The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

by Alison Gopnik

But what happens when children get older? For our children, of course, what happens is school. Schools become the caregivers of older children. In fact, psychology textbooks divide children up into preschool and school age as if school defined an essential biological difference. But “schooling” is actually only a little older than “parenting.” Schools have really only been around for a couple of hundred years, an eye-blink in human history. There is a parallel between the contemporary dilemmas of parenting and the equally ferocious dilemmas of schooling. Like parents, educators often have a scientifically inaccurate picture of learning and development. In fact, they share the same inaccurate picture. The misleading idea is that education is supposed to shape a child into a particular kind of adult. The remarkable spread of standardized testing is a particularly good example of this. A school’s job becomes creating children who will score well on standardized tests. At least the parenting project has sensible goals, such as turning your child into a happy, successful adult, even if there’s actually no clear prescription about how to accomplish those goals. But in practice, if not in principle, schooling ends up being aimed at arbitrary goals like the high test score, the A grade, and admission to the next school.