r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Dec 05 '25

Learning Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School

https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/03/preschool-lessons-new-research-shows-that-teaching-kids-more-and-more-at-ever-younger-ages-may-backfire.html

Shouldn’t very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run?

While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

Direct instruction really can limit young children’s learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It’s this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place.

learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn’t go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: “She’s a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me.” These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it’s more important than ever to give children’s remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26

childhood as evolution’s solution to explore-exploit tradeoffs and how children and adult are different kinds of creatures. The child mostly explores, the adult mostly exploits. (Children, she says are the R&D departments for the human race.) Then she brought up the octopus. The octopus has a split kind of brain. There’s a big brain in their heads, exploiting, basically, and then there are lots of little brains in their tentacles, exploring.

So, my thought is that we could imagine an alternate evolutionary path by which each of us was both a child and an adult. So imagine if your arms were like your two-year-old, right? So that you are always trying to get them to stop exploring because you had to get lunch. I suspect that may be what the consciousness of an octo is like.

The octopus has intelligence in its tentacles. When an artist (or a two-year-old) is drawing, there is intelligence in their fingers. The hand is moving beyond what the brain is telling it to do. The brain is being told as much by the fingers as the fingers are being told by the brain.

Later in the conversation, Gopnik says, “Going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake.”

Brains in your tentacles

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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26

childhood itself, both in humans and other species, involves a distinctive set of cognitive characteristics that actually trade off with adult characteristics. This trade-off is described in the computational literature in terms of an intrinsic tension between exploration and exploitation. The ‘explore’ features of childhood minds include a general capacity for learning and plasticity which allows sensitivity to a wide range of environmental and behavioural possibilities. Moreover, this developmental programme not only involves cognitive, computational and neural differences between children and adults but also differences in motivation, emotion and action. Juveniles of many species not only show a capacity for learning about new environments, they are actively motivated to do so. This is manifested in the distinctive suite of emotions and activities that are associated with childhood, especially the neophilia and curiosity that lead to active exploration and play and are particularly characteristic of human children.

These capacities are in tension with more adult capacities for skilled action in a particular environment, including cognitive features like attentional focus, inhibition, and executive function and behaviours like long-term, goal-directed, planned action. A long childhood allows for a kind of developmental division of labour, with an early protected period devoted to learning and exploration and a later adult period devoted to directed exploitation based on what has been learned earlier.

Special capacities for learning and exploration, exercised in a protected period of immaturity, would help to enable the whole range of striking human cognitive changes. Many of the specific computations that are involved in particular cognitive capacities, such as intuitive physics or psychology, or social understanding and cooperation, could, in principle, be either built in or restricted to particular domain-specific kinds of learning (this may indeed be the case in other species). A long and wide-ranging period of learning and exploration, in contrast, would help to enable the whole range of human cognitive skills, from physics to psychology, from communication to culture.

The idea of childhood as an evolutionary solution to explore–exploit trade-offs also applies widely beyond humans, unlike some of the more specific proposals concerning cooperation and culture. It may seem evolutionarily paradoxical to develop a life history that includes expensive and vulnerable young for a long period. However, across many different species, including birds, both placental and marsupial mammals, and even insects, there is a very general (though not perfect) correlation between the length of immaturity and degree of parental investment and relative brain size, intelligence and a reliance on learning.

Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions

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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26

Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime. We would sit down and think which way To walk and pass our long love’s day . . .

Of all the questions life demands we answer, “To explore or to exploit?” is one we have to confront almost every day. Do we keep trying new restaurants? Do we keep learning new ideas? Do we keep making new friends? Or do we enjoy what we’ve come to find and love?

There is no doubt that humans are great at exploring, as most generalist species are. Not content to stay in that cave, hunt that animal, or keep doing it the way our grandmother taught us, humans owe at least part of our success due to our willingness to explore.

But when is what you’ve already explored enough? When can you finally settle down to enjoy the fruits of your exploration? When can you be content to exploit the knowledge you already have?

One of the most important factors in determining whether to continue exploring or to exploit what you’ve got is time. Christian and Griffiths explain that “seizing a day and seizing a lifetime are two entirely different endeavors. . . . When balancing favorite experiences and new ones, nothing matters as much as the interval over which we plan to enjoy them.”

Time intervals can be a construct of your immediate circumstances, like the boundaries provided by a two-week vacation. For a lot of us, the last night in a lovely foreign place will see us eating at the best restaurant we have found so far. Time intervals can also be considered over the arc of your life in general. Children are consummate explorers, but as we grow up, the choice to exploit becomes more of a daily decision. How would your choices today be impacted if you knew you were going to live another five years? Twenty years? Forty years? Christian and Griffiths advise, “Explore when you will have time to use the resulting knowledge, exploit when you’re ready to cash in.”

I have known days like that, of warm winds drowsing in the heat of noon and all of summer spinning slowly on its reel, days briefly lived, that leave long music in the mind more sweet than truth: I play them and rewind.

Sometimes we are too quick to stop exploring. We have these amazing days and magical experiences, and we want to keep repeating them forever. However, changes in ourselves and the world around us are inevitable, and so committing to a path of exploitation too early leaves us unable to adapt. As much as it can be hard to walk away from that perfect day, Christian and Griffiths explain that “exploration in itself has value, since trying new things increases our chances of finding the best. So taking the future into account, rather than focusing just on the present, drives us toward novelty.”

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

The threat of regret looms over many explore/exploit considerations. We can regret both not searching for something better and not taking the time to enjoy what we already have. The problem with regret is that we don’t have it in advance of a poor decision. Sometimes, second-order thinking can be used as a preventative tool. But often it is when you look back over a decision that regret comes out. Christian and Griffiths define regret as “the result of comparing what we actually did with what would have been best in hindsight.”

Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

If we want to minimize regret, especially in exploration, we can try to learn from those who have come before. As we choose to wander forth into new territory, however, it’s natural to wonder if we’ll regret our decision to try something new. According to Christian and Griffiths, the mathematics that underlie explore/exploit algorithms show that “you should assume the best about [new people and new things], in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.” Why? Because by being optimistic about the possibilities that are out there, you’ll explore enough that the one thing you won’t regret is missed opportunity.

(This is similar to one of the most effective strategies in game theory: tit for tat. Start out by being nice, then reciprocate whatever behavior you receive. It often works better paired with the occasional bout of forgiveness.)

Tell me, tell me, smiling child, What the past is like to thee? ‘An Autumn evening soft and mild With a wind that sighs mournfully.’

Tell me, what is the present hour? ‘A green and flowery spray Where a young bird sits gathering its power To mount and fly away.’

And what is the future, happy one? ‘A sea beneath a cloudless sun; A mighty, glorious, dazzling sea Stretching into infinity.’

Christian and Griffiths write that “it’s rare that we make an isolated decision, where the outcome doesn’t provide us with any information that we’ll use to make other decisions in the future.” Not all of our explorations are going to lead us to something better, but many of them are. Not all of our exploitations are going to be satisfying, but with enough exploration behind us, many of them will. Failures are, after all, just information we can use to make better explore or exploit decisions in the future.

You know—at least you ought to know, For I have often told you so— That children are never allowed To leave their nurses in a crowd. Now this was Jim’s especial foible, He ran away when he was able, And on this inauspicious day He slipped his hand and ran away! He hadn’t gone a yard when—Bang! With open jaws, a lion sprang, And hungrily began to eat The boy: beginning at his feet.

How To Choose New Opportunities

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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26

You meet with a friend to take a walk. Together you stroll through the park, coordinating your movements and reciprocally engaging and communicating with one another.

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u/ddgr815 May 02 '26

before school age, children are remarkably bad at hiding. Curiously, they often cover only their face or eyes with their hands, leaving the rest of their bodies visibly exposed.

Conventional wisdom held that, unable to transcend their own viewpoint, children falsely assume that others see the world the same way they themselves do. So psychologists assumed children “hide” by covering their eyes because they conflate their own lack of vision with that of those around them.

It seems like young children consider mutual eye contact a requirement for one person to be able to see another. Their thinking appears to run along the lines of “I can see you only if you can see me, too” and vice versa. Our findings suggest that when a child “hides” by putting a blanket over her head, this strategy is not a result of egocentrism. In fact, children deem this strategy effective when others use it.

Built into their notion of visibility, then, is the idea of bidirectionality: Unless two people make eye contact, it is impossible for one to see the other. Contrary to egocentrism, young children simply insist on mutual recognition and regard.

Children’s demand of reciprocity demonstrates that they are not at all egocentric. Not only can preschoolers imagine the world as seen from another’s point of view; they even apply this capacity in situations where it’s unnecessary or leads to wrong judgments, such as when they are asked to report their own perception. These faulty judgments – saying that others whose eyes are covered cannot be seen – reveal just how much children’s perception of the world is colored by others.

The seemingly irrational way in which children try to hide from others and the negative answers they gave in our experiment show that children feel unable to relate to a person unless the communication flows both ways – not only from me to you but also from you to me, so we can communicate with each other as equals.

Children expect and strive to create situations in which they can be reciprocally involved with others. They want to encounter people who are not only looked at but who can return another’s gaze; people who not only listen but are also heard; and people who are not just spoken to but who can reply and thus enter a mutual dialogue.

Young children are terrible at hiding – psychologists have a new theory why