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By Root 410 0

But in 1946, a literary scholar named Erich Auerbach adapted the concept of mimesis in what his biography at Lerhaus. org claims is “one of the most ambitious works of literary theory ever undertaken.” Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is pretty much required reading for serious students of literature; it had a profound effect on my undergraduate self, and a copy still graces my bookshelves. Auerbach analyzes literary conventions throughout the history of Western Europe and how they create “a lifelike illusion of some ‘real’ world outside the text.” My college English professor described the mimetic moment as the point at which one makes the critical connection between one’s own experiences and the artistic work and realizes, “Aha! This is that!” This kind of emotional and intellectual resonance on the part of the audience is what makes the creative arts so powerful.

I’ve spoken to many a scientist who was inclined to agree with Plato in devaluing fiction, which is a shame, because I would argue that created fictions present a uniquely effective teaching tool, a way to supplement rather dry college lectures (diegesis) with a dose of creativity (mimesis) to spark students’ excitement and interest.53 Show; don’t just tell. The mimetic moment is a critical component of acquiring true knowledge—actual learning, as opposed to memorizing facts by rote. Learning science, math, or any other subject is all about making that critical connection.

While I was at KITP, I got to know mathematician Bisi Agboola, who teaches at UCSB. Bisi was educated in the United Kingdom and failed most of his math classes through their equivalent of high school: “I found it dull, confusing, and difficult.” As a child, he was determined to find a career in which he wouldn’t need any math, finally announcing to his skeptical parents that he would be a woodcutter. He was crushed when they pointed out that he would need to measure the wood.

But one summer he encountered a Time-Life book—simply titled Mathematics, by David Bergamini—on the history of mathematics, from the Babylonians up until the 1960s. “It captured my imagination and made the subject come alive to me for the very first time,” he said, and it changed his mind about this seemingly dry subject. He realized there was beauty in it, and he wound up teaching himself calculus. Today he is a mathematician specializing in number theory and exotic multidimensional topologies. But he still doesn’t much like basic arithmetic: “I find it boring.”

Different people learn in different ways. Some students respond well to how calculus is traditionally taught, while others, like Bisi (and me), don’t; but that doesn’t mean we lack the aptitude to learn. That was the viewpoint of an eighteenth-century educational pioneer named Johann Pestalozzi, whose ideas laid the groundwork for modern elementary education. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Pestalozzi was the son of a physician who died when Johann was quite young. He was raised by his mother and grandfather in a rural village, and that experience gave him a lifelong empathy for the plight of the Swiss peasantry. While at university, he embraced the “natural” philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, even naming his son in the great thinker’s honor, and went on to become a schoolteacher.

Many of his ideas were quite radical. Pestalozzi rejected the “tyranny of method and correctness” that pervaded Swiss schools of that era, declaring that he wished “to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks as well as from the new-fangled order of cheap artificial teaching tricks, and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself.”54 He became the first applied educational psychologist, insisting that children begin with the concrete object before moving on to the underlying abstract concepts.

Pestalozzi emphasized the individual, encouraging spontaneity and self-activity. His students were not given preset problems with ready-made answers but were encouraged to pursue their own curiosity. He also believed in creating