Cycle: Physics and Poetics

Title: Physics and Poetics

Date: 284—322 BC

Nationality: Greek

Creator: Aristotle

Medium: Document

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

            I would choose these documents not necessarily because of what the documents contain, but because of what they show. These show how learning is cyclical. Aristotle was the pupil of Plato, who was the pupil Socrates. Socrates proposed important ideas, then Plato added to and refined them, and later Aristotle changed and recalculated them. This shows how each student was going through a cycle, learning from his teacher, refining, and adding to knowledge to approach truth. Learning, ideally, should never end. It should be a continuous cycle of learning what is good, improving what is not, discovering new ideas, etc. This is good to explain to a new civilization because it gives a broad view of what learning is—never-ending and cyclical. This can help people set their views high and far. Once a society views learning as a continuous cycle, they will be more teachable and more able to improve and continue to diligently learn. This artifact would be presented first to give a perspective of the broad view of the learning process before getting into details.