World without Development

In the first part of the week, we talked about children’s conceptual and theory development in class. Conceptual development basically helps children make sense of the world. I think it is critical to have concepts develop in us; I thought about a world where people living there do not have conceptual development, and it was very different. People would never be able to group things together into categories, such as having bats and humans all called mammal, and also would not understand that all members in a category share some common features. In the world without conceptual development, I imagine that people would often be confused and have curiosity. Since people cannot category things according to their features, they would need to examine every new things each time they encounter a new object. For example, seeing other people from other parts of the world, they would not be able to tell right away that they are human as well, since people from different parts of the world may not look exactly the same. Thus, it would be time consuming to live in a world without conceptual development; we would need to spend a lot more time in our lives on just simple examine each and every objects that we see.

In the second part of the week, we talked about reasoning and problem solving. I believe that this is another big step in children’s development. Come to think of it, basically almost everything we do in our daily life is related with reasoning and problem solving. For example, when driving a car, we need to solve the problem of where we are going and what road should I take to get there; when writing a blog, we need to first understand the material, and solve the problem and reason out of what we want to write about. Thus, a world where people have no reasoning and problem solving skills would probably be malfunctioning and dangerous.