David B. Chamberlain in Life Before Birth states “Memory is the quintessence of human experience.” And if he is correct, memory is our most precious commodity. What we do to it in the name of education is barely short of criminal. Our public and private schools load young developing minds with trivialized quanta.

In a previous EzineArticle I discussed apperceptive mass, the building of experience. That experience is built in memory. Closely related to this teaching-learning challenge is the affective domain.

The affective domain includes factors of motivation, attitude, perceptions, and values. Affective domain is part of a system proposed in 1965 by Benjamin Bloom in his Taxonomy. Bloom classified three educational objectives: the cognitive domain, the affective domain, and the psychomotor domain.

The affective domain provides an emphasis on feeling tone, emotion, acceptance and rejection. These objectives may vary from simple attention to specific phenomena to the complex internal qualities involving the qualities of character and/or conscience.

Teachers are forced to teach for content rather than understanding because of the emphasis on standardized testing. To offset this negative trend teachers must strive all the more to engender an awareness of the existence of ideas, materials, and/or phenomena. To stimulate a tolerance of these ideas, to help the learner differentiate and to accept. The test here is whether or not the learner is motivated to spend time in the realm of the idea, material, and/or phenomena. The measurement of success is determined by an increase in proficiency in the recognition and understanding of ideas, material and/or phenomena.

The instructional emphasis should be on internalization-the process through which a learner’s affect toward an idea passes from just a general awareness to where it has a direct affect upon his/her individual behavior.

Admittedly, some subjects are naturally more cognitive while others are more involved in the affective domain. Learning Bells’ Theorem would be largely in the cognitive domain; whereas, discussing the American involvement in Afghanistan would fall within the affective domain.