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But the new information economy, as opposed to the older industrial one, demands more innovation and less imitation, more creativity and less conformity.
New research tells us scientifically what most preschool teachers have always known intuitively. If we want to encourage learning, innovation and creativity we should love our young children, take care of them, talk to them, let them play and let them watch what we do as we go about our everyday lives.
We don’t have to make children learn, we just have to let them learn.
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| Keith Negley |
What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages
Sunday Review / New York Times | 30 July 2016
Parents and
policy makers have become obsessed with getting young children to learn more,
faster. But the picture of early learning that drives them is exactly the
opposite of the one that emerges from developmental science.
In the last 30
years, the United States has completed its transformation to an information
economy. Knowledge is as important in the 21st century as capital was in the
19th, or land in the 18th. In the same 30 years, scientists have discovered
that even very young children learn more than we once thought possible. Put
those together and our preoccupation with making children learn is no surprise.
The trouble is that
most people think learning is the sort of thing we do in school, and that
parents should act like teachers — they should direct special lessons at
children to produce particular kinds of knowledge or skill, with the help of
how-to books and “parenting” apps. Studies prove that high-quality preschool
helps children thrive. But policy makers and educators are still under pressure
to justify their investments in early childhood education. They’ve reacted by
replacing pretend corners and playground time with “school readiness” tests.
Young children
today continue to learn best by watching the everyday things that grown-ups do,
from cleaning the house to fixing a car. My grandson Augie, like most
4-year-olds, loves to watch me cook, and tries manfully to copy what I do. But
how does he decide whether to just push the egg whites around the bowl, or to
try to reproduce exactly the peculiar wristy beating action I learned from my
own mother? How does he know that he should transfer the egg yolks to the flour
bowl without accidentally dropping them in the whites, as Grandmom often does?
How did he decide that green peas would be a good addition to a strawberry
soufflé? (He was right, by the way.)
Experimental
studies show that even the youngest children are naturally driven to imitate.
Back in 1988, Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington did a study in
which 14-month-olds saw an
experimenter do something weird — she tapped her forehead on top of a box
to make it light up. A week later, the babies came back to the lab and saw the
box. Most of them immediately tried to tap their own foreheads on the box to
make the light go on.
In 2002 Gyorgy
Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildiko Kiraly did a different version of this study.
Sometimes the experimenters’ arms were wrapped in a blanket when she tapped her
forehead on the box. The babies seemed to figure out that when the
experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must
have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn
they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands.
In 2013 David
Buttelmann and his colleagues did yet another version.
First, the babies heard the experimenter speak the same language they did or a
different one. Then the experimenter tapped her head on the box. When she had
spoken the same language, the babies were more likely to tap the box with their
foreheads; when she spoke a different language they were more likely to use
their hands.
In other words,
babies don’t copy mindlessly — they take note of who you are and why you act.
Children will
also use what they see to figure out intelligent new actions, like putting peas
in a soufflé. For example, in our lab, Daphna Buchsbaum, some
colleagues and
I showed 4-year-olds a toy with lots of different handles and tabs. A grown-up
said, “Hmm I wonder how this toy works” and performed nine complicated series
of actions, like pulling one of the handles, shaking a tab and turning the toy
over. Sometimes the toy played music and sometimes it didn’t.
The actions
followed a pattern: Some of them were necessary to make the machine go and some
were superfluous. For example, the children might see that the toy lit up only
when the experimenter shook the tab and turned over the toy, no matter what
else she did.
Then she asked
the child to make the music play. The children analyzed the pattern of events,
figured out which actions actually made the toy go, and immediately produced
just those actions. They would just pull the tab and turn over the toy. They
used their observations to create an intelligent new solution to the problem.
We take it for
granted that young children “get into everything.” But new studies of “active
learning” show that when children play with toys they are acting a lot like
scientists doing experiments. Preschoolers prefer to play with the toys that
will teach them the most, and they play with those toys in just the way that
will give them the most information about how the world works.
In one recent
experiment, for example, Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins
showed 11-month-old babies a sort of magic trick. Either a ball appeared to
pass through a solid wall, or a toy car appeared to roll off the end of a shelf
and remain suspended in thin air. The babies apparently knew enough about
everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of
attention to them.
Then the
researchers gave the babies toys to play with. The babies who had seen the ball
vanish through the wall banged it; those who’d seen the car hovering in thin
air kept dropping it. It was as if they were testing to see if the ball really
was solid, or if the toy car really did defy gravity.
It’s not just
that young children don’t need to be taught in order to learn. In fact, studies
show that explicit instruction, the sort of teaching that goes with school and
“parenting,” can be limiting. When children think they are being taught, they
are much more likely to simply reproduce what the adult does, instead of creating
something new.
My lab tried a
different version of the experiment with the complicated toy. This time,
though, the experimenter acted like a teacher. She said, “I’m going to show you
how my toy works,” instead of “I wonder how this toy works.” The children
imitated exactly what she did, and didn’t come up with their own solutions.
The children seem
to work out, quite rationally, that if a teacher shows them one particular way
to do something, that must be the right technique, and there’s no point in
trying something new. But as a result, the kind of teaching that comes with
schools and “parenting” pushes children toward imitation and away from
innovation.
There is a deep
irony here. Parents and policy makers care about teaching because they recognize
that learning is increasingly important in an information age. But the new
information economy, as opposed to the older industrial one, demands more
innovation and less imitation, more creativity and less conformity.
In fact,
children’s naturally evolved learning techniques are better suited to that sort
of challenge than the teaching methods of the past two centuries.
New
research tells us scientifically what most preschool teachers have always known
intuitively. If we want to encourage learning, innovation and creativity we
should love our young children, take care of them, talk to them, let them play
and let them watch what we do as we go about our everyday lives.
We
don’t have to make children learn, we just have to let them learn.
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