A mini report on developmental and educational psychology

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I’m not a psychologist (and I don’t even play one on TV), for reasons I will give you later.  But there are some aspects of the subject that are useful to know, and which I stumbled upon rather late in life.

What education must deliver to a person depends on his mental development, so teachers should know, at least in general terms, what is going on in the heads of their pupils.  Here is a sketch of what I picked up; it is not intended to be complete, but you can use it as a starting point for further reading.

Infancy  

Sensory exploration: Smell, Touch, Visual Recognition, Sound.  Newborn infants are learning furiously.  We believe that it is the smell of the mother that first identifies her to the child, followed by the feel of her, and the sound of her voice.  The baby learns to recognize the sound of the other parent, its parents’ eyes, and their faces, pretty much in that order.  The infant also learns to control his or her own face and smile, control its voice to cry, control its body, to try and sit up, and crawl about.
Logical exploration: Permanence.  You know those peek-a-boo games you play?  Well, it’s teaching the infant that things do not cease to exist once they leave its field of view.  From an universe consisting only of things it can see, it graduates to one where there are things around it and behind it which will come back later!  Isn’t that amazing?

 

Logical exploration: Sorting.  Early understanding of all attributes begins with sorting similar things together.  All that furious sorting has a purpose: the child is learning to generalize.  Generalization is probably the root of all logic.  Mommy gives me food, therefore all people will give me food.  (In an ideal world, yes.  There are dangers to generalizing too far, obviously.)

Not how I envisaged it...

Physical exploration: Mass and Volume, position and location.  Sooner or later, Junior will start transporting things about; little kids are born truckers.  Carrying things around, feeling their weight, putting them here, putting them there; it all has a purpose.  The kid learns geometry, and the facts about distances and angles.  Some friends of mine taught their two-year-old to parallel park, using a tricycle.  Why not?

Early Childhood

Language, Arithmetic.  Using language at home provides a basis for describing things, including how many.  It isn’t that language is more fundamental than number, but that language is an essential tool for talking about number. 
Logical exploration: Conservation of number.  An early discovery ---which does come automatically, but not at the same age for all children--- is that rearranging a collection of things does not change how many there are!  It is fascinating to test a child for this understanding: kids who haven’t quite figured it out will re-count, if you move some objects around.  Others will just smile and insist that it is the same number of things.  The age at which this realization comes about has no implication for how bright the child is, unless it happens extremely late in life.
Social Interaction.  Dealing with its peers and with adults is something that will happen in due course, but skill in this area can help the child get more out of school.  Home schooling takes away the opportunity for socialization to happen routinely, unless parents introduce other opportunities, such as a dance class, or a drama clinic (Christian Youth Theatre, for instance; but you run the risk of Junior taking to it just a little too well, and get hooked on theatre to the exclusion of everything else).

The Middle Years

I mean grades 3, 4, 5, 6.  Another enormous intellectual growth spurt often occurs at this time, and the eyes of young people are turned outwards, to their friends and the families of friends, things they see in their community: stores, books.  (TV should NOT dominate their lives in these years, because TV builds an artificial world that is deceitful and dangerous, and manipulative.)  This is an amazing opportunity for the school and the teachers to give a child the experiences that will determine whether it is engaged with, and has a positive attitude towards, the world of people and ideas out there, or whether the child is steered either inwards, towards self-involvement; or focused on objects and material things, which will doom it to lifelong dissatisfaction.
Abstraction.  This is the skill of extracting essential characteristics from a variety of things, to see their similarities, despite superficial differences; or differences, despite superficial similarities.  Children need to make that intuitive leap, when necessary, but know the risk of jumping to unwarranted conclusions.  Jumping to conclusions is human, and actually a sign of intelligence.  But being aware that jumping to conclusions can be problematic is a part of education.
In my experience, Grade 5 (9, 10, or 11 years old) is prime time for jumping to conclusions, and good teachers who don’t get annoyed with all this cognitive blundering are important.  Students at this age are learning facts and absorbing information like sponges.  The base of facts gathered at this age, and the process of sorting through those facts and analyzing them and grouping them is the basis of all future learning.  You can imagine how desperate matters become if a child must wait until he or she comes to college to learn that there was a Great Wall in China.  Maps.  The World.  Countries.  Climate.  Ancient lands and peoples.  Myths and Legends from your culture.  Voyages of exploration.  The Solar System.  Great artists and musicians.  Great authors, especially for children.  Scientific facts, the Elements, common Chemicals.
This information cannot wait until Junior High.  Meanwhile, Junior should discover some sport or athletic activity that he or she likes: tennis, soccer, baseball, basketball, swimming, running.  Or ballet or theatre or gymnastics.  The more the merrier.  All this is much harder on the parents than the kids, but the kid gets a basis for choosing well later on, because you obviously can’t keep all of it up forever.

The upper grades

The splitting apart into infancy, lower grades, etc is admittedly rather arbitrary; it is again the principle of generalizing coming into play.  Most of this will apply to most children (or people; once they’re fourteen, it seems silly to call them children).
Once a child has accumulated a vast army of facts, or even while it is acquiring them, sorting them and analyzing them is important.
A lot of this organization and analysis does indeed get done in College.  But doing a lot of it in school (I mean grade school or high school) introduces the young person to the methodology.  How do you classify your information?  How was information classified at different times, and how were improvements in understanding driven by changes in classification, and vice versa?

College

In my (possibly wrong) opinion, a child’s late youth ---around the age of twenty--- is a time for studying process.  If a person has to wait until college to learn the process of doing something, there is no time for studying the process itself.  For instance, a person should learn in school the process whereby a law comes to be enacted.  In college, it is time for analyzing the possible weaknesses or strengths of that process.
Parents who have not had a college education might find that startling; they can be excused for (mistakenly) imagining that College just provides more, better, more difficult information.  Unless the word information is being used in a very general sense indeed, this is a bad misunderstanding: in College, a student begins to study how other people think, or thought.  How a Historian thinks.  How an author thinks.  How an ancient Greek thought.  How an Israeli thinks about certain things.  This analysis is built upon all the facts that the person had assimilated while he or she was a child, in high school or middle school.  (To call these ideas information dilutes the value of the word.  One must never confuse information with analysis.  Of course, it's all the same to those who don't care about precision of meaning...)
Some parents, of course, would be delighted if their child only learned how a potential victim thinks; parents who imagine that the ideal preparation of a child is to become an economic predator rather than economic prey!  Present company most probably excepted; my readers are very unlikely to be that sort of person.  But one cannot doubt that a vast majority of US parents are focused on getting their kids a foothold in the Business World, which requires very little living, and a lot of earning.  Perhaps that emphasis helps to distort education as we find it, twisting it away from what it should be, and could be again.  But, on reflection, once education emerged as a major factor in the economic and social mobility of a family, the American genius for competition made education a sort of battle-ground for family competition, and education became a competitive activity rather than a cooperative one.  But politicians became answerable for the quality of education in each locality, and they were quick to transfer responsibility and answerability to teachers, and now teachers are in the position of having to supply proof that they have successfully taught their students what parents want to have taught.  This is a waste of time.
But parents must be the first responders to their children’s need to be supplied intellectual stimulus at the right time.  You could have said that you didn’t know Junior needed to be played with with peek-a-boo games.  Well, now you know.  Have another baby, quick!

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