Teaching Babies

Is the title of this post ambiguous to you? If so, good. Because this post concerns not only the notion of teaching information to babies, but how they learn (the ways in which they learn, that is) can then teach us. We're going to be dealing with development psychology and science in this post, and using it to explore the philosophy of humans (Soulful Science promised to connect science and humanity—I'm trying to keep that word).

Anyhow, let me get more specific. I spend my free time meandering through different science articles (isn't that what all college kids do?), both online and in print, and recently stumbled 

upon one about babies and their ability to learn that peaked my interest. There are a multitude of reasons, really. For one, it is a great example of how science and philosophy connect, or how science can reveal much about ourselves. Moreover, it connected to a few classes I've taken which I'd hoped to learn more about. Psychology, for example, which provided Freud's insights about the different phases of life (which, frankly, I was very skeptical of, but hey, can you blame me for doubting a dude who says that women secretly want to be raped?). And linguistics, too, which talked about how brain development influences and alters the ability of people to learn information.

This article summarizes some of the recent research in the field of developmental psychology as conveyed by a recent book (its name and the link at the end of this post), debasing the theories provided by Freud and Piaget that children "produced so much fantastic, unreal play" because they couldn't differentiate between fantasy and reality. On the contrary, rather than their play suggesting limited abilities, such extensive play actually corresponds to their immense imaginative abilities. Imagination was formerly conceived as an ability special to adults, but recent research has shown that it is existent in babies as young as 18 months. And imagination is not longer thought of as being something existent for the purposes of solely entertainment, but rather, too, extant for the comprehension of the "causal structure of the real world." Psychologists now think that babies and children think in ways similar to bayesian networks, meaning that imagination lends way to the thought of different possible things that are then eventually probabilistically connected to outcomes (that is, they learn causal relationships in the world around them through their crazy imaginations!). In fact, children have been shown now to work with very complex statistical information...although not consciously understanding what they are doing, they process complicated sets of relationships even better than adults.

Moreover, new developmental psychology purports children to be "useless on purpose." The point is, it is pretty illogical for an organism to evolve such that it must be dependent upon adults for so many years. So what is the evolutionary benefit? Basically, evolution has given way to a long period of childhood were we are endowed a great amount of freedom (that is, we don't have many responsibilities, we don't have to work—ah, to be young again!), and this freedom enables children to dedicate their time entirely to learning. We explore the world, often through imaginative play, for years and years and then acquire all of this knowledge when we're adults. So, developmental psychology now suggests, in short, that the period of childhood exists so that we can learn! It's pretty interesting and actually makes a lot of sense if you ask me.

And I found this part to be pretty cool, too: recent research has provided some insight on innate moral constructs, showing that, from the age of two, humans recognize and understand the respective and relative importances of moral principles and conventional principles (that is, for example, social customs). Toddlers understand, for example, that it is never okay to hit someone (moral principle) even if everyone at the daycare said it would be okay, whereas toddlers acknowledge it is not necessarily okay to not hang up your coat it the daycare (that is, they understand that the conventional rules change from daycare to daycare). So even at such a young age, it seems humans understand different moral rules derived from empathy versus convention. I find this especially interesting since teachings I've endured—err, had—suggested that such a moral understanding isn't acquired until far later.

So developmental psychology (or science in general) does serve to be helpful in philosophy. It provides us with great insights about the nature of humanity and its capacity for change. That is, it shows, on the hand, that we have innate moral instincts, for example, but that, on the other, their is huge capacity for change, revision, and development. Don't you just love when science and philosophy goes hand in hand? I'm personally of the belief that all science is rooted in philosophy, anyhow, so seeing this article really got me interested in the book (which is entitled "The Philosophical Baby". I'm definitely going to check it out, and if you're interested, you should, too...the link for it is here.