Godmothers, giants and grids: Ed Tech from a child’s view
How do children make sense of the world? How do their ways of making sense change, and by how much? We cannot expect to solve such questions entirely. I will assert that a model of education that does not try to take on these questions is hopeless. We have to rely on some working model of how children see the world. We ought to acknowledge that that model may not be obvious, and that children’s way of making sense may be different from our own.
Our other option is to see children as small adults with poor self control and missing skills. In this view, our job as teachers is to get them to think as educated adults do. Until then, they are incomplete — not ready. I dispute this. I believe that healthy children think and feel in their own way, a way that suits their place in the world.
When we look across the cognitive gap between adults and children, we are not looking at a gap between greater and lesser, rational and irrational, or capable and incapable. No person, whatever their age, can spend long using a cognitive toolkit that fails to make sense of the world. Even burgeoning skills must serve a purpose for the person who uses them.
Depending on the age and their experiences, we may find children determined to process their world through play, exaggeration, humor, metaphors, cataloging, stories, binary opposites, or many other cognitive tools. We ought to see how these existing tools can transform into the literate, mathematical, scientific and other “adult” forms of thinking we devote school to. We can tease out features of how children think to encourage new features.
Good teachers do this intuitively. They meet children where they are. When we are laying out a grid of potential goals and projects, however, we are likely to lose our connection to children’s ways of being and dictate our own. For this reason, I want to give my underlying account of how children make sense of the world and how their sense-making transforms.
Know that I draw heavily on the work of Kieran Egan, who gives a clear, lengthy account in the book The Educated Mind. I borrow his vocabulary: an “understanding” is a way of knowing, such that your mathematical understanding of something may differ from a poetic understanding or a mythical understanding or a categorical understanding. Our goal as educators ought to be to cultivate a set of understandings that allow us to form a complete and useful image of the world.
Children’s understandings transform: Sometimes from within, sometimes from extended contact with new practices and information, and sometimes with changes in the brain and body. We do not talk about fixed stages of development, as if a switch gets thrown at a certain age and a change happens automatically. Instead, we are alert to, for example, the kinds of transformations that the onset of literacy brings to how children think. Some of those transformations might never happen to someone who remained illiterate. Dozens of major overlapping influences drive these transformations, technology included. Yet we can see broad patterns and typical pathways emerge, and plan with them in mind.
Mythical Understanding
In Egan’s schema, when children master spoken language they begin to play with abstractions, with making representations of the world. Because spoken language is not yet fixed to the page, it has a freeform power to remake the world by thought.
This is the age of rhyming, wordplay and singsong patterns. This is also the age of fluid metaphors and analogies. Children of this age have wild, free imaginations: The average 7-year-old, given a box and the question “what could this box be if it weren’t a box,” will have dozens of answers while most adults stall after a few. Anything can be like anything else, through unexpected sparks and connections.
Consider the phrase “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” The child is moving and noting a pattern on the sidewalk. Earlier years were the years of somatic understanding, making sense through movement and interaction. That somatic understanding is still strong, but seeking meaning through words. The child connects “crack” to “back” via rhyme. The little story adds drama, but the playfulness takes the sinister quality away. Rhyme, imagination, rhythm, movement and simple narrative work to make sense of the world. The child’s mind is populated with hundred of these bits, some fleeting and some catchy.
To give order to the fluidity, children of the mythical understanding appeal to binary opposites: very giant and very tiny, good and evil, brave and cowardly, wicked and pure of heart. The evil stepmother is evil, wealthy, ugly; Cinderella is good, poor and beautiful. Although we say “mythical,” we are not only talking about myths or fairy tales; we can view science or history this way. The atom is unbelievably tiny, with immense power trapped deep inside it. People throughout history have risen against their sad conditions by bravely dreaming of a better world. And so on.
Notice that this view runs counter to the popular reading of Piaget’s concrete-operational stage. In this view, children cannot handle abstractions and prefer tangible, “hands-on” experiences. Children love, and even crave, abstractions in the mythical mode: an ancient city, a powerful sorcerer, an unstoppable force. They are less likely to understand compound interest or irony or heritability. But they are equally unlikely to make sense of hands-on experiences without reference to a mythic notion that unifies them.
Romantic understanding
Consider Robert Wadlow, the tallest human to have lived (that we know of) at 8' 11". Was he a giant? Clearly not in the sense of the giant who chased Jack down the beanstalk. But think: His shoes were size 37. He was 6 feet tall (probably taller than your teacher!) when he was 8 years old. Consider Robert Wadlow next to his father, who was 5' 10" tall:
Robert Wadlow defined the limits of human experience. We find him at the margin between fantasy and ordinary life. This is exactly how the Romantic understanding concerns itself: With the boundary between real and unreal.
“Romantic” has nothing to do with romance, in the sense of romance novels. It relates to the era of Romantic literature, the era of Frankenstein and other stories that drew on the supernatural promises of new science and world exploration. In students of this era we find this same fascination with the uncanny, the barely possible, the too-strange-to-be-true elements of society and science.
I’ll cite Kieran Egan’s example:
If you tell a typical five-year-old the story of Cinderella, you are not likely to be asked “What means of locomotion does the Fairy Godmother use?” nor to be quizzed about where she is and what she does when she isn’t active in the story. But if you tell a typical ten-year-old the equally fantastic story of Superman, man, you will need to explain his supernatural powers by reference to his birth on the planet Krypton and to the different molecular structure of our sun from that of his home star, and so on.
The craving to resolve strangeness in (pseudo-)scientific fact is the marker of this understanding.
How does this relate to what students have learned? The key is literacy. Spoken language is fluid and unsettled. Written language is concrete and binding. The written word establishes an image of the world. We can return to words, build real things from them, test them against reality and, most importantly, test them against other people. Consider this scene from Black Robe, with a 17th-century Jesuit priest among a pre-literate native tribe:
Language captures reality, and puts it in the control of the person doing the writing. A word choice changes the world. A description places an idea into the realm of fact, alongside other facts. Historically, this kind of power has not been in the hands of children. Ancient non-alphabetic languages required mastery of thousands of symbols, leaving literacy as a rare achievement at the end of many years of training. The flexibility of alphabetic writing, and its connection to speech, grants that power to a still-young mind.
We also introduce abstract measurements, in math and in science. These suggest hard measures and limits to human experience. In the mythic era, children need opposites to make sense of abstract qualities. Cold makes sense of hot; faraway needs close to make a comparison. Now, given the tools of numbers and measurements, students can pin abstract qualities to a reference. Even so, they should be charismatic references. We could, for instance, tell students about the courier Phillipides, who ran 26 miles from the Battle of Marathon to Athens and died delivering the message that the Greeks had defeated the Persians (probably not a true story). Or we could teach students that scientists added 2 feet to the official height of Mt. Everest because they worried people would think 29,000 feet was an estimate (probably true).
As a result, we find children expanding their access to the world and controlling their depiction of it, all through written language and numbers. The result, for many reasons, is a fascination with the boundaries of reality.
As an autobiographical note, I used to teach 4th grade, which often marks the onset of the Romantic understanding. I used to ask students to imagine worlds and write about them — but make them realistic. That simple word triggered lengthy debates (4th graders love to debate) about what was realistic. Were magical talking mushrooms realistic? Of course not. But what about dragons? Probably not. What about intelligent lizards? Why not? Could they fly? Can any lizards fly? Could they speak and still be realistic? Such conversations led to hours of research, delving into the agreed-upon limits of reality. Was there a possible world like ours in which magic was real? And what is “magic,” as opposed to everyday? In this way, learning was almost a ceremony of transforming their earlier thinking, laden with magic and metaphor, into something more realistic.
This is the era of heroes, of the sort who transcend everyday reality. At this age, children are looking for mentors among the gallery of scientists, pioneers, artists and other heroic people. Stories of people testing the limits of what is possible speak deeply to children of this age. Stories of the bizarre, the exotic, the improbably activate their curiosity. We can still appeal to the mythic elements of good vs. evil, power vs. weakness and so on, but now we are also exploring the tangible limits and mapping them out.
The Philosophical Understanding
At this age students join the roll call of thinkers who have sought the truths beyond everyday experience. The quest to make out the order that lies behind disconnected facts and stories. Let me be clear: Learning of this age do not want to be told the scheme. They want to discover it. They need the chance to probe ideas, test them against the world, stake out claims, argue, doubt, reverse their views and, in all, feel their thinking gain in power and sophistication. The German philosopher Schlegel said that philosophy was an attempt to be a systematic thinker without having a system. This is the essence of this era.
We also must not lapse into just teaching ideas without personalities. The stories of thinkers who struggle towards greater understanding, even through incoherence and doubt, will resonate. This is why Hamlet and Holden Caulfield will serve as guides: They struggle. Focus on the heroes of science who struggled not just against a scornful world but also the standards of evidence (Alfred Wegener, Joseph Lister, Johannes Kepler). They held beliefs they could not prove beyond all doubt and so wrestled with ideas they almost knew were true. Even mathematics is a struggle against limits: For his work on degrees on infinity, Georg Cantor was called a “renegade” and a “corrupter of youth” by his fellow mathematicians. Even Cantor himself found the ideas of nested infinities daunting and fled from mathematics to the sanitarium.
In practical terms, we are cultivating students’ ability to reason to high standards. We want students to generalize across their studies, and see connections. We should encourage them to apply scientific standards to literature, or artistic standards to an equation or computer algorithm. Notions such as elegance or incompleteness or knowability or recursion may become as entrancing as were the fairy godmothers or Guinness Book of Records to younger learners. This is mostly likely to happen if these ideas are embodied by people, from history and from present day life.
Think of these people as mirrors that show our students themselves as they learn. In teaching history, we can study historians. Thucydides wrote about the war between Athens and Sparta as a way of dealing with the personal tragedy of serving Athens in that war as a general. But his mission was to write in plain, objective truth, preserving the tactics and rhetoric as accurately as possible. This is one model of transcending the limits of a single life, towards something lasting and profound. We could watch historians do this work in dozens of ways. In this way, students would have role models for how to place their own lives in the framework of larger ideals.
Applications
Suppose the above scheme makes sense (and I can imagine many objections). Even suppose we want to apply this scheme to how we teach technology in schools. Two complications arise. For one, it is not obvious how these ideas even apply to technology. For another, what if technology itself changes how students think and learn — does this disrupt the scheme?
For concrete applications, I want to emphasize that good applications of technology do not replace the substance of what we teach. If we agree, for instance, that we want to appeal to students developing a Romantic Understanding, then we can start by saying: Who is the transcendent hero, pushing against the limits of reality? As Kieran Egan asks: “What heroic human quality or emotion — courage, compassion, tenacity, fear, hope, loathing, delight, or whatever—can we identify in the topic?” This question must come first before we go in search of the technology.
The technology can amplify the quality we are looking for. Let us imagine a courageous traveler gearing up to explore the most extreme places on earth: the Taklamakan Desert, in the shadow of the Himalayas; McMurdo Station on the South Pole, etc. Spinning the globe on Google Earth and collecting images of research, the student can make a nifty presentation of the trials the hero would endure. (Alternatively, we could use technology to revisit the first explorers of these extreme regions.) Now we can catalog the tech skills, having first decided what make this appealing to the psyche of the child.
In other words, put the child’s way of thinking first, then choose the tools.
As for how technology might disrupt this progression, who knows? A lot of these developmental shifts follow from transitions from orality to literacy. Simply put, literacy changes how people think: It changes cultures, and it changes the individual (see The Alphabet Versus the Goddess for a long and gripping reading on this subject). Is technology more like orality or more like literacy? In many ways, people turn to technology for its fluid, visual, responsive nature, which mimics the same qualities of oral cultures. On the other hand, computers think rigidly and tend to present a lot of words. Even video games, which seem like play, usually ride along rulesets and goals, or at least elaborate systems.
I don’t think we know. We may even find that interactive thinking represents a third form, neither oral nor literate. Children born now may go on to solve problems in the future by writing algorithms, or by doing the kinds of problem-solving and exploration done in video games. If extended use of technology changes how people think, we will probably find that it looks wrong, that students seem to think poorly according to our understandings.
What can we do? I would suggest we start with a framework. If the model of Mythic, Romantic and Philosophical will not do, then pick another one. It is more important that we chart our progress by some agreed-upon understanding of how children think than it is to choose exactly the right one. And then we must adjust. The core of teaching is in learning where the students are. Let us be prepared for surprises.