This article was published in the "Sanlian Life Weekly" No. 44, 2018, the original title of the article is "How to Explain the Real World to Children", it is strictly forbidden to reprint privately, and infringement must be investigated.
<h1>A father's guide to life on Earth</h1>
Not long ago, I read a fascinating children's book called "Here We Are: A Father's Guide to Life on Earth" by Oliver Jeffs, one of my favorite authors.
The book was created for his infant baby at the time. When the little baby was born, Jeffs was 40 years old. He recalls the feeling he felt the first time he came home from the hospital with his newborn child, "Two people went in, three people came out, and they always felt that something was not quite right."
When he got home, the first thing he did was hold the little baby and introduce him to his first home on earth. From room to room, point to him one by one: "Oh, you see, this is a pan, which we use to cook." Why should we eat? Because I am not hungry after eating..."
"This is the window, and the thing outside the window is called a tree."
"That's the shoe, and the guy who's biting the shoe is the dog."
…………
Over the next few weeks, the new father found himself nagging and explaining to his children about a world that was obviously too big for a small baby. And, when he looked at the world with the eyes of a baby, the world suddenly seemed stranger than ever.
For example, he needs to break things down into the most basic parts, like land and sea, day and night, plants and animals; he needs to explain some very abstract concepts, such as time, space, individuality, society, love... What's more, he felt like he had entered a very strange state of mind with macro/micro intertwining. "I'm completely focused on small, mundane things, but at the same time I'm aware of the grandeur and wonder of everything. Suddenly, the tiniest seemed to carry their grand meaning, and some simple truths sounded like the deepest principles of human nature. ”
For example, the words he wrote to his son in his notebook little by little: "Take care of your body, because most of these parts will not grow again"; "People have many different colors, shapes and sizes... But we are all human beings"; "We have only one earth, and it is all we have".
In a recent interview, I asked him, have you ever wondered why there is such a change of perspective?
Here We Are: A Father's Guide to Life on Earth by Oliver Jeffs
He replied: "Perhaps, when you love someone more than yourself for the first time, when you realize that this little life is so fragile and you need to take full responsibility for him/her, your perspective will naturally change." You no longer only care about what the world looks like in your eyes, you also care about what the world looks like in his/her eyes. You no longer care only about your own confusion, you care more about his/her confusion. You are no longer only concerned with the possibility that the world is open to you, you are also concerned with the possibility that the world presents to him/her. ”
From this book, we can clearly perceive a certain change in painting style. In the past, his characters were very comical, with lollipop-like heads and small wooden stick-like legs, but now the characters and animals he draws look more plump and realistic. It seems that after having a child, his world suddenly increases in weight, perhaps because he wants to present a more real world to the child.
But what would the little baby in his arms think of the world his father had painted for him? If he could talk, what would his first question be? He would be happy to know what was going on about the world, and what explanations would he question about his father?
<h1>Fantasy world vs real world</h1>
Almost all animals, including slugs, can learn through trial and error. Smarter animals, such as crows and primates, can learn by observation. But human children take learning to a whole new level, where they can understand all aspects of the world, physical, biological, cultural, and psychological.
Over the past half-century, the understanding of a child's mind has changed dramatically. In the past, we always thought that children (especially infants and young children) were irrational, self-centered, and non-discriminatory, and that their thinking and experience were concrete, immediate, and limited. A child's intellectual development begins with a long dark age, until school age when it is illuminated by the light of reason and gradually develops an understanding of the world and others.
But since the 1970s, a growing number of psychological and neuroscience studies have found that children learn more, imagine farther, care more, and experience more than we thought. From infancy, they acquire knowledge of the world through various means such as observation, imitation, and questioning, and independently construct their own explanatory models of the world.
Kids love magic, princesses, and spaceships, and we think they like to live in fantasies. But many studies argue that children are more interested in the real world and learn more from real stories than fantasy worlds. For example, preschoolers are more likely to learn new things from real animals than anthropomorphic animals. When stories involve real characters (rather than fictional characters) and real plots (rather than space adventures), they are more likely to apply the solutions in the story to real-life situations.
In fact, the reason why children are immersed in the imaginary world is also to better understand the real world. For example, they make up fake friends to learn how to interpret the behavior of others in the real world. Children who have imaginary friends usually get along better with friends in the real world because they are better at analyzing and predicting other people's thoughts and feelings. Children with autism almost never create imaginary friends and never engage in any imaginary games.
Children's interest in the real world can also refer to their endless problems. I love a picture book called "Where the Wind Goes", which is a child's endless questioning:
Where does the wind go when it stops?
When the rainstorm has passed, where does the rain go?
After the mountain reaches the top, where does it go?
Where did the clouds drift across the sky?
The leaves in the forest changed color and fell, but what about later?
Children's problems are often simple and profound. Simple because they know too little about the world, and deep because they often interrogate the nature of things. Therefore, their questions often make us doubt whether we really understand the things that we are usually sure to understand.
In fact, many scientists trace their scientific careers, often to the moment when they were hit by a simple and profound problem in their childhood. For example, Einstein once mentioned that when he was four or five years old, his father showed him a compass, and that little needle operated in such a firm way that it was completely counterintuitive. "I still remember — at least I believe I remember — that experience left a profound mark on me, convinced me that there must be something behind it."
Therefore, many scientists have a special preference for children's questions and like to answer children's questions. Einstein loved to answer children's questions, and there was a book called "Dear Professor Einstein: Letters from Children to Great Scientists", which collected various questions children asked the world's smartest professors, such as:
What is love?
What makes the sun and the planets stay in the sky?
Why do bird feathers have color?
I want to know what's outside the sky. My mom said you could tell me.
We wondered, if there was no one around and a big tree fell, would there be a sound, why?
Einstein's life was orchestrated with various "famous quotes", and the following sentence is not true or false, but I appreciate it: "If I only had an hour to solve a life-and-death problem, I would spend the first 55 minutes deciding whether I asked the right question." ”
Hawking also collaborated with his daughter on a set of popular science children's books that tell the story of the cosmic adventures of a young man and woman (George and Annie). This set of books originated from the problem of a child. At his grandson's 7th birthday party, a little friend asked him, "Mr. Hawking, what would happen if I fell into a black hole?" ”
The first story of that set of books revolves around this question. Scientist Eric was swallowed up by a black hole for a conspiracy, but he left a few pages for his two children with a summary version of his black hole theory, including what a black hole is, how it is produced, how you see it and how you escape it.
"Kids are always asking, how did things happen, and why? Adults often tell them that these are stupid questions. But often it's the adults who are stupid and unwilling to admit their stupidity. It is important for children to remain curious about the world and to keep asking questions. I was also a child and am curious to this day. Children ask me questions about black holes, and I find that as long as the language explained is simple enough, they can understand these concepts. I would like to imagine that when they grow up, they will be able to pick up "A Brief History of Time" and read it carefully. ”
Curiosity is a fragile thing. Scientists believe that a child's curiosity depends on two factors, the first is the child's basic cognitive ability, and the second is the parent's response to their immature problems. Curiosity is a feedback loop that, when encouraged, is enhanced, and ignored, impaired.
In fact, there are many delicate boundaries in terms of how to protect children's curiosity, such as explaining a phenomenon while leaving a certain degree of uncertainty and mystery. We need to give our children knowledge, but at the same time we need to let them know that we don't know all the answers. Let them know that we can explore this world, which is not all mysterious, but still full of unknowns.
As Steve Jenkins, a popular science children's book author I admire, writes in his self-introduction at the end of "How Long Is a Second" (that's a book about time): "By the time I finished this book, I had experienced 21,439 sunrises, and my heart was beating far more than 2 billion times; the distance between the Moon and Earth was about 2 meters far compared to the day of his birth, and there were at least 4.5 billion more people on Earth, including his three children." To this day, he still can't fully understand time, but he hopes to understand a little more every day. ”
After the age of 5, regardless of family background, children's problems show a significant decreasing trend (reading and writing increase), not because they have lost the ability to ask questions, but because children at this age have begun to go to school, and the concern for results has gradually replaced curiosity about the process. Moreover, they will find that adults, especially teachers, prefer answers to questions rather than questions – in most cases, questions are seen as a challenge to authority (or a sign of ignorance), and encouraging questions means letting go of power and control in some way, which is not easy for adults, so it is already nice to tolerate it.
We certainly can't expect every parent to be able to simplify such a complex scientific concept for their children, as Hawking did. Nor can we expect every teacher to be like Einstein, with the greatest kindness and encouragement for children's problems. However, we need to understand that a child's early learning experience is largely social. Some learning experiences involve their own first-hand experience (through observation), but more are seeking information and answers from the outside, including abstract concepts, scientific phenomena, past/future events. In order to understand these concepts, children must rely on information and knowledge provided by others. This is the value of non-fiction children's books.
Fiction and non-fiction children's books inspire different enthusiasm among readers. When we tell a story to a child, we are actually explaining the world to him in a literary way. Fictional themes such as love, fear, adventure, and the triumph over evil and adversity are mostly universal. You can read Charlotte's Web or Charlie's Chocolate Factory to any child and capture their hearts. But the joy of reading non-fiction children's books is much more subtle. Few young readers will laugh or cry when they read about a spider's magical jumping ability, or when a continent is moving. Not all kids are interested in the same non-fiction subjects, some like astronomy, some like animals, geology, engineering. However, I have found that really good non-fiction children's books capture the hearts of children in a more peculiar way, and that they convey no less joy, beauty, and wonder than stories.
"Magical Reality" author Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins once wrote a book for children, "Magical Reality", the title of which means that the magic contained in science's interpretation of reality is no less than myths, fables and fairy tales. Myths last because they are great stories. Scientific narratives are always unfinished, constantly revised, and rarely have clean endings or touching moral comforts, but they can be as magical as Homer's epics, or as interesting as Kipling (an English writer, Nobel Laureate in Literature, who has written many works of children's literature, such as the Jungle Book). For example, what story about the origin of human beings is more amazing than the theory of evolution? "You think, what a fascinating story it is that we were fragments of dust that swirled around the sun, and over the course of 4 billion years, we have gradually changed from bacteria to what we are today!"
In an interview, Steve Jenkins told me, "I have great respect for the understanding of children. No matter how complex the concept, as long as it can be related to their interests and curiosity, as long as they are provided with some tools to understand the world, the rest will be taken care of by themselves. ”
For example, he believes that scale is an important tool for children. "Because this is the simplest, most direct way for children to measure the world." This is the pattern I found in my own relationship with my children. When children are confronted with a new thing, whether it is an animal, or a geological feature, or some kind of astronomical phenomenon, the first thing they want is a sense of scale. In fact, not only children, once things are beyond the scope of our direct experience, even adults are difficult to grasp the scale. ”
Therefore, he makes great use of this scale in his works. For example, "All the Way Down", the picture gradually enters the earth from outer space, followed by land and ocean... Each page is a shot, each shot is a partial zoom in on the previous shot, and ends with a little boy holding a magnifying glass to see a little ladybug. The inspiration for the book came from the first time they took their 2-year-old daughter on a plane, and when the plane was about to land, he found her daughter looking out the window with a look of surprise, and he thought she must have realized - how did the house become smaller?
The book "How Long Is a Second" that we mentioned earlier is also a scale of time. In just one second, people blink 7 times, woodpeckers peck trees 20 times, hummingbirds flapp their wings 50 times, bats launch 200 ultrasounds, black mamba snakes slide out of the terrible 7 meters, dragonflies fly 15 meters, planes sail 244 meters, humpback whale songs travel underwater for 1550 meters, and light travels for 3 million kilometers. There are 4 babies born in the world and 2 dead at the same time. 1500 chickens were killed. The author then expands the scale of time from seconds to minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, the length of time for the entire universe.
He also has a very interesting book called "Why Giant Pandas Have Dark Circles", which interviews a group of strange-looking animals in the tone of a child:
Dear mountain fish, how is your nose so bright?
Dear Horned Eagle, how did the feathers on your head stand tall and vertical?
Dear bearded seals, does your beard itch so long?
Dear panda, who gave you a pair of big dark circles?
He said that children may think that an animal's appearance or behavior is very strange, but through this chain of cause and effect inference, they will understand that there are reasons behind the reason why animals grow up to be what they look like and why they make these strange moves. Almost all children are interested in the causal chain of things. The question "why" and the answer it points to allows children to understand the world in a deeper and broader way.
Jenkins was born in 1952 to the son of a physics professor and astronomer. Because of his father's work, he often moved when he was a child. North Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Colorado, wherever he moved, he always kept a room full of lizards, turtles, spiders, he also collected fossils and rocks, and his notebooks were full of geological periods. The basement of his house always had his chemistry lab.
One of his favorite books as a child was the book "The Strange Beasts of the Past" by the explorer Anderson (a former director of the American Museum of Natural History), which tells the story of Anders' search for fossils in Mongolia in the 1930s. He always thought he would be a paleontologist. However, he ultimately chose the design. After graduation, he moved to New York to work for an advertising design firm until his daughter was born, where he began working on picture books with his wife while reading bedtime stories to her.
"The world is changing at a rapid pace. On the one hand, science is becoming more and more abstract, and its scales are either as small as incomprehensible, such as quantum mechanics, or as large as incomprehensible, such as cosmology, or difficult to grasp in the dimension of time. It is increasingly difficult for non-scientists to connect with it.
But at the same time, science-related issues can have an increasingly direct impact on our lives, such as stem cell research, the possibility of cloning, gene editing, nuclear weapons, and so on. As citizens, society demands decisions on issues that we can barely comprehend. But if children can truly understand that science is a process, not a chain of facts, anyone can follow the process and make informed judgments about the right and wrong of the information and the motivations behind it, and perhaps they can make more informed decisions.
That's the value of non-fiction children's books: it encourages children to ask questions. It will tell children that observing and measuring the natural world is the first step towards understanding. More importantly, scientific conclusions are inherently questionable. Understanding how science works means that we know how to think critically about something, and we can observe things as they are, rather than having someone else tell us what they are, generate new ideas about those things, and verify that our previous knowledge of it is correct.
<h1>How a child's curiosity develops</h1>
In How We Think, John Dewey once described in detail how a child's curiosity develops from a life instinct to an intellectual activity that becomes a positive force for advancing thinking.
Curiosity is first manifested as an outflow of life force, the expression of a rich organism... If you pay attention to the movement of a baby, you will see that he is also constantly trying and groping. He would suck, touch and bump all kinds of objects, push and pull, scratch and throw, in short, experience these things until there was no longer any freshness. Such activities can hardly be said to be intellectual activities, but without them, intellectual activities become pale and stop-and-go without materials.
Under the influence of social stimuli, curiosity will develop to a higher stage. When a child is no longer able to derive interesting sensations from personal contact with objects, but understands that he can expand his experience by asking others, he will ask others to provide him with materials that interest him, and a new era begins. We will constantly hear childish voices asking, "What is this?" "Why is that?"
Then, his question deepens: What is the house on? What is the land supporting this house on? On what basis does the earth that sustains this land stand? And all that. But this kind of problem is not yet a truly conscious or rational systematic exploration. What he is asking for is not a scientific explanation, but only a desire to know more about this mysterious world. What he explores is not a law or a principle, but more facts. But children's questions are not just about accumulating incoherent information. He will realize that these facts are not the whole story, and there will be more behind them, and more truths will be seen from these things. Thus came the germ of intellectual curiosity.
When curiosity rises above the physical and social level, it reaches the intellectual level, at which time the problem is found on the basis of observing things and accumulating materials, and thinking about it. When the question is still not solved after being asked by others, and the child still leaves the problem in his own mind to continue to think and find ways to find an answer, curiosity rises to the level of intelligence and becomes a positive force to advance thinking. For the open-minded, the experiences of nature and society are fraught with a variety of subtle challenges that need to be pondered further. The forces that make problems germinate need to be grasped and used correctly, otherwise they will gradually diminish or even disappear.