Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnikis an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth16 June 1955
CountryUnited States of America
boring engaged involved kids people society stressed takes work
The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that's actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and it's not something that our society does very well at all.
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Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.
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In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.
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Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources, you find that the women are just as likely to be successful.
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Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.
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What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn.
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I think universities are trying to figure out how we could use what we know about learning to change our education system, but it is sort of funny that they don't necessarily seem to be consulting the people who are sitting right there on campus.
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We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.
children profound people
Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: How should this society work? How should relationships among people work? The exploration is: Who am I, what am I doing?
children people parent
Some people say that parents don't matter, and that's not true at all. The irony is that we pay attention to all these things that don't matter, and not to what does matter, such as parents having enough resources to provide an environment where their children have both security and freedom.
people support care
To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.
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Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old.
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When nobody read, dyslexia wasn't a problem. When most people had to hunt, a minor genetic variation in your ability to focus attention was hardly a problem, and may even have been an advantage. When most people have to make it through high school, the same variation can become a genuinely life-altering disease.
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Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.