Grayce P. Storey
Intellect is derived from a Latin verb meaning “to gather and select the best fruit of a harvest.”
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An intellectual person originally was one who gathered thoughts, ideas, feelings, and intuitions. They also used their faculties to unmask effective ways one should live through out the world.
Children must become intellectuals as they develop communication skills so that they will be able to express their ideas and feelings to others and will in return understand people’s feelings and ideas.
Children are a product of this world in which they had no part in its making. Also they should be given the time and opportunity to express themselves without being interrupted with outside ideas or conclusions.
The essence of intellectuality deals with the ability to formulate and express ideas with others, coupled with the ability to modify the ideas on the basis of experience and dialogue. The responsibility lies on the school to assist the children in their development of these skills. It is also the acquiring of these skills which helps the child in developing into an intelligent individual.
Children are confronted with many problems such as, being rich or poor, availability of jobs, and an equal chance of becoming president.
The young people are confronted with many complex and frustrating questions. They have no person, no place, motive to explain their ideas. Home is often a place to rest; the street, a place to play out restlessness.
“Schools should not be a place for the maintenance of stupidity. Stupidity has to do with thoughtlessness, with the blind acceptance of ideas . . . . most centrally with the loss of control over one’s action and ideas.”
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Teachers have the responsibility to reverse stupidity to intellectuals.
Most teachers try to promote the students thinking capabilities and make this a top priority in their educational goal. The key variable in teaching for thinking are instructional material and the procedure for which the materials are used.
There are probably two types of memory, long-term and short-term. “Long-term memory occurs when structural changes occur in the brain. Short-term memory, on the other hand, may be dynamic and consist of either nerve impulses or slow patterns of electrical charges that wax and wane, or both.”
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Mark Rosenzweig, Edward Bennett, and Marian Cleeves went about demonstrating this using rats in four different environments. At the end of the experiment, they checked the rats for the difference in ratio of cortex to subcortex.
The experiment was carried out as follows: the standard lab environment consisted of a metal cage with three rats, the enriched was a large cage with twelve rats complete with play things, and the impoverished was a bare cage with one rat, the seminatural environment which showed the greatest ratio of cortex to subcortex is weight. This is evidence that experience directly affects the brain.
Neurons or nerve cells do not increase in number after the brain has reached maturity. If a portion of the brain is destroyed by toxin or injury it is permanent. The destroyed portion does not regenerate.
“Short-term memory may be related to images in the brain and theses images to consciousness.”
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Penfield and Roberts suggest in Speech and Brain Mechanisms (1959) that anything which has entered the stream of consciousness is recorded in the brain.
A prerequisite for culture is adequate memory storage so that complex learning can occur.
Karl Pribram, an experimental neurophysiologist, “feels that two classes of communicative acts can be distinguished on the basis of whether the meaning of the act depends on the context in which it occurs.’ Context free communicative acts are labeled ‘signs’ and context dependent communicative acts are labeled ‘symbols’ (Pribram 1971: 305.) If we are to deal with the biological elements necessary for fully developed culture, we must look at the ability to symbol. To understand this ability we must understand the organization of the cerebral cortex and something about how it may have evolved.”
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