'ROY R. BEHRENS The Weave (and Warp) of Invention William James once described the perception of infants as a "blooming, buzzing confusion.", As dynamic as it is, his description has become suspect. We have come to believe that infant perception may not be all that confusing, and that there may be structural properties of the brain, with which we come into the world, and which help us to put it together-to group together those things which are alike, and to separate those which are different. To paraphrase James, these properties might at least enable us to know a "bloom" when we see one, and to know that it isn't a "buzz." Yet, even if the brain has such properties, there are still a number of variants; and it is perhaps a discovery of our century that different cultures put the world together in a variety of different ways, and that the validity of their group- ings is really a matter of context. To the Cora Indians, butter- flies and airplanes are birds. To the scientists who -preceded Linnaeus, bats were birds, and whales were a kind of fish. To Leonardo da Vinci, the airplane meant "wings attached to a man." To a twentieth century French child, ignorant of the world of adults, dogs and airplanes were the same thing be- cause "both bark." The Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, seems to have related this process of grouping to theprocess of education. "The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge," Piaget has said. Rather, it is "to create possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things." In our society, in our schools, that goal is gener- ally ignored. With a degree of justification, since the existence 11 Volume 8 Number 2 Second QUlrfer