Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an
injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are
aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons,
especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
- Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )
I have great respect for Professor Szasz (and not because he can pronounce his own name and I have no idea how to say it). He is a wise man and has provided people with much good advice.
However, this quotation is an example of a man who is very knowledgeable in one discipline believing that his opinion is valuable in all others. In this matter, that of childhood learning, Professor Szasz doesn't have a clue.
He is correct in that some adults feel it beneath them to have to learn something new in order to repair a broken device in their home, for example. Rather than admit that they know nothing about the device, they maintian their feeling of superiority (not needing to know) and pay someone to come in to fix it. The someone has no pangs of guilt about overcharging such a homeowner in order to help him feel better about himself.
Children don't learn just because they have little concept of their own self importance. On the contrary, most children learn very young the level of importance they hold in their family.
Kids learn because that is what they were programmed to do. Every animal and plant is programmed to learn what it must in its early days in order to survive. Professor Szasz has apparently not heard of the survival instinct. Every living thing has it.
While the brain of a young child is not its full size, it is disproportionately large for the size of its body. Even at birth, the brain has unbelievable potential. (Its final growth spurt is in the late teens when the frontal lobes--the part that determines right from wrong, good from bad--develops.) The brain is programmed to suck in information (especially in the first five years) at an astounding rate. Most children, for example, learn about half of what they know in their entire lifetimes by the age of five years.
Languages are relatively easy for a child to learn up to the age of 11 years. The language part of the brain is programmed to soak up language like a sponge. As the brain is not programmed to differentiate between languages, a child may learn any number of languages during this period. He may even cross them with each other when speaking to a parent or whoever else is teaching them languages. It's more difficult for a young child who is learning several languages to keep within the confines of one language than it is to learn several languages.
Around the age of 11 years, a change occurs in the brain, a change that allows the brain to use what language(s) it has learned in ways that will benefit it as an adult. In other words, the brain develops its first adult functions around age 11. This conforms to the age at which boys and girls in our prehistoric past reached adolescence and were required to adopt adult responsibilities. They often became parents by age 13.
By age 11 and after, people have much more difficulty learning a new language. The reason is because the brain changes, physically and functionally.
Here is where Professor Szasz and I differ. I believe, and my teaching and sociological studies support this, that children learn how to think in depth before the age of 11 years. After age 11, they learn information they process through the machinery they have built in their heads to produce the level of thought they will have as adults. Of course adolescents and adults will improve upon and refine their thinking processes, but thinking itself is as hard to come by after age 11 as is new language if these have not been learned before age 11.
Children in their first decade of life don't have much knowledge accumulated with which to think in depth. What they have is learned from parents (about 85 percent, including their teachers), from family, peers, their community and their various other associations. They learn to sort through and process what they do know so that they can reach conclusions that serve them at the time.
Those children who are given little op[portunity to think at any depth beyond that of basic needs, including in school, become adults who are incapable of thinking beyond the depth of basic needs of the present. Kids who are given opportunities at home and in school to think about what is happening around them, including the preconditions for it (history) and the consequences of what they do today as life unfolds in their future will become that small percentage of adults who can think at the level for which humans received their scientific name, homo spapiens sapiens. (Yes, two "sapiens" is technically correct.)
Keeping important subjects away from young children harms them not only because they don't know anything about topics that may be critical to their lives as teens and adults, but also because they will not have the knowledge on which to base thought that will form the thinking processes they will have for the rest of their lives.
Anything about childhood learning that disagrees with this is old and out of date. My "theses" will not be proven here simply because they are an assembly of the work of many current sociologists. And because this is not a book.
Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to give children the opportunities they need to become thinking adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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Comments: 7
Also if an individual's experience with learning a certain kind of skill (be it mathematical or mechanical) has been negative, usually stemming from negative reinforcement by substandard instructors, then they will likely have a negative predisposition in regards to their ability to ever
acquire deeper knowledge or better skills in that area.
I like to think of our perception of life, the universe, reality, the nature of things etc as being analogous to viewing a screen with a picture on it. Each new fact, skill or idea on the screen represents a single pixel on the screen. With the passage of time and the accumulation of skills, facts and concepts the pixels begin to define a picture and we begin to develop a more comprehensive understanding of "the big picture". The fact that the picture is a moving one adds to the complexity of the task.
Good, thoughtful article that made me think about learning and human nature and all the subtle and profound aspects there of.
Learning is not stifled as we grow older. We may get lazier though. Brain elasticity, as you put it, depends on practice. Even lazy brians can be strengthened if people want to. It's like any kind of exercise. It's a way to avoid Alzheimer's risk and brain degradation.
I do more thinking now in the average hour (at age 63) than I did in whole days when I was half my present age. And when I was half my present age, I was a classroom treacher.
The problem with schools (oh! where to begin?) is mostly that teachers are required to teach subjects, not life. There is only one subject for a child, and that is Life. We don't teach to emotional or social development, something I stress at great length in my book, 'Turning It Around.
I love your example of each new learned thing being a pixel on the mosaic screen of life.
Many of us in Gather grew up when those who had difficulty learning were considered by teachers to be either lazy or dumb. In my case, it was "lazy." That word was used to my parents, by teachers, almost every year I went to school. Not one teacher considered the possibility that I might have a brain processing problem (learning difficulty) or that I might have been severely underdeveloped socially or emotionally.
I survived. My sister did not have one happy day in her adult life (about 36 years). She lived alone and lonely in her last few years. Though a very smart woman, she did not have coping skills and had no idea how to make or keep a friend.
My sister couldn't make it through high school. I struggled through postgraduate school, which is not bad for someone who couldn't read.
Professor Szasz' quotation has some validity. We are unwilling to accept our ignorance on simple things and unwilling to take criticism as we grow older. This curtails our learning opportunity. Children are presumed to be ignorant and people do not come up with harsh criticism if they make mistakes, instead the children are taught to correct themselves.
It is true that children have a precocious learning ability. They absorb fast just by being soaked into the information flowing from the environment. It is programmed because it was essential for the survival when the human being roamed the unforgiving terrains as a hunter.
In today's social and emotional jungle the skills required for survival are different; and have not been programmed by millennia of years of adaptability. That is why there is a need to teach the children a new set of skills for coping up in life.
Your comments make an excellent addition to my article. Let's hope that we can convince others to pay attention to it so that we can do things that will make that "new set of skills for coping up in life" a reality. That is the purpose of 'Turning It Around,' my book.
Thanks Dad