Play or practice?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

… “A child who is not given time to observe will easily and freely repeat the words that adults have given him, but he will not be able to combine them into a single picture of the world” …

Now there are many responsible parents who believe that they should invest as much as possible in their child in childhood in order to give their offspring the opportunity to fully realize themselves in the future. They are anxious when they see a child "wandering aimlessly" around the apartment or yard. Every minute a child does something of his own, a dark sense of guilt rises in the parents. It is sometimes connected with the fact that they cannot load the child to the fullest. Or so, "as expected" - in the words of all-knowing neighbors and friends.

Indeed, many highly respected people believe that "after three it's too late." And Glen Doman (1995, 1999) argues that most of all children sit back before a year. It was he who proposed a method of reading up to a year and methods of forming encyclopedic knowledge in children under 2 years of age. As a result, children, in accordance with this method, can remember when the Battle of Trafalgar was 2 years old (although they do not understand well what a battle is and why it is happening).

And there are mothers who follow all these instructions. But it must be remembered that not a single child brought up according to the method of Glen Doman (it arose in the late 50s) received the Nobel Prize. And Masaru Ibuka, who wrote a book about how “it's too late after three,” was himself raised differently.

He recalls dismantling his grandfather's alarm clock as a child. He put it together, but some of the parts turned out to be superfluous, and the alarm clock stopped walking. The grandfather did not scold the boy. But I bought another alarm clock. This time, there are significantly fewer unnecessary details, although the alarm still did not go off. And only when the grandfather silently bought the third alarm clock, the boy was able to understand the intricacies of the mechanism, cope with naughty tools - a screwdriver, etc. - and assemble the working clock.

But the grandfather did not sit next to the boy, drumming into him where to put certain details. The grandfather created a rich environment for the child, within which the child independently learned the world and its laws.

Modern psychology has a new understanding of how the brain works. According to this concept (Frith, 2012), the brain does not perceive information, but predicts it. And after each prediction, it verifies the prediction with the resulting result. Consequently, it is the mistake that becomes the guideline for the brain towards the correct understanding of objective reality. If the brain is not mistaken, it has a very inaccurate, subjective picture of the world, which can be very far from the real picture.

There are things that cannot be explained and shown to a child. Once upon a time J.-J. Rousseau called it the awakening of the senses.

Imagine a one year old toddler sitting in a bathtub. He enthusiastically shoves an empty bottle with a narrow neck into the water, but it, like a ball, all the time jumps out to the surface of the water. The child already knows that whatever he throws in the room inevitably falls to the floor. This is how his body behaves if his legs fail. But the bottle resists this knowledge and forces the child to repeat and repeat the experiment. He does not yet know that such an experiment was conducted by Archimedes long before him. And he opened the law.

Suddenly the cap that closed the bottle opens, and the child sees bubbles coming out of it in the water. He does not yet know what air is. But he discovered it for himself. And he found that when the bubbles stopped, the bottle would behave like a normal object in the room. Everything is the law, which adults call the Archimedes law, discovered by an ordinary child in an ordinary bath. Yes, he will not be able to verbalize it. Perhaps at school he will finally be faced with the exact wording. And then there will be an insight. But it builds on this long-term work of forcibly submerging a bottle in water. And when he will be told about air in a physics lesson, he will have a picture in his brain with bubbles going to the surface of water from a bottle. And he will receive words for the law he himself discovered.

But another picture is possible. Parents will not allow the child to sit in the bathroom for 30 minutes in vain and shove the bottle into the water “useless”. They will quickly wash it themselves, not allowing it to play with objects, bring it to the bed and read a book about objects that the child has not licked, smelled, or touched. And then he will know the words. And he can even tell a rhyme. But there will be no real world under these words.

On the retina of a child, there are dotted images, because the overall picture is made up of the activity of many receptors. Moreover, the retina is flat, so there is no space in the image. To put this mosaic into a correct image with volume, what the child sees, he must touch, put it in his mouth, perhaps hit the floor, etc. Only after conducting experiments with the object, he will learn to restore what the eyes see, into an accurate image of the object. And even then this inner sensory knowledge can be combined with the word. Only then, hearing the word, the child will recall the whole complex of sensations from the object and will understand exactly what it is about.

Only a child who saw himself how a ray of light from a window, stumbling over a speck of dust floating in the room, gives a small rainbow, will combine this with the vision of a large rainbow after the rain. And when he sees a red sunset later, he will be able to guess that this is how the sun's rays are refracted on dust particles in large air masses.

A child who is not given time to observe will easily and freely repeat the words that adults have given him, but he will not be able to combine them into a single picture of the world.

But a parent can also fuel this learning process. For example, lying on the grass, he can point the child to the ant and ask him to go on an exploration to determine where the anthill is. And in the evening, returning home, open Ondřej Sekora's wonderful book "Ferd's Ant" and read something, discussing with the child how much what is written in the book corresponds to what the child saw.

One day a woman called me to advise on what to do. Her first-grader girl enthusiastically told the teacher in the class that she saw the moon simultaneously with the sun during the day. The teacher impartially said that the moon is only at night, and the girl fantasized everything, distracting the class from work. The child came in tears. Mom didn't know what to do. If you quarrel with a teacher, how will she then communicate with her daughter? But this means that the teacher has read many books. Including the wonderful tale of the great Russian poet A. S. Pushkin about the dead princess and seven heroes, where it is clearly stated that the Moon and the Sun do not meet with each other. But the tale is just a lie, although there is a hint in it. Therefore, in addition to relying on fairy tales, it is necessary to raise your head to the sky in order to admire the event when the moon and the sun meet. The teacher knew the story, but did not look at the sky.

I have masters who, given a numbered list of subjects, cannot divide it in an excel table based on numbers. They count the subjects with their fingers and thus mark the groups. But this means that once the parents rushed home and forgot to count the steps. And then play with them to see how adding the first 4 steps and the next 5 steps, you get exactly the figure that will be if the steps are counted in a row. And such cases with counting, when counting remains not in words (numbers), but in leg movements, in images, and then it becomes a world law, and not a random set of words that you just need to memorize, because they have nothing to do with the world.

We often laugh at Americans that they learn the multiplication table in grade 4 at school, while our children learn it during the summer between first and second grade. But we do not think about the fact that our children teach it as a rhyme, without understanding the meaning that is embedded in it, whereas in other educational systems, before giving a child something to learn, an adult must make sure that he has already given birth to the idea of addition and division. And he will give birth to this idea thanks to the continuous game with numbers, climbing the stairs, counting apples and laying out multi-colored pebbles on the shore of the reservoir. At some point, enlightenment occurs, and the fact that multiplication is a certain way of addition is suddenly revealed in its original purity.

But check your kids what they do when they forget the multiplication table and there is no computer wizard nearby. This often leads to confusion. Many children cannot calculate the required amount in any other way. They got this knowledge as a gift from an adult. And this gift was not appreciated, because their own strength was not invested in knowledge.

Likewise, geometry is not a subject in school. This is the curvature of the world. And her child should feel with his whole body - hitting objects. And in contact with them, give birth to non-verbalized laws. For example, that the hypotenuse is a better way of reaching a certain place than moving along the sum of the legs.

The games played by children who are accustomed to lonely games from infancy are games of learning about the world. But if the child is never given the opportunity to be with himself, he will always demand the participation of an adult who entertains him, because a long time ago, immediately after birth, this adult with his anxiety suppressed the child's desire for independent knowledge of the world. But only this way of cognition makes it possible to give a uniqueness to the child's picture of the world. Everything that an adult gives a child is a trivial knowledge of a given culture.

A child who has been involved in social educational institutions from infancy will only be able to learn what the society knows at that time. But in order to create something yourself, you need to have your own unique picture of the world. And then failure to fit into it the typical picture offered by society will create the error that will induce it to learn and clarify. And, in the end, to create something that the society did not yet know.

A child's own games are his unique way of understanding the world and discovering its laws, while on intuitive images, which gradually, practicing actions in the game, the child will learn to convey in words. And it is this picture of the world that will form the basis of his unique understanding of the world. Working out individual elements known to society is only a part of its life. And it will only be the basis of quality performance. But it can never become a mechanism for the formation of a creator.

To an even greater extent, reflections are required for the younger and, of course, the older student. That is why parents sometimes need to quietly walk past the door, behind which the 11-grader lies on the couch (and it seems to the adult that he is spitting at the ceiling), and not demand that he immediately remember about the exam. The child will soon go out into the world, and therefore it is worth solving a lot of questions about the future life, the choice of a profession, the meaning of life, betrayal and love. And only he himself can answer all these questions. And if adults decide for him here, then he himself will only have to be a slave to someone's desires, even if the one who produces these desires thinks that he is “doing the best,” although in our country it most often turns out “as always” …

But this does not mean that the child should be left alone forever. An attentive adult always sees when a child gets tired of thinking - this is too much mental work. And then he reaches out to an adult. It is necessary to maintain a balance of knowledge acquired by a child independently and what an adult gives him. The older the child is, the greater his ability to learn. And, having loaded the child with different sections, you need to check if he has time for independent reflection. If not, you educate the performer. And you need to forget about the creator.

However, concerned parents may ask me, but how to distinguish the really meaningless waste of a child's time from the process of contemplation and cognition. There is a difference. A child who is simply "kicking a noodle" is easily distracted by something new. A cognizing child is immersed in the process of cognition, and therefore may not respond either to an offer to try candy or to an offer to play football, although at other times he does it with pleasure. It is immersion in the process, in which the child is not just attentive, but overly keen, and the brain learns to keep an object in the zone of active attention, and distinguishes idleness from cognition.

But this also applies to the school. The teacher shouldn't always show the children everything. He should push to cognition, starting this process, and then providing an opportunity to independently discover. And if the child asks for a solution, the teacher shows only the first action, observing the child's ability to do further on his own. And then providing only what there is a request for, but without telling each time the entire solution process from start to finish.

We only accompany the child in this world, and do not live his life for him.

Author: Elena Ivanovna Nikolaeva - Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor of the Russian State Pedagogical University named after V. I. A. I. Herzen, author of about 200 scientific works