What Young Children Know About Living and Learning With Companions

Abstract

Theories of how children learn have been led by concern for forming young minds so they can talk and act well in society. Children who are old enough to speak are to be trained so they will grow up responsible and productive citizens, articulate, literate and numerate, and perhaps, eventually, good parents. In the 1930s science believed that children, as exceptionally intelligent animals, learn by conditioning. In the 1960s the new theory of learning proposed that inherent cognitive processes, principally informed by visual experience and designed to be mediated by language, should be fostered to adapt to novel information and solve rational problems. In neither theory were imaginative intentions or emotions of the active and creative child, in its body and communicating with its more intimate senses, given primary place. Infants, too young and inarticulate to conform to formal classroom teaching were presumed to need care, not education. But thoughtful observers and experienced teachers have long believed children are born with powers for creative and cooperative learning. They have perceived that a child learns by their own curiosity and invention, and that the playful imagination of infants and toddlers holds the secret of all imaginative learning in good company. Comenius said it well in the 17th Century, as did Dewey and Whitehead in last century. They argued against Cartesian intellectual individualism, undemocratic imposition of social rules, and what Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Jerome Bruner presented a new and richer view of cognitive growth in infants in 1968. He has repeatedly insisted that children want to evaluate a shared world as a resource for creativity and cooperation (Bruner, 1990, 1996).