This interesting argument reflectes one of the difficulties inherent in developing a science of pedagogy: understanding just what people know and how they know it. Efforts to create such a science are, in my opinion, confounded by folk beliefs about what is basic or innate to human knowledge, things like words and language, numbers and math, time and space.Take the number line, for example - the representation of linear space in equidistant intervals represented by a sequence of numbers. Now I don't think the concept is innate - nor I think should anyone who has studied pre-Cartesian science and mathematics. But many people do, and view them as foundational or fundamental to education - and so research such as the study described here seems revolutionary. "Our familiar notions on 'fundamental' concepts such as time and number are so deeply ingrained that they feel natural to us, as though they couldn't be any other way," added former graduate student Cooperrider. "When confronted with radically different ways of construing experience, we can no longer take for granted our own. Ultimately, no way is more or less 'natural' than the Yupno way."
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