The words we know shape what we know
Ed-tech guru Jamie McKenzie has published a fascinating new book entitled Lost and Found: A Guide to Discovery Learning through Purposeful Wandering. In this excerpt adapted from the chapter "Finding the Best Words," McKenzie explains how tools like the Visual Thesaurus can "expand our thinking palette."
Whenever exploring complex ideas and issues, the success of our thinking will be bolstered by augmenting the complexity of the words and concepts we entertain as we proceed with our search for understanding. In many cases, limited vocabulary will narrow a search and restrict the depth and richness of the findings.
In most cases, the main concept we start with — be it beauty, enchantment, courage, intuition or some other idea — turns out to be much more complicated that we understood.
Beauty soon leads us to cosmetic, artifice and photoshopping as well as phrases like inner beauty and words like soul and spirit. All of these concepts are multifaceted, but in the common parlance, they are generally oversimplified and barely understood.
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