In Your Own Words
We only begin to understand what we have heard when we go beyond the words of the message and let our new understanding interact with our experiences in inexpressible ways.
Again from the Instruction of the Imagination:
It is crucial to see . . . that the end result of RECONSTRUCT—a mental representation, in the mind of the listener, of the speaker's complete message—is only a temporary stage on the way toward the understanding of the speaker's intent. It is only in the last stage, IMAGINE, that the listener must try to meet the challenge—the pragmatic challenge—of figuring out what the speaker tried to convey. The listener has to reconnect the signifieds of the reconstructed message, and their semantic relationships, to their experiential clusters; re-analogize what was originally digitalized by the speaker; re-contextualize what was de-contextualized; and bring back to the private domain of experience what was originally translated into the language of social agreement. . . .
Linguistic comprehension is thus made possible by the conventions of language, but it is also, at the very same time, totally dependent on the ability of the listener to go beyond the conventions, to figure out what it was that the speaker had to reduce, digitize, and stereotype, in order to be able to communicate in the first place. A communication event proves to have been successful to the extent that the listener has managed to gain an experiential insight that is as rich, as complex, as inexpressible, as the intent that gave rise to the entire event—to the extent that the listener has managed to transcend language as a social system and re-enter the private domain of experiential cognition. This is why we usually only remember the gist of what we heard, not the exact wording.
We sometimes say to our children: "You only understand what you have heard, or read, once you manage to say it in your own words." This is exactly the point. When we repeat what we have heard in the same words, we never let go of language: we never go beyond the realm of social convention. We only begin to understand what we have heard when we manage to embed it within our own experiential grasp of the world around us, when we go beyond the words of the message and let our new understanding interact with our experiences in inexpressible ways. Then, if we wish to restate what we now understand, we have to launch a new process in which we are the ones who face the challenge of reducing our communicative intent into the conventionalized forms by our language.
We saw traces of the Hirschean argument earlier in the same theory. That is, competence in the social-semantic space—knowledge of and facility with socially constructed and shared ideas, such as language in the first place—sets the stage for communicative, and thus academic, success. Now here we see the other side of the educational coin: understanding, not memorization; ownership over learning; and personal relevance are what make learning succeed.
I have always been sympathetic to both sets of ideas, but more suspicious of the latter. The point of memorizing (the action, not the consequence) is not to erase the private-experiential component—to "never let go of language"—and replace it with community rule. It is to store ideas so that we may reflect on them wherever we are and deepen our understanding. The private-experiential is not diminished in any way.
Further, "ownership" and "personal relevance," as we find them in most educational thought are not quite the same things as "going beyond the conventions" and "our own experiential grasp of the world around us" that we find in this theory. The main difference is that, in education, if Timmy is to understand that 4 + 2 = 6, we should give him a personal, real-world experience of this idea. He can take 4 counters and then 2 counters and experience the sum as 6, for example. By the lights of this theory, on the other hand, Timmy's private-experiential plane is private and experiential because it is stocked with experiences with more or less iconoclastic interpretations, not because it is comprised solely of "things that happened to Timmy."
