Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/the-heart-of-the-matter-why-we-teach/5027366/
I have recently begun to ponder: Why do we find it so rewarding to enable the learning of others? One of the reasons I love working with young children is that, during this period of rapid development, humans are learning how to learn. Young children are bringing to bear all their faculties to make meaning of their surroundings (Tronick, 2007). They are learning to coordinate their motor, sensory, and affective systems to leverage cognition, reaching higher and higher levels of symbolic thinking—and they are doing it all in relationship to other people (Greenspan, 2004).
Consider the significance of learning to point to direct another person’s attention to something. On the surface this skill may seem trivial, but it is not (Tomasello, Carpenter, & Liszkowski, 2007). Pointing, unlike the more specific gestures that precede it (e.g., head shake for “no”), has the power to convey a wide range of intentions including informative (to know something), requestive (to do something), and expressive (to feel something) (Tomasello et al., 2007). For example, a child may point to a ball to inform the partner of its location after they have been looking for it together (“There it is!”), to request that the partner roll it to ...