Research: संस्कृत, Oral Education and Critical Thinking Development

Nisarg Joshi

CriticalThinking, Language, Samskrutam

We have discussed benefits of oral education many a times. Encountered one more research related to it. Sharing it for reviving our conviction and confidence in Sanatana गुरुकुल परंपरा.

Following research gives hints for certain common reactions for authority of संस्कृत by educated Indians.

  1. Why संस्कृत?
  2. Why संस्कृत for science and technical education?
  3. Why संस्कृत for spiritual development?

Research (Keep संस्कृत in mind as reference, esp. while reading highlighted parts)


Sanskrut_criticalthinking

Grasping the Interplay between the Verbal Cultural Diversity and Critical Thinking, and Their Consequences for African American Education

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2017.00064/full

  • How well we ask questions is based on how well the language in which we think is developed.
  • If language does refine human thinking then we cannot escape the fact that it must play a pivotal role in learning theory.
  • How does language make us better thinkers? Crogman et al. (2015) started by initially connecting thinking, question asking and learning by showing that: “Description invites students to ask ‘what,’ ‘when,’ ‘who,’ whereas analysis focuses on ‘why’ and ‘how,’ and evaluation encourages students to think beyond the phenomenon by going deeper and asking ‘what if’.” The ability to question at increasingly complex levels refines the learning experience.
  • learners that may have less access to expressive language, may internalize their questions creating challenges in the feedback loop that should be happening between thinking, questioning, and learning.
  • Language in essence serves as the “signifier” for higher-level systems of meaning such as scientific theories (Lemke, 1990; Martin, 1991) and is a prototypical resource for making meaning (Halliday, 1993).
  • Language, serves as a set of processing cues or instructions that guide construction of memory for discourse (Gernsbacher, 1990; Givón, 1992).
  • Because language does impact and streamline thought, it must affect a child’s curiosity, leading to good question asking behavior. There is a clear development in the learner’s ability to formulate questions in response to their curiosity development (Crogman and Trebeau Crogman, 2016). To formulate questions language is important. We speculate that there is not a direct correlation between sensory curiosity (i.e., “curiosity base”—Figure 4) and language. Animals exhibit curiosity even though they do not have language. Spelke and Hermer (1996) speculate that one of the main differences between humans and animals is the human formulation of language.
  • There is large body of evidence that shows that language helps us to formulate better questions, which is essential for the critical thinking process. Further, humans achieve much more than other animals because of language, so much so that when language is lost, human mental faculties are impaired.

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