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FIGURE 1. Example of 36 words printed on cards to be classified according to
similarity in meaning.
The difference is impressive when the adults' results are compared with
the richness of perception and imagery of children in the third and fourth
grade when given the same task (Fig. 3). Miller reflects upon these delight-
ful results:
“Children tend to put together words that might be used in talking about the same
thing—which cuts right across the tidy syntactic boundaries so important to adults.
Thus all twenty of the children agree in putting the verb 'eat' with the noun 'apple';
for many of them 'air' is 'cold'; the foot' is used to 'jump; you 'live' in a 'house';
'sugar' is 'sweet'; and the cluster of doctor,' 'needle,' 'suffer,' 'weep,' and 'sadly' is a
small vignette in itself.”
What is wrong with our education that castrates our power over lan-
guage? Of the many factors that may be responsible I shall name only one
that has a profound influence on our way of thinking, namely, the misap-
plication of the “scientific method.”
Scientific Method
The scientific method rests on two fundamental pillars:
(i) Rules observed in the past shall apply to the future. This is usually
referred to as the principle of conservation of rules, and I have no doubt
that you are all familiar with it. The other pillar, however, stands in the
shadow of the first and thus is not so clearly visible:
(ii) Almost everything in the universe shall be irrelevant. This is usually
referred to as the principle of the necessary and sufficient cause, and what
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