If Children Educate Themselves, What Do We Do?

“When I say that children are biologically designed to educate themselves, I mean they are born with certain instinctive drives shaped, over eons, by natural selection to serve the purpose of education,” writes author and educational philosopher Peter Gray, who names these six drives:

• Curiosity: The drive to explore and understand.
• Playfulness: The drive to practice and create.
• Communicativeness: The drive to know what others know and share what you know
• Willfulness: The drive to take charge of one’s own life.
• Planfulness: The drive to think about and plan for the future.
• The desire to grow up.

In the Exchange Reflections “Nurturing Thinkers, Explorers and Innovators,” Laura Mickey shares these implications for teaching:

“How we ‘teach’ young children may provide information about what we already know or it may stimulate curiosity. I encourage us to do more than ask children to repeat the information we have given; let’s do more than have them sit on a square without talking or fidgeting.”

Gray’s six drives dovetail well with Mickey’s conceptualization of the teacher-child partnership:

• The educator’s role is to find out what the children want to know.
• The child is the primary agent in learning.
• The teacher’s role is to uncover the questions and be a co-learner.
• The child’s role is to be active and questioning.

For more information about Exchange's magazine, books, and other products pertaining to ECE, go to www.ccie.com.

© 2005 Child Care Information Exchange - All Rights Reserved | Contact Us | Return to Site