2 years after Serena left, in my sophomore year, I was concurrently learning about children’s development and John …show more content…
Aristotle believed that the mind is activated by experiences and prior to experience and knowledge, the mind is dormant. Knowledge is gained through the brain processing the information obtained from experiences. In 1689, political theorist John Locke published an essay in which he took Aristotle’s beliefs a step further. Locke introduced a belief that the mind is equivalent to “white paper, void of all characters (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica)” but is still cognizant. An example of the Tabula Rasa theory would be playing a musical instrument. In elementary school, a student begins to learn the fundamentals of playing an instrument. They learn how to play all the notes on a scale, and how to read music, but as they get more exposure to playing and reading music, they can build on their previous skills. Instead of playing all whole and half notes, the student can begin to play quarter and eighth notes and so on. At the time, Locke’s theory was revolutionary and so the Tabula Rasa theory was widely accepted and dominant in Western culture until the