Thank goodness for friends and Facebook. This past Sunday, I was surprised to find a New York Times article posted
"on my wall" from a friend I have had several conversations with about
children. We've talked about the complex and interesting lives of our
preschoolers. We've discussed how kids can know so much and how some
adults never see how much they understand. Then, on Sunday, she posted
a book review about preschoolers and philosophy on my wall. It was like
getting a care package at college or a surprise present from grandma!
Alison
Gropnik is my new personal angel because she gives my spiritual
philosophy about children a scientific basis so that I can talk about
it professionally.
Here is a quote from the article,
Early childhood is both familiar and mysterious. Everyone
was a baby once, and most adults have spent plenty of time talking to
small children. But we simply can’t remember what it was like to be
younger than 5 or 6, and conversations between an adult and a preschool child is far from a dialogue between equals.
The problem is we know too much. One of the first things I tell
new pre-k teachers is to ask kids to "Tell me about..." their drawings
instead of trying to guess, "Is that a boat?" My son will likely say,
"No, its a rescue space ship" but many others bend to the suggestion of
adults. That's just the way it works, unless we give kids the power to
own their perceptions of the world, they will passively bend to ours.
This book looks like a great read and I can't wait to pick it up
because it may finally open up a conversation about development that is
not entirely based on the giants of research. With it, we can better
come to an understanding of children based on their brains instead of
our adult ideas about kids. Recently, I mentioned the possible
falsehoods inherent in antiquated frameworks for understanding children
in my post
Yoda vs. Piaget: Creativity and Recipes.
It seems I might finally have some research to back it up! The review
goes on to say, "Thanks to such work, it seems we can now get over some
of the false or misleading ideas about childhood inherited from
Sigmund Freud and
Jean Piaget,
the pioneer of developmental psychology." And then there is this, "The
notion that moral ideas develop only in adolescence — as Piaget, for
one, claimed — appears to be wrong."
If you have read this book
or know someone who has leave a comment with your opinion. Is early
childhood development done? Do we know everything we need to? Is Piaget
and Erickson enough? What about
Gilligan or even
Gopnik as a new foundation?
Image: http://pushthefuture.org/speaker_profiles/2006/kidsphilosophyslam.html
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