Children Are Not Little Scientists
Judging by their methods and their talents, we would do well to think of children not as scientists, but as anthropologists.
From Paul Harris's Trusting What You're Told, whose central argument is that most of what we know we learned from others. Here at the end of the book, having detailed a great deal of evidence in support of that argument, Harris turns to the inevitable conclusion: children are not "little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments."
When young children who are growing up in Europe or North America think about witches, they typically conceive of those agents as fictions, the stuff of fairy tales and bestsellers, but not of real life. Their stance reflects the commitments of their culture. Once we step into another cultural framework, the status of witchcraft can shift dramatically. For example, adolescents—and indeed adults—living in South Africa do not regard witchcraft as a fairy story. Despite efforts to increase public understanding of the AIDS virus and the way in which it is transmitted, efforts that have been in part successful, witchcraft is still widely endorsed and invoked as an explanation for the disease, and traditional healers are routinely consulted to combat its effects. There is little evidence that the Western medical model has displaced local, culturally grounded beliefs in supernatural transmission. Indeed, the two conceptions often coexist within the same individual. Many adolescents and adults invoke both the Western model of AIDS transmission and the power of witchcraft, emphasizing now one and now the other, depending on exactly how a given case is presented to them.
The coexistence of these two modes of thinking does not easily fit with a common assumption in developmental psychology—namely, that intellectual development can be best characterized in terms of the type of conceptual shifts that we discern in the development of science. I am skeptical about this analogy. Scientific communities and their distinctive modes of investigation are extreme latecomers, when viewed against the protracted backdrop of human history. It would be odd if cognitive development were to mirror such a recent and distinctive institution. We may all be hardwired for preschool and ritual, but probably not for hypothesis testing or Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability. . . .
If it distorts the nature of cognitive development to think of young children as scientists, making progress toward objectivity in various subdisciplines—physics, biology, and psychology—is there a more appropriate metaphor? . . . .
The classic method in social anthropology is not the scientific method in the way that experimental scientists conceive of it. It includes no experiments or control groups. Instead, when anthropologists want to understand a new culture, they immerse themselves in the language, learn from participant observation, and rely on trusted informants. Of course, this method has an ancient pedigree. Human children have successfully used it for millennia across innumerable cultures. Indeed, judging by their methods and their talents, we would do well to think of children not as scientists, but as anthropologists.
We conceive of children as little scientists, I think, because, somewhat ironically, we have picked up that conception from romantics such as Rousseau, Froebel, Peabody, Dewey, Kilpatrick, and later Piaget (and his many disciples) and it has become, over the last hundred and thirty years or so, simply a background assumption that we don't notice. The fact that much of so-called romantic thinking—and indeed the science that emerged from said thinking—essentially "neglected cultural and social interaction factors in the development of children's cognition and thinking ability" should at the very least give us pause and make us wonder whether we have the full story yet.
