There’s been a lot of press for Alison Gopnik’s new book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life. Via Bookforum, here’s my lazy way of linking to this
review … (and more and more and more and more and more and more).
And here’s a short video. Here’s also an opinion piece at the New Scientist authored by Gopnik herself that puts things into an interesting perspective. I really love this:
Human development is more like reverse metamorphosis than simple growth, with babies as exploratory, bright butterflies while the adults are caterpillars, inching along their narrower paths.
And then there’s Gopnik’s excellent opinion piece in the New York Times:
Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.
Read the rest. It relates some really interesting (and funny) results from experiments and includes a couple of solid suggestions for rearing and educating the little devils.
The funny thing I’m realizing is that these descriptions of babies pretty closely match the way I describe (and prescribe) my own way of approaching the world.
Hmmm…
