Learners actively create meaning even within abstract drill

Evidence

Formal logic is like grammar: it is assimilated in a “living” way even if the actual learning process has been necessarily schematic and abstract. For the learner is not a passive and mechanical recipient, a gramophone record—even if the liturgical conformity of examinations sometimes makes him appear so. The relation between these educational forms and the child’s psychology is always active and creative, just as the relation of the worker to his tools is active and creative. A calibre is likewise a complex of abstractions, but without calibration it is not possible to produce real objects—real objects which are social relations, and which implicitly embody ideas. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 368

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing move — abstractions are embodied in real objects that are social relations carrying ideas — is a dense, paradigm-shifting claim about how material practice and ideology interpenetrate.
• XREF: Directly connects to Marx’s commodity fetishism and to the materialist base of the Islamophobia field’s understanding of how reification works.