Their erroneous beliefs about basic mathematical concepts, explains Jerome Kagan, restrain them:
Some children have great difficulty separating mathematical representations from the more familiar representations for words. Carl Jung, who provided an example of this psychological block, recalled his profound inability to accept the argument: If a = b and b = c then a = c because he always replaced the letter symbols with semantic concepts and rebelled against the possibility that if cats = pets and pets = dogs then cats = dogs. “My intellectual morality fought against these whimsical inconsistencies, which have forever debarred me from understanding mathematics.”
(Quoted from page 35 of The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century, by Jerome Kagan. Cambridge University Press, 2009.)
For a brief biography of Jerome Kagan, click here. For images of or relating to Jerome Kagan, click here.
For a brief biography of Carl Jung, click here. For images of or relating to Carl Jung, click here.
Some children have great difficulty separating mathematical representations from the more familiar representations for words. Carl Jung, who provided an example of this psychological block, recalled his profound inability to accept the argument: If a = b and b = c then a = c because he always replaced the letter symbols with semantic concepts and rebelled against the possibility that if cats = pets and pets = dogs then cats = dogs. “My intellectual morality fought against these whimsical inconsistencies, which have forever debarred me from understanding mathematics.”
(Quoted from page 35 of The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century, by Jerome Kagan. Cambridge University Press, 2009.)
For a brief biography of Jerome Kagan, click here. For images of or relating to Jerome Kagan, click here.
For a brief biography of Carl Jung, click here. For images of or relating to Carl Jung, click here.
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