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“Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.”)
“Right now, knowledge is a commodity,”25 says the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner. “Known answers are everywhere, and easily accessible.” Because we’re drowning in all of this data, “the value of explicit information is dropping,”26 according to Wagner’s colleague at Harvard, the innovation professor Paul Bottino. The real value, Bottino added, is in “what you can do with that knowledge, in pursuit of a query.”
When we’re overloaded with information, “context becomes critical,” Brown says. “What matters now is your ability to triangulate, to look at something from multiple sources, and construct your own warrants for what you choose to believe.” That can involve “asking all kinds of peripheral questions,” Brown notes, such as What is the agenda behind this information? How current is it? How does it connect with other information I’m finding?
Interestingly, the more preschool models itself after regular school—the more it becomes a venue for loading kids up with information and feeding them answers to questions they have not yet asked—the more it seems to squelch their natural curiosity. The child psychologist Alison Gopnik has9 been outspoken in criticizing the trend of turning preschool into school—which, she notes, is driven by overambitious parents and (in the United States, at least) by federal mandates requiring more standardized teaching in preschool.
Play is critical for healthy development of inquiry skills...
When we start teaching too much, too soon, says Gopnik, we’re inadvertently cutting off paths of inquiry and exploration that kids might otherwise pursue on their own. As Gopnik puts it, “Children are the research and development division of the human species.” If they are permitted to do that research—to raise and explore their own questions, through various forms of experimentation, and without being burdened with instructions—they exhibit signs of more creativity and curiosity.
The child psychologist Alison Gopnik has . . . Alison Gopnik, “New Research Shows That Teaching Kids More and More, at Ever-Younger Ages, May Backfire,” Slate, March 16, 2011; Gopnik’s quote about kids being the R&D division of the human species is from her appearance on ABC’s Nightline, April 2, 2010; her views on similarities between children’s learning and scientific learning appear in her paper “Scientific Thinking in Young Children,” published at the University of California, Berkeley, and also appearing on the website of Science, September 28, 2012,
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