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Free to Learn Chapter 6. THE HUMAN EDUCATIVE INSTINCTS

Author: Peter Gray Publisher: New York, NY: Basic Books. Publish Date: 2013 Review Date: Status:⌛️

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The Educable Animal

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From an evolutionary perspective it is reasonable to say that we humans are, first and foremost, the educable animal. We are educable to a degree that goes way, way beyond that of any other species. Education, as I defined it in Chapter 2, is cultural transmission. It is the set of processes by which each new generation of humans acquires and builds upon the skills, knowledge, rituals, beliefs, and values of the previous generation. Education, thus defined, has to do with a special category of learning. All animals learn, but only humans learn to a significant degree from others of their species and thereby create, transmit, and build upon culture, from one generation to the next.

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At least two million years ago, our human genetic line began moving along an evolutionary track that made us ever more reliant on cultural transmission. Over time we developed means of hunting, gathering, processing foods, protecting ourselves from predators, birthing, caring for infants, and combating diseases that depended on detailed knowledge and well-honed skills. Such knowledge and skills went way beyond what any individual or any group of individuals living together could discover on their own. Our survival came to depend on the accumulated achievements of prior generations, each building on the accomplishments of their ancestors. We also became increasingly dependent on our ability to cooperate and share with others of our kind, within and across bands, which required the transmission of social mores, rules, rituals, stories, and shared cultural beliefs and values. In short, we came to depend on education.

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Today when most people think of education they think of schooling. In other words, they think of education as something done to children by adults. But education long predates schooling, and even today most education occurs outside of school. To say that we are the educable animal is to say that we have, built into us, instinctive drives to acquire and build upon the culture into which we are born. Today, in the minds of most people, the onus for education lies with adults, who have the responsibility to make children acquire certain aspects of the culture, whether or not the children want to acquire them. But throughout human history the real onus for education has always laid with children themselves, and it still does today. Just as children come into the world with instinctive drives to eat and drink what they must to survive, they come into the world with instinctive drives to educate themselves—to learn what they must to become effective members of the culture around them and thereby to survive. Those instinctive drives, broadly construed, are curiosity, playfulness, and sociability.

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Natural selection works largely by building upon and modifying structures and instincts that are already present. All mammals are to some degree curious, playful, and sociable. But in our species these traits have been greatly expanded and shaped in ways that suit our unique educative needs.

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Curiosity: The Drive to Explore and Understand

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Whenever Mitra and his colleagues set up an outdoor computer in an area in which it was a novelty, children crowded around it because they were curious. They wanted to know what this strange thing was and how it worked. They especially wanted to know what they could do with it.

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Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC, began his great treatise on the origin of scientific thought with the words, “Human beings are naturally curious about things.”4 Nothing could be more obvious. Within hours of their births, infants begin to look longer at novel objects than at those they have already seen. On their deathbeds, people sometimes make heroic efforts to remain alive a little longer, sometimes in great pain, because they are curious to see what will happen next. During all of our waking time between birth and death, our senses are alert to changes in the world around us—our curiosity is continuously provoked. To confine a person to an unchanging environment (to the degree that that is possible), in which there is nothing new to explore, nothing new to learn, is everywhere considered cruel punishment, even if all other drives are satisfied. In a healthy human being, the thirst for knowledge is never quenched.

  1. Aristotle (1963 translation).

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OF COURSE HUMANS ARE NOT the only species that is motivated to explore. All organisms probe their environment to find what they need for survival. For some animals, exploration involves simply random or quasi-random movement. An amoeba moves randomly until it makes contact with chemical molecules indicating that food is nearby, and then it keeps moving in the same direction until it engulfs the food. Foraging ants move out in random directions from their colony’s nest, leaving faint chemical trails as they do.5 If one ant finds a source of food, it returns to the nest and leaves a stronger trail, which others in the colony can follow. Mammals explore in more directed ways than do protozoa or insects—ways that seem well designed for the acquisition of multiple kinds of information about their environment. Through exploration, they gain information about the general layout of their corner of the world, about food sources, predators, escape routes, potential hiding places, safe places to sleep or to raise young, and about the presence or absence of other members of their species, whether foes, friends, or potential reproductive partners.

  1. Gordon (1999).

  2. Inglis et al. (2001).

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The most systematic studies of exploration have been conducted with laboratory rats. When placed in a novel environment—typically a large open-topped box or maze with various objects, pathways, and barriers—the rat’s strongest initial drive is fear. The animal cowers motionless in a corner. Gradually, however, the fear diminishes and the exploratory drive begins to manifest itself and the rat starts to make brief excursions. On each excursion it may rear up several times on its hind legs and look around and sniff before scurrying back to the corner. Over time, the rat becomes bolder and begins to explore larger areas, sniffing everywhere and feeling objects with its whiskers and forepaws. Even after it has thoroughly explored the apparatus, the rat continues to patrol periodically, checking to see if anything has changed. If a new object appears in an otherwise familiar environment, the rat approaches it, at first cautiously, and explores it until it, too, becomes familiar. Many experiments have shown that rats acquire useful information through such exploration.7 In one set of experiments, for example, rats that had an opportunity to explore a complex arena that contained one or more hiding places ran much more quickly to a hiding place when they were deliberately frightened in a later test than did rats that had not previously explored the arena.8

  1. Roberts et al. (2007).

  2. In one such experiment (by Renner, 1988), newborns, just one day old, were first shown one or the other of two similar checkerboard patterns and then were tested with both patterns in front of them to see which one attracted most of their attention. The babies looked longer at the pattern they had not seen before. To exhibit such a preference, the newborns had to perceive the difference between the two and remember that difference over the seconds that separated one trial from the next.

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MOST RESEARCH ON HUMAN CURIOSITY and exploration has been conducted with infants, toddlers, and preschool children. In hundreds of experiments, babies have been found to gaze much longer at scenes they have never seen before than at ones they have previously seen. In fact, this preference for novelty is so reliable that researchers use it to assess babies’ abilities to perceive and remember. Babies who look significantly longer at a new pattern or object than at one they have already seen must perceive the difference between the two and must, at some level, remember having seen the old one before.9 Babies also look much longer at events that seem to defy the laws of physics than at those that abide by them.10 For example, given a choice between watching objects fall down or up when shoved off the end of a shelf, babies as young as three months old look much more at the latter than at the former. In their attempts to understand the world around them, babies seem to be attracted to all events that run counter to their expectations.

  1. Friedman (1972).

  2. Baillargeon (2004, 2008).

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By about six months old, babies begin to explore with their hands as well as with their eyes. They grab any novel object within reach and hold it in front of their eyes, turn it from side to side, pass it from hand to hand, rub it, squeeze it, pull on it, drop it, pick it up again, and in general act as if they are deliberately testing the object’s properties.11 Such actions decline sharply as the infant becomes familiar with a given object, but return in full force when a new, different object is substituted for the old one. Through such actions, babies quickly learn about the properties of the objects around them and how to use those properties. They learn how to make objects squeak, come apart, twist into new shapes, bounce, or shatter, depending on the object’s nature. During the exploration process, the baby’s face is serious and intense, like that of a scholar poring over a book or a scientist working feverishly with test tubes; with each discovery comes a eureka moment of delight. If you want to see the raw emotions of curiosity and discovery writ large on the face of a scientist who doesn’t hide emotions, watch any normal nine-month-old baby exploring a new object.

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As children grow older, their curiosity does not diminish but motivates increasingly sophisticated forms of exploration. Research psychologist Laura Schulz and her colleagues have performed many experiments with children showing how they go about solving mysteries in the world around them. In one experiment, the researchers presented four-year-olds with a box that had two levers sticking out of it.12 Pressing one lever caused a toy duck to pop up through a slit on top of the box, and pressing the other caused a puppet made of drinking straws to pop up. The box was demonstrated to different children in two different ways. In one demonstration condition, the experimenter pressed each lever separately, so the child could see the effect that each lever produced when pressed. In the other condition, the experimenter always pressed the two levers simultaneously, so the child could not know which lever controlled which object. Then each child was allowed to play with the two-lever box or with a different toy. The result was that children who had seen only the two levers operated simultaneously chose to play much more with the demonstrated box than with the new toy, while the opposite was true for the other children.

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The logical interpretation is this result: The children who were shown what each lever did were no longer much interested in the box because they had little to learn from it. In contrast, those who had only seen the two levers pressed simultaneously wanted to explore the box so they could try each lever separately and discover whether it moved the duck, the puppet, or both. The children were motivated by curiosity to discover how the box worked; they were not much interested in producing already known effects. The experiment also showed that four-year-olds are capable of rather sophisticated cause-effect reasoning. They realized that to know fully how the box worked, they had to see what each lever did separately, not just what the two levers did when operated together.

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In another set of experiments, Schulz and her colleagues showed that teaching can interfere with exploration.13 Four- and five-year-olds were allowed to explore a toy that could produce four different effects when acted upon in different ways. It squeaked when one tube was pulled out from inside another; it lit up when a small button hidden inside the end of a tube was pressed; it produced musical notes when certain parts of a small yellow pad were pressed; and it produced a reverse image of the child’s face when the child looked into one of the tubes. In the teaching condition, the experimenter deliberately showed and explained to the child how to produce one of the effects, the squeak. In the experimenter play condition, the experimenter squeaked the toy in front of the child, but did so as if for her own enjoyment rather than in a teaching mode. In the control condition, the experimenter did nothing with the toy before giving it to the child. The result was that the children in the control condition and in the experimenter play condition subsequently spent much more time exploring the toy, and discovered how to produce more of its effects than did children in the teaching condition. Apparently children in the teaching condition tended to conclude that the only thing the toy could do was squeak, because that was all the experimenter showed them. Those in the non-teaching conditions had no reason to believe the experimenter had shown them all there was to know about the toy, so they explored it more fully to discover its possibilities.

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There is reason to believe that this kind of inhibitory effect of teaching on curiosity occurs in schools all the time. A teacher shows students one way to solve an arithmetic problem, for example, and the students conclude that it must be the only way. They don’t explore alternative ways to solve the problem (even if they are allowed to, which they often are not), and they therefore fail to learn all the dimensions of the problem or the full power of arithmetic operations. Ultimately they are deprived of the joy of discovery in the realm of numbers and learn not to go beyond what was taught.

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Playfulness: The Drive to Practice and Create

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Playfulness (the drive to play) serves educative purposes complementary to those of curiosity. While curiosity motivates children to seek new knowledge and understanding, playfulness motivates them to practice new skills and use those skills creatively. In Mitra’s experiments, curiosity led the children to approach the computer and manipulate it to discover its properties; then playfulness led them to become adept at using those properties for their own, creative purposes. For example, after exploring the computer’s Paint program, children played extensively with it, using it to paint pictures that were their own creations, not inherent properties of the computer. Similarly, after exploring the Word program, many used it to write notes of their own creation, just for fun. In the process, they became skilled in computer painting and computer writing.

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In a classic series of research studies, British developmental psychologists Miranda Hughes and Corrine Hutt documented the behavioral differences between exploration and play in two-year-olds.14 When first presented with a complex new toy, the typical child explored it intensely, exhibiting a serious face and eyes riveted on the toy. As the child manipulated the toy to discover its properties, the focused concentration continued, punctuated by momentary expressions of surprise, sometimes mixed with joy, as new discoveries were made. Only after exploring the toy for some time did the child begin to play with it, by repetitively acting on it to produce known effects or by incorporating it into a fantasy game. The shift from exploration to play was marked by a shift from a focused, serious facial expression to a more relaxed, smiling one. It was also marked by a change in heart rate. The heart rate during exploration was slow and steady, indicative of intense concentration; during play it became more variable, indicative of a more relaxed attitude. During exploration, the child screened out the researcher and other potential distractions; during play the child became more willing to interact with the researcher and to incorporate other events and objects into the play.

  1. Hughes and Hutt (1979); Hughes (1978).

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Play is not as widespread among animals as is exploration, but it does appear to occur in all species of mammals and in some species of birds. From a biological, evolutionary perspective, play is nature’s way of ensuring that young mammals, including young humans, will practice and become good at the skills they need to develop to survive and thrive in their environments. This practice theory of play was first proposed and developed more than a century ago by the German philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos, who presented evidence for it in two books: The Play of Animals (1898) and The Play of Man (1901).

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GROOS WAS AHEAD OF HIS TIME, in his thinking about evolution and about play. He understood the writings of Charles Darwin and had a sophisticated, modern understanding of instincts. He recognized that animals, especially mammals, must to varying degrees learn to use their instincts. Young mammals come into the world with biological drives and tendencies (instincts) to behave in certain ways, but to be effective such behaviors must be practiced and refined. Play in animals, according to Groos, is essentially an instinct to practice other instincts. He wrote, “Animals cannot be said to play because they are young and frolic some, but rather they have a period of youth in order to play; for only by doing so can they supplement the insufficient hereditary endowment with individual experience, in view of the coming tasks of life.”15 Consistent with his theory, Groos divided animal play into categories related to the types of skills the play promotes, including movement play (running, leaping, climbing, swinging in trees, and so on), hunting play, fighting play, and nursing play (playful care of infants).

  1. Groos (1898), p. 75.

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Groos’s explanation of play’s biological purpose allows us to make sense of the patterns of play seen throughout the animal world. For starters, it explains why young animals play more than older ones; they play more because they have more to learn. It also explains why mammals play more than do other classes of animals. Insects, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes come into the world with rather fixed instincts; they don’t need to learn much to survive, given their ways of life, and there is little if any evidence in them of play. Mammals, on the other hand, have more flexible instincts, which must be supplemented and shaped through learning and practice provided by play.

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Groos’s theory also explains the differences in playfulness found among different orders and species of animals. Those animals whose way of life depends least on rigid instincts and most on learning are the most playful. Among mammals, primates (monkeys and apes) have the most to learn, and they are the most playful of all animal orders. Among primates, human beings, chimpanzees, and bonobos (a species of ape closely related to chimpanzees and to humans) have the most to learn, and they are the most playful species. Also among mammals, carnivores (including the dog-like and cat-like species) are generally more playful than herbivores, most likely because success in hunting requires more learning than does success in grazing. Aside from mammals, the only other animal class in which play has been regularly observed is that of birds. The most playful birds are the corvids (crows, magpies, and ravens), raptors (hawks and their relatives), and parrots. These are all long-lived birds, with larger brain-to-body-weight ratios than other birds, which exhibit much flexibility and cleverness in their social lives and ways of obtaining food.16

  1. Evidence for these species’ difference in play is found in Burghardt (2005) and Fagen (1981).

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The idea that play’s purpose is to promote skill learning also helps us to understand why different species of animals play in different ways. To a considerable degree, you can predict what an animal will play at by knowing what skills it must develop to survive and reproduce. Lion cubs and the young of other predators play at stalking and chasing; zebra colts, young gazelles, and other animals that are preyed upon play at fleeing and dodging; young monkeys play at swinging from branch to branch in trees. Among species in which males fight one another for access to females, young males engage in more play fighting than do young females. And at least among some species of primates, young females, but not young males, engage in much playful care of infants.

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In The Play of Man, Groos extended his insights about animal play to humans.17 He pointed out that human beings, having much more to learn than do other animals, play much more than do other animals. Indeed, young humans everywhere, when left to their own devices, play at the kinds of skills that people must develop to thrive as adults. He also pointed out that human beings, much more so than the young of any other species, must learn different skills depending on the unique culture in which they develop. Therefore, he argued, natural selection led to a strong drive, in human children, to observe the activities of their elders and incorporate those activities into their play. Children in every culture play at the general categories of activities that are essential to people everywhere, and they also play at the specific variations of those activities that are unique to their native culture.

  1. Groos (1901).

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HERE, TO EXPAND UPON Groos’s theory, is my own list of universal types of children’s play and the relation of each type to basic human survival skills.

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•   Physical play. Like all mammals, we must develop strong bodies and learn to move in coordinated ways, and so we engage in physical play, including running, leaping, chasing, and rough-and-tumble games that resemble the play of other mammals. Children on their own initiative don’t lift weights or run laps to keep in shape. Nothing would be more dull and wearisome. Instead, they chase one another around, and wrestle or play at sword fighting to happy exhaustion, many times per day if given the opportunity. While some forms of physical play, such as chasing one another around, occur in all cultures, others, such as playful sword fighting or bicycle riding, are unique to cultures in which the appropriate artifacts and models are present.

Note: Second circuit

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•   Language play. We are the linguistic animal, and so we engage in language play to learn to talk. Nobody has to teach language to young children. They learn it on their own, through play. At about two months of age, infants begin to make repeated, drawn-out vowel-like cooing sounds—ooh-ooh-ooh, eeh-ahhh-eeh-ahhh. At about four or five months, the cooing gradually changes to babbling, as the baby begins to put consonants and vowels together—ba-ba-booba-ga-da-da-da-badada. Such language-like sound production occurs only when the baby is happy; it has structure; it is self-motivated; it is not done to get something—it is done purely for its own sake. All that makes it play. With time, the babbled sounds come increasingly to resemble the sounds of the child’s native language, and by about one year of age the child’s first words appear and may be repeated over and over in a playful manner. After that, the child’s linguistic play becomes ever more complex and takes forms that are ever more shaped by the specific linguistic culture in which the child is developing. Children play with phrases, puns, rhymes, alliterations, and alternative grammatical constructions—all of which help to consolidate their growing understanding of all aspects of their native language. Listen closely to any young child playing with language, either alone or in pseudo dialogues with others, and you will find many instances of practice at linguistic constructions that are joyful challenges to the child. When language play is carried into adulthood, we call it poetry.

Note: Third circuit 

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•   Exploratory play. We are Homo sapiens, the wise animal, who make sense of the world, and so we have exploratory play, which combines exploration and play to promote understanding. I distinguished earlier between exploration and play, but I hasten now to add that in our species the two often blend. Much if not most of children’s play is exploration as well as play. As children develop skills in play, they continue to be open to new discoveries made during play. In Mitra’s experiments, the children who had reached the stage of playing with one or another of the computer’s programs were still making new discoveries about the program’s capacities. As I will describe in Chapter 7, whenever children or adults bring imagination and creativity into their efforts toward discovery, they are combining play and exploration. In adults, we call that science.

Note: First circuit

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•   Constructive play. We are the animal that survives by building things—including shelters, tools, devices to help us communicate, and devices to help us move from place to place—and so we have constructive play, which teaches us to build. In constructive play a child strives to produce some object that he or she has in mind. A child making a sand castle, or creating a spaceship from blocks, or drawing a giraffe, is engaged in constructive play. In many cases the objects built in constructive play are miniature or pretend versions of “real” objects that adults in the culture build and use. Hunter-gatherer children make small versions of huts, bows and arrows, blowguns, nets, knives, slingshots, musical instruments, digging sticks, rafts, rope ladders, mortars and pestles, and baskets. Through such play they become good at building, and by adulthood they are making well-crafted, useful versions of the real things. Constructive play can be with words and sounds as well as with substances, and people everywhere, adults and children alike, produce stories, poems, and melodies in their play. Among the countless kinds of constructions playfully made by children in our culture today are computer programs, written stories, and secret codes with invented symbol systems. Constructive play can be intellectual as well as manual.

Note: Third circuit 

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•   Fantasy play. We are the imaginative animal, able to think of things that do not exist or are not present, and so we have fantasy play, or pretend play, which builds our capacity for imagination and provides a foundation for the development of logical thought. In this type of play children establish certain propositions about the nature of their pretend world and then play out those propositions logically. In doing so they develop and exercise the imaginative capacities that allow people to consider things that are not immediately present, which is what we all do when we plan for the future and what scientists do when they develop theories to explain or predict events in the real world. I will say more about this in Chapter 7.

Note: Third circuit

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•   Social play. We are an intensely social species, who must cooperate with others to survive, and so we have many forms of social play, which teach us to cooperate and to restrain our impulses in ways that make us socially acceptable. When children play imaginative games together, they do more than exercise their imagination. They enact roles, and in doing so they exercise their capacities to behave in accordance with shared conceptions of what is or is not appropriate. They also practice the art of negotiation. As they decide who will play what roles, who may use which props, and just what scenes they will enact and how, the players must all come to agreement. Getting along and making agreements with others are surely among the most valuable of human survival skills, and children continuously practice those skills in social play. I will say much more about social play in Chapter 8.

Note: fourth circuit 

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The types of play italicized in the above list are not mutually exclusive categories. They are functional types, meaning that they refer to the different functions that play can serve. Any given instance of play may serve more than one function. A lively outdoor group game may be physical play, language play, exploratory play, constructive play, fantasy play, and social play all at once. Play, in all its varieties taken together, works to build us into fully functioning, effective human beings.

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Going beyond Groos, I would add that children are naturally motivated to play not just at the skills that are most prominent and valued among adults around them, but also, even more intensely, at new skills that lie at the culture’s cutting edge. Because of this, children typically learn to use new technology faster than do their parents. From an evolutionary perspective, that is no accident. At a gut, genetically based level, children recognize that the most crucial skills to learn are those that will be of increasing importance in the future—the skills of their own generation, which may be different from those of their parents’ generation. The value of this attraction to the new is especially apparent in modern times, when technology and the skills required to master that technology change so rapidly.

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Human Sociability, and the Natural Drive to Share Information and Ideas

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In Mitra’s demonstrations in India, curiosity led children to approach and manipulate the computer, playfulness led them to become skilled at using it, and sociability caused the new knowledge and skills to spread like wildfire from child to child.18 Because of their natural sociability and capacity for language, children’s minds are networked with those of all their friends. When one child in Mitra’s study made a discovery, such as how to download documents on the computer, that discovery spread quickly to the whole group of children nearby, and then some child in that group, who had a friend in another group, carried the spark of new knowledge to that other group, where a new brush fire was ignited, and so on, through the roughly three hundred children who at various times used the outdoor computer. Each discovery by one child became the discovery of all the children in the network. As I write this, philanthropists are working on the One Laptop per Child project as a means of bringing literacy and stores of knowledge to the whole world. According to Mitra, however, we don’t need one laptop per child. Children learn more when they share a computer and learn from one another.

  1. Mitra and Rana (2001).

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Other research confirms Mitra’s observation that children learn more together than alone. Earlier in this chapter I described two of Laura Schulz’s experiments on the explorations of four-year-olds. Here is another one.19 Schulz and her colleagues allowed four-year-olds to explore a toy that had two brightly colored gears that both moved when a switch was turned on to operate a motor hidden inside the toy. The question posed by the experimenter to motivate the children’s exploration was this: What caused each gear to turn? More specifically, did the motor turn gear A, which then turned gear B; or was the reverse true; or did the motor independently turn both gears? The children could solve this puzzle by removing one gear at a time to see what happened with the other gear when the switch was turned on, but they had to discover this strategy on their own. Schulz and her colleagues found that children exploring in pairs were far more likely to solve the puzzle than were children exploring alone. In pairs, they shared knowledge as they explored, so each child’s insights became the insights of both.

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We humans have many biological adaptations that cause us naturally, even automatically, to learn from others around us. One of these is reflexive gaze following. When we attend to another person our eyes move, automatically, reflexively, to gaze at the same spot at which the other person is gazing. This reflex helps us understand what the other person is thinking about or talking about. When a person says, “Oh, that is beautiful,” our automatic gaze following helps us know immediately what that refers to.

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Gaze following has been studied most fully in infants and toddlers. Beginning at about six months of age, babies tend to look at whatever their nearby caregiver is looking at.20 This reflex ensures that babies generally see and pay attention to the same objects and events in their environment that their caregivers attend to, which may be the most important things to learn about in their culture. Gaze following also helps infants learn language. When a baby hears her mother enunciate a new word, maybe mushroom, the baby has a chance of learning what that word refers to if she is looking at the same object as her mother.21

  1. Schulz et al. (2007).

  2. Brooks and Meltzoff (2002).

  3. Ibid. (2008).

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No other animals exhibit gaze following to the extent that we humans do. In fact, the unique coloring of our eyes may be a special adaptation that came about through natural selection to enable us to follow each other’s gazes and thereby understand each other better. The relatively dark blue or brown circular iris of the human eye is sharply set off by the bright white of the rest of the visible portion of the eyeball (the sclera), which makes it easy for others to see where we are looking. Other primates, including chimpanzees and bonobos, have dark sclera, which do not contrast with the iris. Chimpanzees and bonobos do engage in some gaze following and can learn through that means, but their gaze following is much less automatic than is humans’. It is also less accurate, because it depends entirely on seeing whole head movements, not eye movements.22

  1. Okamoto-Barth et al. (2007); Tomonaga (2007).

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Of course, the greatest human adaptation for social learning is language. We learn language through linguistic play in infancy and early childhood, and use it to support most of our subsequent social learning. Language allows us to tell one another not just about the here and now but also about the past, future, faraway, and hypothetical—which no other animal can do. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett put it, “Comparing our brains with bird brains or dolphin brains is almost beside the point, because our brains are in effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others. They are joined by an innovation that has invaded our brain and no others: language.”23

  1. Dennett (1994).

  2. Goebel (2000).

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Listen to the everyday conversation of people of any age, in the same detached frame of mind that you might use in studying beings from another planet, and you will be amazed by the power of language and by the amount of information exchanged every minute. As children grow older, their use of language becomes ever more sophisticated, and the ideas they exchange and develop in their conversations do, too.

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The conversation then moved into related realms concerning the purpose of laws, the difference between laws and morality, and the question of what kinds of freedoms should or should not be permitted in a democracy. These are ordinary kids talking with one another, but they’re grappling with abstract intellectual and moral concepts and challenging one another to think and express themselves more clearly. Kids “just talking.” It occurs all the time and is a powerful vehicle of education, especially for kids past the age of about eleven or twelve, who are as motivated to explore one another’s minds through language as four-year-olds are to explore toys with their hands.

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How Schools Thwart Children’s Educative Instincts

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Why don’t school lessons ignite enthusiasm and spread insights in the same wildfire way that Mitra observed among impoverished children in India playing at public computers? It is not hard to think of probable answers. Children in school are not free to pursue their own interests, or to pursue those interests in their self-chosen ways. Children in school are more or less continuously evaluated, and the concern for evaluation and pleasing the teacher (or, for some, rebellion against pleasing the teacher) often overrides and subverts the possibility of developing genuine interests. Children in school are often shown one and only one way to solve a problem and are led to believe that other ways are incorrect, squelching the potential for exciting discoveries. And as Mitra himself has pointed out, the segregation of children by age in schools prevents the diversity in preexisting skills and knowledge that seems to be a key to self-directed learning from others.25

  1. Mitra (2005).

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Curiosity, playfulness, and meaningful conversation are all thwarted in school, because they require freedom. Psychologist Susan Engel and her colleagues conducted an observational study of kindergarten and fifth-grade classrooms in the United States and found that children in neither grade expressed much curiosity relevant to anything that they were required to study.26 When children asked questions, they asked about rules and requirements, such as how much time they had to finish a task, not about the subject itself. Questions about the subject were asked almost entirely by teachers, and the students’ task was to guess at the answers the teachers were looking for. When students did seem to show a spark of interest, the teacher often cut the interest off, so as not to fall behind on the assignment.

  1. Engel (2006, 2009).

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And that, pretty much, is what school is all about—suppressing curiosity and enthusiasm so students can complete assignments in a timely manner. It’s no wonder that the longer children are in school, the less interested they become in the subjects taught. The decline in interest over successive grades in school has been shown in many large-scale research studies, especially for science, but also for other subjects and for schoolwork in general.27 One study, however, suggests that the decline is not inevitable.28 In that study, students in fifth through eighth grade in various public schools in Israel were assessed for their interest in science. Students in traditional public schools showed the typical decline in interest, but those in so-called democratic public schools did not. In fact, in the democratic schools interest in science tended to increase from year to year. By eighth grade, students’ interest in science was substantially and significantly greater in the democratic than in the standard schools. “Democratic” schools in Israel are not nearly as democratic or tolerant of self-directed learning as the Sudbury Valley School, but they do permit much more freedom in curricula than do traditional schools. In Israeli democratic schools, teachers might allow students to experiment in science classes, not merely follow the steps listed in a workbook.

  1. Eccles et al. (1993); Galton (2009); Harter (1981); Lepper et al. (2005); Osborne et al. (2003).

  2. Vedder-Weiss and Fortus (2011).

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