Construction and Education

Abstract

Do we construct our own world from our experiences? A number of educational jurisdictions in our time have embraced inquiry as the official approach to teaching and learning. Most thought, so far as it was mediated by language and not just grunts and crude gestures, would have been immediate and concrete like Wittgenstein's builders in the first few sections of the Philosophical Investigations, Yet in the lives of our not so distant ancestors much, perhaps most of the things encountered in their everyday lives were not in any direct sense made or constructed. For the objects of everyday life are now not constructed in the old way by family members, by past tribal members remembered, or by ourselves.\n Of course a child finds itself in a world of language in much the way a hawk finds itself in a world of flight.