The Way Children Learn

These are a few points from the book 'Einstein Never Used Flash Cards' on how children learn.

The Way Children Learn

To give you a sense of what it's like for your children to learn, we'll tell you a little story.Last summer, one of us was gazing out in our backyard, looking at the small lake that sits underneath some willows. It was dusk and the sky was a kind of orangey haze. Suddenly through the haze, there appeared a large object, as big as merry-go-round, shaped more like a Frisbee, hovering over the lake. It appeared to be made of metal. We blinked, and blinked again. Then, the thing began to move in spiral, right up into the air, and then it disappeared.

     Consider what we've describe. What do you think? No, we were not taking drugs. Was it some sort of optical illusion? We don't think so. You might ask - was it a UFO? The fact is, we did not see this. But you were probably trying pretty hard to figure it out. Something was being described that didn't fit with your notion of reality. You searched for a way to explain it. And finally, you lobbed it into the catch-all category of "UFO", or unidentified flying object. Your mind was probably working hard to explain the incongruity, to understand the reality as it was presented. But it didn't match up to what you knew. You worked to explain it.

     That is what happens with children from the start.The world is new to them, and they are busy trying to interpret it. Children are active learners, constantly seeking to understand and master their environment. You don't have to make them want to learn. Babies are constantly putting things in their mouth - not necessarily because the things taste good, but because it's babies' way of discovering what things are made of. Babies are constantly dropping their spoons on the floor, not to make you get your daily exercise, but to see : Will it always go down? At the same speed? Can I make it go faster? They are discovering the properties of gravity and velocity.

     Jean Piaget, the great Swiss scholar whose ideas have so dominated developmental psychology, taught us that the mistakes children make are far more revealing than the answers they get right on IQ tests. After all, sometimes when children get things right, they are simply parroting what they have heard. But when they tell you how they think about the problem, you know if they really understand. Piaget defined intelligence as a kind of adaptation to the environment. To learn how young children think, Piaget watched his own three children as well as hundreds of other children. What he found was startling. Children are the engines behind their own development. This means that, as we argued in chapter 2, the everyday, mundane experiences children have are sufficient to fuel their drive to understand the world. They do not wait passively to be urged to engage in intellectual behaviors, nor do they conservatively avoid new experiences. To the contrary, children create much of their own stimulation by observing and actively experimenting as they play and go through their daily lives. As a result, parents can relax and relieve themselves of the mantle of responsibility for cognitive development that they have assumed.

     .....Children are constantly learning, and there is a lot  to learn that we don't even think about .The repetitive, annoying things babies and young children often do are their way of learning about the world, manipulating the parameters of the situation for fun, just to see what will happen.

     What Piaget discovered, then, is that babies and young children are programmed by nature to learn in unique ways that fir their own developing brains and bodies. Show a 2-year-old some flash cards with numbers and he'll learn to parrot what you say. Let him play with M&M's, and quantity will become of great interest to him. Read him a story about Peter Rabbit, and he won't forget a single detail. Learning in context is the key to intelligent learning.