Learning from talk
HGSE Professor Paul Harris
In this interview excerpt, HGSE professor Paul Harris describes the need for research on how children learn through conversation with others. While developmental researchers often emphasize learning through observation of the world, we must explain how children come to understand and believe in things they cannot perceive.
"I'm interested in the fact that there are lots of things that children can't experience firsthand. For example, they can't experience the history of their country or of their family. They have to be told about it. They can't experience the history of their species, and if they are going to learn about biology and evolution they have to be told about it. They can't really, unless they are extraordinary, draw any conclusions about, let's say, the shape of the earth. They have to learn by testimony that it's round as opposed to flat. And then there are all sorts of things which are too small to observe, be they vitamins or germs. Yet children have conversations about these entities a lot. And then of course there are metaphysical references; people talk to young children about life after death or God. My feeling is that a lot of developmental psychology is predicated on the assumption that children learn things by getting stuck into concrete, tangible materials, making observations, and drawing conclusions. This is the sort of message you get if you read Piaget's work: the stubborn autodidact model. But it's not just Piaget; it's people like Montessori or Rousseau. There is a strong tradition that says that children learn best if you leave them to their own devices and let them play.
"Up to a point, when we think of young children in preschool environments, we think that this is an important part of their learning. And no doubt it is. But I want to say that human beings and young children clearly have the opportunity to learn all sorts of other things and they can only learn those from other people. [I am studying] how it is that children can learn from what I call testimony, that is, listening to people tell them things about events, episodes, entities that they can't observe for themselves. I like working with preschool children but this is the kind of topic that might oblige me to work with older children because one of the questions it raises is the following: to the extent that children are given all sorts of information about the world, they have to start discriminating among their informants. They have to start thinking about who is telling them the truth, who is offering rhetoric or propaganda. How do children start to realize that some people are more objective and some people are more evangelical than others? How do they come to make judgments about who is a reliable teacher or informant? Given that we tend to think of young children as figuring things out for themselves, [it is important to ask] questions about the many things that they can't figure out for themselves."
<read the full interview>
