8.The Semiotics of Twigs and Leaves

The author of this article narrates an incident which exposes the failure of a scholar   to fully comprehend  meaning despite being trained in the scientific ways of observation.

Heraclitus said centuries ago :

“Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
 Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected…” Heraklietos of Ephesos

The following incident  is supposed to have happened in Australia :

A scholar with a brilliant university education, for her post doctoral research had gone to Australia. As part of her research she was expected to teach the aborigine children the  concept of classification of items. 

The scholar thought it appropriate to teach classification using objects found in nature. So she took the children to the country side and made them pick up twigs and leaves.

Then, the scholar had the children sit  in a small circle. She made them place the collected objects in the centre. And as they watched, she began to classify them as twigs and leaves.  Next, the leaves itself was classified into two: green leaves and  dry leaves. After drawing her attention to the classified objects she made the children mix it up and directed them to classify them  as she had done. The children classified them  in three groups but each group contained both twigs and leaves. Realizing that the aborigine children failed to understand the concept of classification correctly, she repeated her classification strategy. But even after repeated demonstrations the children classified them as three groups each containing both twigs and leaves.

Naturally the university educated scholar concluded that the aborigine children are incapable of grasping the concept of ‘classification’!

 The local guide who had accompanied the ‘scholar’ in her study had a faint knowledge of the dialect spoken by the aborigines. So he made some inquires and came up with a startling revelation. He found that there was ’rhyme and reason’ in the classification system followed by the aborigine children. They had classified the twigs and leaves according to their ‘smell’- very strong smelling ones, faint smelling ones and those with no smell.

Unfortunately, the post doctoral fellow with a  brilliant educational background, failed  in inferring  such a strategy for classification

This story of the semiotics of  twigs and leaves tells us that there exist knowledge beyond   what is gained from  professors, journals, research articles, text books and thousands of educational sites… Even if the five senses and the ‘common sense’ is activated through cognitive or  constructivist principles, there is no guarantee that one might arrive at the truth/ real meaning of  things! Let me conclude with a quote from Mark Twain:

“All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.”

1908, notebook