Verbalism is basing reasoning solely on words.
Verbalism is the tendency to base reasoning on words, rather than concepts . In this way, when reasoning, greater importance is given to the terms than to the ideas themselves.
Communication errors
The incorrect use of words and the lack of correspondence between them and what is expressed are examples of verbalism. When someone misuses words, or even uses them without knowing their meaning, they leave the concepts in the background.
The origin of verbalism is found in the link between thought and verbal expression . When this relationship is weak, the person does not think accurately and, in turn, does not use words as they should. Verbalism, in this framework, is a failure that is reflected when expressing oneself.
In general, we all fall into the clutches of verbalism, regardless of the level of education we have. This is because during our first years we cannot learn the language in a very structured way, paying attention to technical rules, but rather we do it spontaneously, at an uneven pace and without being able to judge the quality of our sources.
We learn to speak, and then to read and write, as best we can. Our parents or guardians do not always have the best teaching techniques, so we also depend on their linguistic knowledge until, years later, we can begin to organize our learning. All of this leaves us with a base generally riddled with errors that would take a lot of work to purge to reach perfection.
In education
In the educational field, verbalism is a pedagogical procedure that privileges verbal memory : that is, the storage of information in the form of words that were read or heard. In this way, verbalism is not oriented towards facts or experiences as a learning vehicle.
In other words, the objective of verbalism in the student environment is for students to memorize and repeat verbal information. It does not aim to be understood, neither on a superficial nor a deep level. There are various techniques that rely on this way of learning; For example, there are those who learn languages by generating long lists of words that they then memorize , expanding their vocabulary at a greater rate than that achieved by traditional methods, but without delving into semantic, grammatical issues or their use in real life.
The problem of verbalism
Verbalism becomes a problem in the field of education when students memorize words without fully understanding their meaning . This means that they cannot put the terms in context, establish relationships or generate new knowledge based on them.
That is why many educators highlight the importance of ensuring that students understand processes , instead of aiming for them to memorize data. Verbalism is not sufficient for the construction of knowledge and can even be an obstacle.
Verbalism in learning strips knowledge of its depth.
For many specialists in the field of education, learning in this way can be useless. The main reason behind such a statement is that automatically acquired concepts cannot be applied to real-life situations either , since they are not incorporated into our minds with the necessary context to know what their usefulness is or what their limitations are.
Another problem with verbalism is that it does not encourage the exploration of knowledge , the search for knowledge, largely because it presents it in a closed and one-dimensional way. The student does not appreciate the benefits of education, which is why he does not pursue it on his own, but accepts it when it is imposed.