Trusting What You're Told: How Children Learn from Others PDF
Preview Trusting What You're Told: How Children Learn from Others
TrusTing WhaT You’re Told TrusTing WhaT You’re Told How Children Learn from Others j PauL L. Harris The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, Eng land 2012 Copyright © 2012 by President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Harris, Paul L. Trusting what you’re told : how children learn from others / Paul L. Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 06572- 7 (alk. paper) 1. Learning, Psychology of. 2. Children. I. Title. BF318.H363 2012 155.4′1315—dc23 2011046701 Contents Introduction 1 1. Early Learning from Testimony 8 2. Children’s Questions 22 3. Learning from a Demonstration 45 4. Moroccan Birds and Twisted Tubes 63 5. Trusting Those You Know? 78 6. Consensus and Dissent 98 7. Moral Judgment and Testimony 113 8. Knowing What Is Real 132 9. Death and the Afterlife 152 10. Magic and Miracles 173 11. Going Native 194 Notes 213 References 222 Acknowledgments 242 Index 245 TrusTing WhaT You’re Told introduction W e adults could scarcely find our way in the world, either literally or metaphorically, if no one told us anything. Imagine planning a journey to a distant city you’ve never visited before. Even to conceive of that plan—to know of the city’s existence and to want to see it—calls for a wealth of geographic information that only other people can supply. Deprived of the testimony of others about the land in which we live, our spatial horizon shrinks to the places we have already seen and those we can see just ahead of us. Much the same can be said of our temporal horizon. If no one ever told us about the past, it seems unlikely that we would ever think about the Great War, the Roman Empire, or the Stone Age, let alone the eons that preceded life on earth. Our intuitions about the span of his tory would be cramped by our own short biography. In spite of this manifest de pen dence on information supplied by other people, pro gres sive educators have conceived of young children as hands- on learners who learn best in the here and now from their own active observation and experimentation. The possibility that chil- dren’s early learning might be intimately linked to what they can con- jure up in their imagination on the basis of what other people tell them has been downplayed. Maria Montessori offers a well-k nown example of this emphasis on the priority of first-h and experience. In the Mon- tessori classroom, the teacher aims to take a back seat, on the assump- tion that young children’s engagement with concrete materials is the optimal vehicle for learning. Indeed, for Montessori, the teacher’s quiet withdrawal was the hallmark of good teaching. Montessori’s focus on children’s autonomous learning is part of an
The list of books you might like
