What a child learns first

I am keen to get into a bit more detail in understanding what the child learns first and how they come to terms with the new world around them.

Before a child learns basic concepts (for example, animal, soft, dirty, etc), they make more fundamental discoveries about the world around them: that objects exist, they differ from one another and they have permanence. That one thing happens because of something else (cause and effect), that objects are positioned (concept of space) and that activities occur at measured intervals (concept of time).

Jean Piaget (an important developmental psychologist) was of the view that every act of intelligence is an attempt to interpret something in our external reality, a taking in of what the child sees or hears and subjecting it to a meaning system in the brain. You can think of a newborn’s gaze at the mother or other people in the family wondering ‘who are these?’ As such the newborn child is not an empty vessel into which knowledge is poured. He participates in the learning.

Let us take a look at the idea (concept) of permanence.  You can try this out with a five-month old baby.

Place a ticking clock within the child’s reach and he will try to reach for it.  But if you cover the clock with a cloth, the baby withdraws their hand. As they do not understand permanence at this stage, they consider that the clock no longer exists.

When the child is at least a year old, they will lift the cloth to reveal the clock. But they still have not grasped that objects exist independent of their actions upon them. If you put the same clock under another cloth on the opposite side of the room as the child watches, they will still look for it under the cloth where you first placed it. At birth a baby is only aware of the space it occupies or acts upon. It does not see itself as one sharing space with other objects.

It is only when the child discovers that objects are displaced relative to one another that they can attribute permanence to them. As in the case of the clock, then they understand that the clock exists regardless of where it has been placed.

Here is an inspirational video where Jonathan Drori speaks on the value of allowing children tinker with things at home in order to learn (as we have suggested in the previous post)