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personally know reality and his related position to reality (Kilian & Viljoen 1974 :
165).
The pedagogic relationship of knowing is not merely knowing, but it is also and
especially understanding ofthe other's mutual involvement in the education situation.
The act of understanding implies action. This means that the adult through being
actively involved in the child's life bodily encounters him by confronting him with
. norms. The adult gets to know the child's being-in-the-world through a vis-a-vis
encounter of the child in his situation. To know the child pedagogically it is therefore
necessary for the adult to accept the child as fellow constituent of the education
relationship (Kilian & Viljoen 1974 : 167).
To understand pre-supposes that one must have knowledge of that which one wants
to understand (Van Niekerk 1987 : 11). Understanding implies thinking, in other
words, the solving of a problem. This implies a phenomenological approach to that
which one endeavours to understand. One will have to differentiate between essential
and non-essential knowledge, then proceed to a refined analysis of that which is
essential before one can arrive at an understanding of the nature of the relationships
between the different essential characteristics of the situation with which one is
confronted. In everyday life we rely heavily on intuition to understand situations.
Intuition operates on the pre-eognitive level; it is an essence ofsensing (Nel & Urbani
1990: 11).
Sensing is described by Straus (1963) as the grasping ofmeanings on the pre-eognitive
level. It supplies the stable supportive base for perceiving. Intuitive understanding
means that as long as the senso-pathic moment of perceiving remains stable we accept
that we understand what we perceive. Our understanding may be correct or not
correct. As long as we feel satisfied that we understand, we will proceed to act
according to our interpretation of the situation. When the senso-pathic gets disturbed,
doubt will undermine our feeling that we understand and we will then seek for the
reason for our doubt (Nel & Urbani 1990 : 44). Once we have identified it, the
problem to be solved will be to fit the aspect about which we have doubted sensibly