The Importance of Education

The one thing that I have continually noticed throughout the readings is the importance of educating children. And by educating, I don’t just mean formally, with books and classrooms. I also mean through life experiences. In many of the problem solving topics discussed in the reading, and even biological processes, children could not ever gain the knowledge that they need to be successful in life without experience with the outside world.

First of all, when discussing biological concepts, it is important to note that children do seem to have some innate knowledge of biological and non-biological movement, and that with some amount of time they also come to understand living and non-living objects, but without the experiences that they have had in life, they could not come to know either. The book even mentions a study done by Inagaki (1990) where they compared the understanding of children that had raised goldfish as pets to children that hadn’t raised goldfish. The children that had experience with a pet was better able to understand another kind of animal that they were less familiar with, simply because they had some personal concept of living things.

Also, in many of the problem solving tasks, there is importance put on feedback to and education of the children, and the effects of that on the children. It is important to note that children do have some basic understanding of problem solving, but it is also very interesting to see how they combine what they already know with what they are taught, in order to solve new problems. For example, in the balance-scale problems, it was indicated that even children that were expected to be able to solve such problems, having been taught them in a classroom environment, were unable to make the jump from the type of balance they had learned the problem on to the one used in the experiment. Therein lies a problem, in my opinion. It seems that if the educational system currently in use was actually beneficial to students, they would be able to generalize information that they have learned in classes like physics to real world situations, where the balance problem might not even be a balance, but could be a car teetering on the edge of a cliff. It seems like it would be important to be able to figure out a problem like this in a hurry.

As for mental models, I find it interesting that children have so many different mental models of the earth. In my opinion, this is reassuring, because it shows that children are capable of thinking for themselves. This is useful in many cases, as some teachers start with incorrect information (as before they knew what shape the earth really was) that may have to be corrected at some point in a child’s life. If a child were just blindly taking in information, they would not be able to go back and change old misinformation, and would potentially walk around confused about which information was correct. Sometimes, reading about this stuff makes me wonder what I did when I was the age of the children mentioned in these studies. Did I believe that the earth was round? Although it wasn’t mentioned in this book, I want to point out that there are still people that believe that the earth is flat, and that the photos that we have seen of Earth are not actually real. It seems like that would be difficult information to hold onto so tightly that you can form a cult around it.

However, my main point about education being important was seen in the use of analogous thinking. I found it surprising that even though children of a certain age can be shown how one person solved a problem, they have difficulty using that information to solve a very similar problem, until they are asked to repeat what happened in the previous example. This seems to be some indication that without educational experiences, children could not make certain leaps in their thinking. Of course, over time, children gain general experience with the world that they can use to solve certain types of problems, but if they don’t go out and handle objects and work with gravity and trajectories and those sorts of things, they will never have an ability to solve some of the problems that come up in the daily life of an adult.