Here’s a nice brief piece from the New York Times on the cognitive abilities of babies and young children. A number of the research studies and findings mentioned are classics of child psychology, and I don’t know that saying that “in some ways, [children] are smarter than adults” really means much. But I like the direction Gopnik takes it next:
Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urge preschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specific skills.
That's a lot of brain for a little baby.
One of the basic experimental paradigms in research with young children as subjects relies upon their innate tendency to look, and look longer, at whatever is new or unexpected for them. This is the ultimate in self-directed learning, in which babies design their own curriculum by devoting more attention to the stimuli that will teach them the most. What I take away from this article is an affirmation that young children are pre-programmed to learn, and that with appropriately supportive environments–most of all, the attention of loving caregivers–learning is what they will do.
To quote the great neuroscientist Louis Armstrong,
I hear babies cry
I watch them grow
they’ll learn much more
than I’ll ever know
and I think to myself
what a wonderful world
On a related note, I would encourage anyone interested in education to head over to the website for the master’s thesis project of my fourth grade teacher, Kent Daniels. His unusual classroom was filled with computers, couches, camaraderie, and the most self-directed learning I did until probably college. He treated us nine-year-olds like adults, but he also clearly kept alive many of the same innate drives to learn that we had had since early childhood. Scroll down through this page, or use the search bar throughout the website, for some discussion of our student-created “learning contracts” and the experiential basis for our education that year. Again, this formative experience for me and for decades of Kent’s students is a far cry from the educational approaches and priorities of No Child Left Behind and other regimented instruction. It takes incredibly dedicated and creative teachers like Kent to make classrooms challenging and enriching for all students, but I do hope that continued inquiry into child brain development and educational psychology will inform future educational policy and maybe swing the pendulum back towards something that retains that joyful hunger for learning that children have in their earliest years.
