The Philosophical Baby
How childhood changes the world.
by Alison Gopnik
August 31, 2009
In The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, author Alison Gopnik looks at what science knows about your baby's brain, and comes to some remarkable realizations about the extent to which babies think, feel and love. (Check out Babble's interview with the author here!) In the excerpt below, Gopnik answers the question: "Why do we have childhoods in the first place?"
The very fact of childhood — our long protected period of immaturity — plays a crucial role in this human ability to change the world and ourselves. Children aren’t just defective adults, primitive grown-ups gradually attaining our perfection and complexity. Instead, children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens. They have very different, though equally complex and powerful, minds, brains, and forms of consciousness, designed to serve different evolutionary functions. Human development is
more like metamorphosis, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, than like simple growth—though it may seem that children are the vibrant, wandering butterflies who transform into caterpillars inching along the grown-up path.
What is childhood? It’s a distinctive developmental period in which young human beings are uniquely dependent on adults. Childhood literally couldn’t exist without caregivers. Why do we go through a period of childhood at all? Human beings have a much more extended period of immaturity and dependence, a much longer childhood, than other species, and this period of immaturity has become longer as human history has gone on (as we parents of twenty-somethings may recognize with a sigh). Why make babies so helpless for so long, and why make adults invest so much time and energy in caring for them?
An animal that depends on imagination has to have some time to exercise it. Childhood is that time.
This protracted period of immaturity is intimately tied up with the human capacity for change. Our human capacities for imagination and learning have great advantages; they allow us to adapt to more different environments than any other species and to change our own environments in a way that no other animal can. But they also have one great disadvantage — learning takes time. You don’t want to be stuck exploring all the new possible ways to hunt deer when you haven’t eaten for two days, or learning all the accumulated cultural wisdom about saber-toothed tigers when one is chasing you. It would be a good idea for me to spend a week exploring all the capabilities of my new computer, as my teenage son would, but with the saber-toothed tigers of grant deadlines and classes breathing down my neck, I’ll just go on relying on the old routines.
An animal that depends on the accumulated knowledge of past generations has to have some time to acquire that knowledge. An animal that depends on imagination has to have some time to exercise it. Childhood is that time. Children are protected from the usual exigencies of adult life; they don’t need to hunt deer or ward off saber-toothed tigers, let alone write grant proposals or teach classes — all of that is done for them. All they need to do is learn. When we’re children we’re devoted to learning about our world and imagining all the other ways that world could be. When we become adults we put all that we’ve learned and imagined to use.
©2009 Alison Gopnik
About the Author
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Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of over 100 articles and several books, including The Philosophical Baby. For more, see www.alisongopnik.com. |
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