Review
A great overview of many studies about the learning abilities of children. Includes a bunch of insights that will make you put parenting in perspective and makes me, as a parent to be, more knowledgeable in the different approaches te teaching / learning / gardening / carpenting.
Grandmothers
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Grandparents can help out with child care more directly, too. Given the demands of human childhood, the more caregivers there are, the better.
The Commitment Puzzle
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Alloparenting not only gives mothers a break, it gives young women and young men a chance to practice caring for children.
4. Learning Through Looking
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the really striking result is that very little of that learning comes through conscious and deliberate teaching.
The Little Actors
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Children learn by watching and imitating the people around them. Psychologists call this observational learnin
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they learn by listening to what other people say about how the world works—what psychologists call learning from testimony.
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When we imitate other people, in a very real sense we become those people
The Birth of Imitation
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Human beings had an evolutionary advantage because we learned to manipulate other things, or other people, or both.
Rituals
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The fact that the children were so sensitive to the teacher’s intentions made them stupid, or at least stupider than they would have been otherwise.
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figuring out just what the teacher wanted, made them worse at actually learning
6. The Work of Play
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First of all, play is not work.
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play isn’t just incompetent work; it has special characteristics that let you distinguish it from the real thing
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Play, pace Miss Havisham, is voluntary.
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Animals play only when all those other basic needs are satisfied.
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Play has a special structure, a pattern of repetition and variation.
Rough-and-Tumble Rats
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Grown-up rats, like some grown-up humans, forget how to play. Or maybe they’re just too busy and worn out from the grown-up rat race—all that running through mazes for unfulfilling rewards
Getting Into Everything
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Play didn’t help the rats to do any one thing, in particular. Instead, it helped them to learn to do many things in a more flexible, varied way.
Kinds of Minds
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Pretending and thinking about possibilities were very specifically linked.
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Theory of mind, as it’s called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people
Beyond Miss Havisham
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It’s not that the grown-up builds knowledge for the child. Instead, the grown-up builds a scaffold, and the scaffold helps the child to build knowledge herself
7. Growing Up
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Older children, as well as younger ones, create and revise intuitive theories of how the world works
Apprenticeship
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Many of the most effective teachers, even in modern schools, use elements of apprenticeship
Scholastic Skills
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School was invented to allow children to master the technical details of reading, writing, and arithmetic calculation
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For many children in elementary school the problem may not be that they’re not smart enough, but that they’re not yet stupid enough.
Thinking Differently
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We’re so used to scholastic learning that this kind of focused attention might seem like an obvious prerequisite for any kind of learning
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when the drugs are taken in a controlled way, in a safe, caring, and protective environment, they do seem to allow a kind of flexibility, exploration, and learning that might not be available in more sober conditions, and these are just the strengths of young children.
Schooling and Learning
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Narrowing attention may be part of growing up, but wide attention is part of being young. It’s not something we need to fix.
The People in the Playground
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The greatest and most challenging transition in the school-age period is the transition from a life that is centered on our caregivers to one that is instead centered on our peers—
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Kids move from solitary pretending to playing games with rules in groups
The Two Systems of Adolescence
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your job as an adolescent is to leave that protected context and actually make things happen yourself.
The World of Screens
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Information had always traveled at the speed of a fast horse; suddenly it traveled at the speed of electricity, going from ten miles an hour to millions. And it was greeted with familiar dread.
Eden and Mad Max
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One reason we adults tend to misjudge the impact of technological change is because the experience of change is so different for adults and children
The Technological Ratchet
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Perhaps our digital grandchildren will view a master reader with the same nostalgic awe that we now accord to a master hunter or an even more masterly mother of six
9. The Value of Children
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It’s about producing a robust, flexible ecosystem that lets children themselves create many varied, unpredictable kinds of adult futures
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Utilitarians think that we should make decisions by calculating what will lead to “the greatest good for the greatest number.
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But the morality of being a parent is about taking a creature who isn’t autonomous and can’t make his own decisions, and turning him into one who can.
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Once I commit myself to a child, I’m literally not the same person I was before
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Deciding whether to have children isn’t just a matter of deciding what you want. It means deciding who you’re going to be
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Precisely because such decisions are so morally profound and life-transforming, we should respect the freedom of individual people with individual lives to make them
The Old and the Young
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But rather than using other institutions, such as work or school, as a model for caring for children, we could think about caring for children as a model for other institutions
The Paradoxes
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The purpose of loving children, in particular, is to give those helpless young human beings a rich, stable, safe environment— an environment in which variation, innovation, and novelty can blossom.