:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Children as scientists

Analogy Map

Children	Scientists
Playing	Experimenting
Toys	Research equipment
Observation (watching)	Observation (watching, measuring)
Learning from parents and adults	Learning from other scientists (education, university, publications, conferences)
Theories about simple feedback, simple cause-and-effect relationships, middle-sized and close objects, close relationships with people	Theories about complex feedback and cause-and-effect relationships, big and small sized, far away objects
Theory-building intuitively, through neural networking in the brain	Theory-building both intuitively and rationally, through scientific methods such as statistical analyses
Theory-building in one child’s brain	Theory-building across many scientists brains
Secure environment and resources for exploration provided by parents	Secure environment and resources for exploration provided by society and scientific institutions, tenure

Discussion

This analogy helps demystify both child learning and the process of science. Science is often considered purely rational, and child learning purely playful and intuitive. It is not obvious to most people that both are analogous processes of learning.

Quote Bank

Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl (2000):

“A number of developmental psychologists have argued recently that what children do looks strikingly like what adult scientists do. Children create and revise theories in the same way that scientists create and revise theories…. In fact, we think they are not just similar but identical."

"We think that children and scientists actually use some of the same machinery. Scientists are big children. Scientists are such successful learners because they use cognitive abilities that evolution designed for the use of children."

"Just as babies play with the world, testing out their hypotheses on the objects around them, scientists perform experiments. Of course, the scientists’ toys are a lot more expensive."

"Just as children eventually revise and even replace what they know in the light of what they find out, scientists eventually abandon even cherished theories for new ones. It is true that scientists are less willing to give up their theories than children are, but this may, of course, have something to do with the cost of their toys."

"The two most successful examples of human learning turn out to be quite similar. Children and scientists are the best learners in the world, and they both seem to operate in very similar, even identical ways. But they are also never permanently dogmatic—the things they know (or think they know) are always open to further revision."

"When we give grownups leisure and money and interesting problems to solve, they can be almost as smart as babies. We think that, throughout history, some adults continued to learn new things about the world, especially when they were relevant to particular problems of survival. This might explain, for example, the achievements of hunter-gatherer “folk botany” or of Australian aboriginal geography. But the contingencies of history some five hundred years ago gave many more adults the chance to learn about the world. We invented institutions that re-created the conditions of childhood—protected leisure and the right toys. We call those institutions science."

"The most important difference is that children typically make up theories about close, middle-sized, common objects, including people. Scientists, in contrast, often make up theories about objects that are very small or very big, hidden or rare or far away, and the relevant evidence is often very thin on the ground."

"Being a baby may feel like being a scientist. It isn’t just that babies can explore and explain their world; they seem driven to do so, even at the risk of life and limb and maternal conniption fits. Like other human drives, that explanatory drive comes equipped with certain emotions: a deeply disturbing dissatisfaction when you can’t make sense of things and a distinctive joy when you can.
All of us are driven by these cognitive emotions sometimes, scientists are driven by them much of the time, and babies, who have so much to learn, are in their grip practically all the time."

Further Resources

Gopnik, A. (2012). Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications. Science, 337. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1223416

Alison Gopnik (2011): What do babies think? Ted Talk.

Analogies for Sustainable Development