elbow

In Piaget's terms learning involves both assimilation and accommodation. Part of the job is to get the subject matter to bend and deform so that it fits inside the learner (that is, so it can fit or relate to the learner's experiences). But that's only half the job. Just as important is the necessity for the learner to bend and deform himself [sic] so that he can fit himself around the subject without doing violence to it. Good learning is not a matter of finding a happy medium where both parties are transformed as little as possible. Rather both parties must be maximally transformed - in a sence deformed. There is violence in learning. We can not learn something without eating it, yet we can not really learn it either without letting it eat us. (Peter Elbow, "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process," in College English, Volume 45, Number 4, April 1983, p. 331)