have long since accepted the idea that book-learning means little unless it can be related to the child’s experience. Classroom experiences need to be planned carefully to give the child new understandings. The school should ‘seek to provide children with experience in sensing and attacking problems, appropriate to their age and maturity, so their actions are based on creative thinking, on enlightened self-interest, and on a scientific approach to problem-solving’.”
First Edition Publication Date: 1947!!!!!
The words in this book were considered modern at that time. She had a positive attitude that the arts would finally be accepted as a necessary strategy to teaching children.
50 + years and not quite there yet.