Sublime

Understanding children has led us to understand ourselves in a new way.

As they hear us talk, babies are busily grouping the sounds they hear into the right categories, the categories their particular language uses. By one year of age, babies’ speech categories begin to resemble those of the adults in their culture.

We’ll summarize this big picture by elaborating on the three ideas we’ve presented in previous chapters. Foundations. Babies begin by translating information from the world into rich, complex, abstract, coherent representations. Those representations allow babies to interpret their experience in particular ways and to make predictions about new eve

Studying babies makes us realize that the biological computers on this planet differ from the man-made computers in this regard, as well. They don’t just compute, learn, reason, and know. They are driven to do all these things and are designed to take intense pleasure in doing so.

Alison Gopnik notes that the word “parenting” was essentially never used until the 1950s, and only became popular in the 1970s. For nearly all of human history, people grew up in environments where they observed many people caring for many children. There was plenty of local wisdom and no need for parenting experts.

Consider the game of peekaboo. The love of the game is universal: Some version of it is believed to exist in virtually every culture.69 The language is different, but “the rhythm, dynamics, and shared pleasure” all are the same.70 A familiar face first appears and then disappears behind someone’s hands. The baby sits there, puzzled and slightly ala

Scientists and children belong together in another way. The new research shows that babies and young children know and learn more about the world than we could ever have imagined. They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments. Scientists and children belong together because they are the best learners

Piaget wanted to explain the classical philosophical problems of knowledge. But unlike earlier philosophers he wanted an explanation that would be linked to biology.

The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner