Babies can be rational without being goal-oriented

Alison Gopnik sharing some of the latest research on the neurological development of babies in Your Baby is Smarter Than You Think in the August 16, 2009 New York Times. Read the whole thing.
A couple of key observations:

But babies' intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.

This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can't not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.

[snip]

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.

Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don't use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.

In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences - we plan based on what we've learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting - a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.

These observations tie together several strands of research - E.D Hirsch's emphasis on the importance of a framework of knowledge, James Heckman's revealing research on non-cognitive skills, Hart and Risley's discovery about the importance of early word volumes, Gerald Weinberg's Used Car Law (from General Systems Thinking) - as well as the importance of variety and balance between volume and quality, imagination and facts, action and description, etc.

As with so many things to do with reading, the name of the game is balance and nuance. What is right for this child at this moment may be more imaginative works than concrete; two months from now it might be the reverse. Just as in life there is always the effort to harmonize the trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness.

There is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

The failure of our schools to create a literate society is sometimes excused on the grounds that the schools have been asked to do too much. They are asked, for example, to pay due regard to the demands of both local and national acculturation. They are asked to teach not only American history but also state and city history, driving, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, consumerism, carpentry, cooking, and other special subjects. They are given the task of teaching information that is sometimes too rudimentary and sometimes too specialized. If the schools did not undertake this instruction, much of the information so provided would no doubt go unlearned. In some of our national moods we would like the schools to teach everything, but they cannot. There is a pressing need for clarity about our educational priorities.

Where are you creeping with your lame paws?

Herman Wouk is the author of The Caine Mutiny, a magnificent tale of decision making and personal responsibility set in the South Pacific in World War II and in part inspired by the author's own service in destroyers in that war. It is a great book, particularly for young boys and young men, say 12 years old and older.

Wouk is still alive and well and writing great prose. He has a new book out The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion. I have not read it yet but it looks good based in this excerpt of his via New Scientist, Is God a Mathematician. It has been years since I have read anything by Wouk but he seems to have lost none of his style. Some lines from the essay:

. . . Like many novelists I have spun my books out of my experiences when I could, but in attempting work far outside my own relatively jog-trot existence I have had to pick other men's brains. My World War II service, three years on destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific, gave me the substance of The Caine Mutiny, but taught me nothing at all about the world storm that swept me from Manhattan to the south Pacific like a driven leaf. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima my ship was a bobbing speck on picket duty in the rough waters off Okinawa, and we had just survived a kamikaze attack unscathed; so I joined heartily in the merriment aboard ship, very glad that I had survived the war and would soon go back to my free civilian life and marry my sweetheart. As to the larger issues of dropping a whacking new bomb made of uranium on a Japanese city, I was innocent and indifferent. The radio said that our scientists had "harnessed the power of the sun", and that was quite enough for me and for all of us aboard that old four-piper, halfway around the world from home.

As a Columbia undergraduate, imbibing the Greek philosophy, comparative religion and general humanism of the noted core curriculum, I rode the subway to the Bronx once a week to study the Talmud with my grandfather. The Talmud is a hard grind in Aramaic, and to lighten up things I would now and then venture an agnostic prod at some tender point of our faith - say, Joshua's stopping the sun and moon. Grandpa would respond with good-natured scorn, stroking his full beard, "Where are you creeping with your lame paws?" It was more pungent in Yiddish, but you get the idea.

And would never be again

From William Manchester's The Last Lion.

When his flag-draped coffin moved slowly across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bare-headed Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned, not only him and all he had meant, but all they had been and no longer were, and would never be again.

There is constant squabble

From Aidan Chambers' Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children.

There is constant squabble about whether particular books are children's books or not. Indeed, some people argue that there is no such thing as books for children but only books which children happen to read. And unless one wants to be partisan and dogmatic - which I do not, having had my fill of both - one has to agree that there is some truth on both sides and the whole truth in neither.

The fact is that some books are clearly written for children in a specific sense - they were written by their authors deliberately for children - and some books, never specifically intended for children, have qualities which attract children to them.

Minds are never to be sold

From The American Union Speaker, by John D. Philbrick

The Negro's Complaint
by William Cowper

Forced from home and all its pleasures,
Afric's coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger's treasures,
O'er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But though slave they have enrolled me,
Minds are never to be sold.
Still in thought as free as ever,
What are England's rights, I ask,
Me from my delights to sever,
Me to torture, me to task?
Fleecy locks and black complexion
Cannot forfeit Nature's claim;
Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same.

Why did all-creating Nature
Make the plant for which we toil?
Sighs must fan it, tears must water,
Sweat of ours must dress the soil.
Think, ye masters, iron-hearted,
Lolling at your jovial boards;
Think how many backs have smarted
For the sweets your cane affords.

Is there, as ye sometimes tell us,
Is there One who reigns on high?
Has He bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from His throne, the sky?
Ask Him, if your knotted scourges,
Matches, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means that duty urges
Agents of His will to use?

Hark! He answers,--wild tornadoes,
Strewing yonder sea with wrecks,
Wasting towns, plantations, meadows,
Are the voice with which He speaks.
He, foreseeing what vexations
Afric's sons should undergo,
Fixed their tyrants' habitation
Where his whirlwinds answer--No.

By our blood in Afric wasted,
Ere our necks received the chain;
By the miseries that we tasted,
Crossing in your barks the main;
By our suffering since ye brought us
To the man-degrading mart;
All, sustained by patience, taught us
Only by a broken heart.

Deem our nation brutes no longer,
Till some reason ye shall find
Worthier of regard, and stronger
Than the color of our kind.
Slaves of gold! whose sordid dealings
Tarnish all your boasted powers,
Prove that you have human feelings,
Ere you proudly question ours.

An update from the front lines of misery writing

I am not a keen enthusiast for the general prevelance of dark writing for children, particularly problem novels for Young Adults (YA). I strongly feel that there is a much more positive spin that can be put on life without being too Pollyannish and that there is benefit to "always look on the bright side of life." Much of this misery writing is done under the banner of being real, reflecting the world in which children are growing up. This is at best a fictional flag of convenience. While there are many challenges facing children, the world is incomparably better for almost all children than it was even only twenty-five or fifty years ago. Finally I cannot escape the perhaps too judgmental sense that a disproportionate number of these authors are not really writing for the entertainment or edification of children but are seeking in some ways to draw attention to their own self-perceived struggles - that they have never escaped self-regarding teendom into resonsible adulthood and are forever miserable YA wannabees.

Was that too harsh?

Anyway, here is Julie Just's essay in the April 4, 2010 New York Times, reporting on the latest developments in misery writing; The Parent Problem in Young Adult Lit.