![]() There may be a psychological analog to the “hygiene hypothesis†proposed to explain the dramatic recent increase in allergies. Gopnik concludes, as we often have right here:īut trying to eliminate all such risks from children’s lives also might be dangerous. Harold e jones child study center how to#But what they are learning that our kids are not is how to handle risk, and how to learn on their own. Of course, those kids do not need to learn long division, or coding. In other cultures, 3- to 5-year-olds successfully use a hoe, fishing gear, blowpipe, bow and arrow, digging stick and mortar and pestle. Harold e jones child study center skin#Among the Maniq hunter-gatherers in Thailand, 4-year-olds skin and gut small animals without mishap. ![]() There is very little explicit teaching.Īnd children do, in fact, become competent surprisingly early. Adults take it for granted that young children are independently motivated to learn and that they do so by observing adults and playing with the tools that adults use—like knives and saws. He found some striking similarities in the preindustrial societies that he analyzed. Lancy’s paper makes the WEIRDness of our modern attitudes toward children, for good or ill, especially vivid. In recent years, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and colleagues have used the acronym WEIRD—that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic—to describe the strange subset of humans who have been the subject of almost all psychological studies. Lancy looked for commonalities in what children and adults did and said. He compiled a database of anthropologists’ observations of parents and children, covering over 100 preindustrial societies, from the Dusan in Borneo to the Pirahã in the Amazon and the Aka in Africa. In a recent paper titled “Playing with Knives†in the journal Child Development, the anthropologist David Lancy analyzed how young children learn across different cultures. My 21st-century reaction reflects a very recent change in the way that we think about children, risk and learning. She sees a 5-year-old using a saw and can’t understand why no one stops him: ![]() It begins with Gopnik, author of “The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children,” watching a 1927 film of kids at the Harold E. Piece in the Wall Street Journal, Alison Gopnik wonders how come we have such a dim view of our kids that we assume they are less curious and competent than any earlier generation. Often they weren’t even “taught.” The assumption was that kids were naturally curious and would learn by watching, imitating, trying, and being expected to help out. ![]() Throughout most of history and to this day in some of the world, children learned the great lessons they needed to know - survival, stories, how to gut a goat - without going to school. ![]()
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