How children learn

One day I sat watching my littlle one year old grandson trying to put on his shoes. For him it was a major undertaking. First he tried the left shoe, then the right shoe. When that did not work he tried twisting his left foot into the shoe then the tried the right foot. But nothing worked. I thought he would turn to his father sitting beside him watching his efforts bemusedly. But no, he was going to do it on his own. There was a look of fierce determination ( that by itself was glorious) on his little face. He was going to get it right or perish in the attempt! Not really but he was really really determined.

It got me thinking about how children learn new things. According to the latest research, your child has been learning since before birth. It seems a child is born with an almost full complement of brain
cells - some 100 billion. However, these cells, called neurons, are not fully connected or necessarily used at birth. The main task of the brain in early childhood is for these neurons to forge connections. By age three, the brain has formed an estimated 1,000 trillion of these connections, called synapses. An individual cell may be connected to as many as 15,000 others. 

This tremendous growth is fueled by the child’s experiences, heredity, and maturation. The amount of
positive stimulation a child receives is directly related to the child’s behavioral and brain development. This positive stimulation includes responsive forms of play, affection, discovery, and language interactions. In situations where children are deprived of enough such early learning opportunities, brain and behavioral development slow or fail to progress in normal ways. Exactly what types and how much early stimulation young children need to promote “optimal” brain development is a topic of vigorous scientific inquiry. 

During the first 10 to 12 years of life, it is estimated that approximately half the synapses formed inearly
childhood will be shed or pruned. Most likely, the synapses that are used repeatedly are strengthened and are more likely to endure. Those used less often are more likely to be pruned or re-configured. By early adolescence, the number of synapses will have declined to about half the number of those in the three-year-old’s brain. A great deal of research is underway to understand these basic developmental processes and their practical significance.  What has been well documented for more than 30 years, however, is that the way in which the adult brain functions can be profoundly affected by early experiences. 

Recent research confirms that brains get “wired” in different ways to achieve
positive ends. But a brain is not a living “computer” waiting for the “software” of
experience. Evidence indicates that brains are as unique in their appearance and their
functioning as everything else about us. There are many compensatory and probably
idiosyncratic processes at work in the early years that contribute to each child’s brain
development.

Early brain development produces a large, complex brain by the age of three. A three-year-old’s brain is estimated to be 90 percent of the adult brain in terms of structure and function. Yet the brain’s development is far from complete. What children learn and do continues to affect the brain’s function and refinement. Such changes will continue throughout life into old age -something not fully appreciated until recently. The primary basis for this refinement appears to be experience and
active use of the brain. 

There are many different forms of learning. Learning includes a wide range of
human behavior characterized by the active process of acquiring new knowledge and
skills, as well as creating new connections among existing knowledge and skills.
Learning occurs in informal, everyday contexts as well as in structured learning
situations. It involves associations or relationships between and among elements.

Rather than give an overarching theory of how children learn, John Holt, the father of the modern home school movement, uses anecdotal observations that question assumptions about how children acquire knowledge and learning skills. First and foremost, Holt believes that children are born learners and that there is a curiosity in all children that begins at birth, not when they are put in school.  His observations of young children reveal that their brains are trying to make sense of the world. Children want to solve problems; they like to think.  The problem is that parents and educators get in the way of this natural process by placing children in large, impersonal schools, and by teaching a meaningless curriculum in an industrial factory setting. Holt rejects knowledge that is entirely taught in an abstract manner. He uses the example of teaching fractions as an anesthetic experience with little real world application.  Similarly, he is disgusted by children’s primers and picture books with their “dumb” and simple vocabularies.  Rather, Holt believes in exposing children to real world problems of increasing complexity.  For example, he encourages parents to expose their children to newspapers, letters, warranties, the yellow pages - anything tangible and visceral to promote their curiosity about the world. Holt maintains that the best results can be gained a student is given time to figure things out and to develop hunches that become more and more sophisticated with experience.  For Holt, there are no stupid mistakes as children develop their cognitive skills. The concept of self esteem is the second fundamental belief that Holt espouses.  Self confidence is the key to a child’s learning.  Overbearing teachers and parents, coercive educational institutions, the rote drudgery of learning and endless testing - all serve to create a sense of anxiety, of crushing curiosity, of making learning a painful rather than a natural and pleasurable act.  Over time students come to believe that they are failures.  Indeed, Holt asserts that stammering and stuttering are the consequences for some children of destroyed self esteem. Fear of failure, punishment and disgrace, along the with the anxiety of constant testing, severely reduces students’ ability to perceive and remember, and, thus, drive them away from learning.  Holt, with his trust children philosophy, believes, perhaps naively, that they have a strong sense of what is right and have an innate self correcting mechanism that will help them to (eventually) solve a problem.  Most instruction, especially reading, Holt argues, is self taught anyway, so why the need for overbearing teachers and parents?    Holt believes that learning can be pleasurable and that learning in the form of games can be the first step in having children embrace a lifetime of learning. What should parents do about brain development?  Mostly they should do what good parents have done for generations. Be sure your child is well cared for, well nourished, rested, happy, engaged, and allowed to play and learn with all the delight and energy of each stage of development.