Meaning is objective 

The images that someone sees “on his retina” are images constructed by the brain. However, the reality around him is objective and the meaning he gives to elements of concrete reality is also objective. If this were not the case, oral or written communication between people would not be possible. Communication between people who speak different languages ​​can be solved by using a simple dictionary. It is therefore a misconception to call meaning subjective. Subjectivizing reality does not always go smoothly. It often happens that a child gives the wrong meaning to reality. It calls a tree a bush or a sheep a goat. For the absorption and anchoring of knowledge it is therefore necessary that a parent or teacher helps the child to subjectify objective reality. It is evident that this often goes “wrong”, especially with more complicated and abstract concepts than a tree or a sheep. Many educational innovations are based on the assumption that meaning is not an objective given, but that the student himself gives meaning to the learning content and thus creates his own knowledge. That is a major misconception.

The representation of reality in an individual's brain is subjective. We see a living room that turns completely yellow under artificial light, because our brains “know” that that room should not be yellow, without the yellow color veil. However, take a photo with an old-fashioned analog camera and the photo is bright yellow!

Example

Marcel (6) sits alone in the afternoon watching the a commercial about tampons. After the commercial, he approaches his mother.
"Mom, I want a tampon for my birthday."
His mother looks at him in surprise: “What should you do with that?”
Well, you can cycle, swim and much more with it, but I forgot that.”

In this example, Marcel analyzes what he hears in the advertisement about a tampon. He has no idea what a tampon is for, but is pleasantly surprised when he hears that you can cycle and swim with it. Marcel saves that understanding without outside help; a tampon is an object that you can use for swimming and cycling. That is, it stores dispositional representations, a kind of neural formulas, that together form the mental representation of an object such as: dangerous or not, color, size, moving or not, human, the purpose of the object, etc. And in it case of the tampon also: swimming and cycling. Apparently you can swim and cycle with a tampon! Without help, Marcel gives the wrong meaning to the term 'tampon'. The result is a representation in the brain of an incorrect concept.

That in itself is of course not a problem. At some point, and perhaps even a fraction after his statement, constructive friction takes place. His mother says: “What are you supposed to do with that?” And after his answer to that, she'll probably explain to him that tampons are for something other than swimming and cycling. Another person's help is needed to help the child store the correct representation.

This incorrect concept seems easy to correct. However, other naive concepts are much more difficult to recover afterwards. Adolescence is such a intense emotional phase, among other things, because there is more conceptual friction than in childhood. Adolescents need the help of parents, teachers, or others involved in the young person's education to replace naive or incorrect concepts with new, correct insights. There is also some time pressure, because as the incorrect concept persists in the adolescent's brain, it becomes more difficult to correct it. It must also be done vigorously, because acquired insights during adolescence cannot be replaced without a fight.

This process occurs all the time in education, although the role of the school should not be exaggerated. Adolescents have been going through this process for hundreds of thousands of years. The school has only been participating in this for a very short time. This does not alter the fact that it is up to the teacher to organize the learning environment in such a way that these conceptual changes become possible.