Alison Gopnik writes in her book The Philosophical Baby, "Babies love to learn…. They are open to all the richness of the wide world.
"When they play, children actively experiment on the world and they use the results of those experiences to change what they think. The statistics they observe and the experiments they perform help them make new causal maps of the world around them."
"Very young children can use their causal maps of the world — their theories — to imagine different ways that the world might be.” Experiences and interactions continue to shape ideas allowing children to create, pretend, and imagine. "Eventually, they enable even adults to imagine alternative ways the world could be and make those alternatives real."
Contributed by Christine Kiewra
by Alison Gopnik
One of the key experts in the film, "The Beginning of Life"
In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik — a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother — explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined.
Comments (1)
Displaying 1 CommentCSBC
Denver, CO, United States
Interesting. A few issues ago we had a piece claiming that Piaget was wrong about how infants learn. Now we have a piece that exactly replicates what Piaget said,. Piaget used the term schema: a hypothesis about the world! Of note in the Sunday Denver Post, a math researcher strongly argued that children should use their figures to learn basic arithmetic. Also a Piaget concept! Piaget Rules!
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