Baby Einstein

 

I have long been confused by the separation between what researchers know about learning, and the way school is structured.  Like Mike Weshe, I have often thought about this while watching toddlers navigate the world. Similarly to his observations about his son learning to walk, the organic, playful process of language acquisition has always struck me as the ideal instructional model. It’s also a process that is extremely different than the way learning is structured in most schools.  

Babies coo. They play with their mouths to make sounds. They cry and hoot and listen and mimic wildly. They spend a lot of time making joyful nonsense noise. For hearing babies, they link the mouth sounds that others use to people, to objects, to feelings and thoughts. In turn they learn to express with their own sounds, then words, then phrases, sentences, and finally, with angry rants about the Supreme Court.  By and large, we trust babies in this process. Sure, there’s like, Baby Einstein or whatever, and there is certainly a connection between the psychological, intellectual and social development of young children and the quantity, quality and consistency of interaction with caring adults. But by and large, before the formal study of brain development and/or mommy blogs, this extremely complex, individualized, lifetime-spanning process happened naturally, without much intervention.   

Compare this to a typical school experience. Pacing is mandated by adults upon adults upon adults upon adults, not by innate curiosity.  Indicators of success are determined by adults, who also assess if and how they’ve been demonstrated. Failure is punished, and is always high-stakes.  Instruction is delivered to the student monolith, yet most forms of evaluation are both individual and hierarchical.

Why have we made school into a place that seeks to stifle all the beautiful internal and collective processes our brains innately know?  What are we so afraid of?  That nothing, really, separates men from beasts? So we put our kids in burgundy polos and khaki pants, and send them to a derelict public building to sit in economically uncomfortable chairs and stress out about taking tests or getting shot because the cop that’s standing down the hall is actually there to arrest them, not protect them.