Piaget's View on Child Learning

Piaget concluded that babies aren't just born in possession of adult knowledge, either from a past life or from DNA. Instead, Piaget thought that children must have powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to construct new pictures of the world, pictures that might be very different from the adult picture. When we learn about the world, when we do science. for example, we don't just hit the right answer once and for all. Rather, there is a very gradual unfolding sequence of corrected erro...

 Breast Feeding is Unsanitary

Twenty-six years ago I noticed that our clearheaded, undrugged mothers, who were not strapped down or restrained in any way, eagerly, with mothedy murmurs of joy, reached out to grasp and hold their babies as I placed them on their abdomens. Why not let them hold their babies? I have heard many absurd objections over the years. "The mother's hands and breasts are not sterile!" I personally feel that nonsterility is one of the greatest benefits of breast-feeding. Bacteria are essential to the ...

 Facts We Learn as Children Aren't Supposed to Change

People who don't know a lot about science treasure what they do know, what they learned early as children, like: a) Eskimos have lots of words for snow. b) Wait 20 minutes after lunch before going swimming. c) There are nine planets, and the ninth one is Pluto.d) The biggest dinosaur ever was the Brontosaurus.e) Triceratops was the one with the three horns.f) T-rex was awesome. One of the nice things about growing up is you don't have to spend time thinking about planets, digestion or ...