How Toddlers Learn is How Humans Learn

I am the almost-always overjoyed father of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy-- so the subject of this essay is not removed or theoretical for me. I am also the father of an eleven-year-old wunderkind girl-- and a beauteous infant girl, five months old and a constant joy (and responsibility).

The subject of this essay is familiar to every parent.

Our culture has absorbed as normal and natural that there is a distinction between learning, and schooling (education). We all tend to say, and most tend to agree, that the purpose of education, is supposed to be Learning. But most would agree, and developmental psychologists and other scientists of human growth and development tend to agree as well, that a huge mass of all that a human being will EVER learn-- namely, becoming functionally fluent in their native tongue(s); having learned to crawl, then walk, then run; knowing the world around them, the behaviors and habits of those they spend the most time with, frequently imitating them, often almost unconsciously, yet very purposefully nonetheless... All of this and so much more is absorbed in the first five years, whether or not a child has attended a single day of school in those crucial, formative years. The human mind absorbs So Much, So Voraciously, during those early years. Even though the life of a toddler frequently appears on the surface to be merely composed of playing, eating, sleeping, soiling diapers, and (of course) throwing tantrums-- So Much Learning occurs. With or without the presence of a professionally-trained teacher, So Much Learning occurs.

Freedom for students, of all ages, to choose, initiate and delve as deeply as they want into the activities they choose, will often manifest as "play", "making things", "conversation" (in teens particularly)-- and of course (in this day and age) time on computers, on the Internet, on hand-held devices, playing video games, as well as just plain hanging out and horsing around. Many of these activities might not look like Learning in a culture raised on the conviction that learning occurs when trained adults stand before a large group of age-segregated youths and tell them what they need to know, requiring tests and homework and, to quote Henry David Thoreau, "What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."
That meandering brook is an excellent metaphor (Thoreau was pretty good at those) for the human mind, pursuing the natural, "meandering" pathways created by its own curiosity, its inherent power to carve the paths of its choosing, around obstacles and impediments, erosion having its way against rock, soil, sand and clay, carving the most natural, non-linear path, yet never failing to reach its inevitable goal-- the ocean. A human-carved ditch, on the other hand, takes the straightest, manhandled path from a human-chosen Point A to the human-desired destination. It is "straight-cut", bespeaking the human desire to control, to destroy or maim the wondrous "meandering" nature of-- well, nature. Things as they are, minus too much "industrious", hierarchical human meddling.


The hierarchical nature of human control-freakishness is evident in straight-cut ditches, Interstate highways and cardboard suburban developments everywhere, but since our actual topic is the growing human mind, let us return to examining its meandering nature when left to its own devices. Let's return to the description above of young people's likely choices of activities if allowed to choose. They play, they converse, they explore, they make and break and take apart, just to put something back together again. I see my two-year-old son engage in such seemingly purposeless, "meandering" activity daily, all the time. He pours all his blocks out of their box, just to methodically take each piece and return it to the box; once all the pieces are confirmed back in place, he empties it again, immediately, and starts from scratch. And similar activities with countless other items, all through the day.

Soiling diapers. Crying. Sleeping. Eating. Throwing tantrums. So much of it seems meandering, purposeless-- certainly NOT learning-- right?! Yet we've already agreed, and even if you don't agree, most experts in human growth and development and other relevant sciences and studies do, that more essential knowledge is absorbed, more capital L Learning occurs by the age of five than at any other time in life. So even though a two-and-a-half year old frequently appears to be engaged in frivolous, unproductive, counterintuitive pursuits, becoming completely engaged in apparently meaningless activities and explorations of minutiae, seeming always intent on breaking things or making messes-- somewhere in that meandering mess, two- and three-year olds are, all of them, inheriting the priceless keys to the kingdoms of human language fluency, physical coordination, problem-solving skills, identifying and relating So Much of the vast world surrounding us all, to their own crystallizing world-view.

What if we allowed THAT kind of learning to continue through the "schooling years"? If students looked like they were "always playing, meandering, hanging out, horsing around"-- how different would that be from all the apparent time-wasting engaged-in by the intent Learners who are Toddlers?

We could judge the surface, most-visible activities, and cry "Pleasure Isle", Lord of the Flies-- paint the whole picture as uncivilized, either mere indulgence of all childish fantasy and laziness, a la Pinocchio's "Pleasure Isle", where all the fun-loving "bad boys" were tricked into "escaping" to a place of their wildest dreams of fun, games and illicit behavior, resulting in the "punishment" of all the boys being transformed into donkeys and existing for the remainder of their days as slaves; similarly but conversely, one might imagine a scenario of student-guided autonomy in a "learning environment" being akin to William Golding's cautionary fiction Lord of the Flies, which began not with its story's boys being lured to a place of pleasure: rather, they found themselves stranded after a plane crash, a destructive calamity, alone on a deserted island with no adults present. These boys cobbled together a faint echo of governance, a struggle for leadership, a narcissistic militant faction which grew from somewhere akin to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness... And quickly collapsed into self-destructive, primitive anarchy of the most stereotypical and dramatic sort. Melodramatic, really.

These two now-archetypes have come to represent our culture's fears of what's might happen if we were to actually allow, as Maria Montessori once named a book on "The Advanced Montessori Method", Spontaneous Activity in Education. In talk of "reforms" of mainstream academic approaches, in both public and private institutions, there is a good deal of lip-service paid to notions such as Spontaneous Activity being beneficial to children's development and overall education. But, in almost all such cases, any allowance of Spontaneous Activity occurs not in any sense resembling Thoreau's metaphorical "meandering brook"-- but rather, is "allowed" in the Context of the "straight-cut ditch" of the preordained, highly controlled hierarchy of learning content and standardization. As pointed out in my last 'blog article, the stated goal of almost all conventional education for youth today is the creation of Standardized Minds, based on content determined, created, and forced not just upon students, but upon the teachers who must "put" the standardized content "into" young minds, rigorously and "successfully". THAT, my friends, is (today's version of) the "straight-cut ditch" Thoreau warned formed the dubious answer to the question "What does education often do?"

But note, Thoreau included the modifier "often". He was not placing a blanket, all-inclusive denunciation upon education of his day, but warning that it is "often" the case, that education takes a pre-formulated, manhandled path previously dug by bureaucratic human forces, rather than allowing the "meandering brook" of natural, unforced learning to occur.

Recalling that a seemingly aimless, "meandering brook" always finds its way downhill, always finds its way to its destination-- eventually, the ocean-- whether or not human forces intercede or interfere, Thoreau seems to indicate that the human mind, left to its own devices and path, naturally tends toward a useful purpose and ultimate destination of its own choosing, whether or not it appears to be "meandering" and require standardized intervention using straight-cut ditch techniques.

Which brings us back to this notion of what might, what could possibly happen if, during the schooling years our culture allocates, youths were allowed to continue learning in the way that we all see toddlers Learn. Instead of assuming that they will "do nothing" with their time, or indulge in the Heart of Darkness on display in Golding's Lord of the Flies-- and if observing that they do in fact choose to play, converse, explore, horse-around, test their limits and boundaries in the most engaging ways they can muster-- if instead of immediately judging that those chosen activities will inevitably lead them to become donkeys and be shipped away as lifelong slaves, we recall that toddlers also appear to be doing things other than the vast amount of intensive learning they are in fact, constantly doing, we might instead put a greater degree of Trust, full Respect into our children's hands-- and instead of the "straight-cut ditch" of top-down standardized learning, we might allow them what Henry David Thoreau, a smart man and one of American letters' wisest voices, described much more approvingly as the "meandering brook" of a Freedom-Centered approach to learning. A meandering brook is entirely free in comparison to a straight-cut ditch. It pursued, it created, its own path, which always takes it where it needs to go. The human mind can, and does, thrive-- at all ages but particularly the growing human mind-- in an environment of Freedom, in which it is offered the Trust that its chosen activities, that which engages it most (however far it might seem to meander), will lead to its richest development. A stream carves through any substance, or goes around it, either way attaining its natural, most authentic path, always leading to the natural destination, the correct destination. If we offer the growing human mind the Respect of this Trust and Freedom, and a nurturing environment, safe and supportive, with a community of other Learners of all ages alongside to assist and collaborate in the journey-- imagine how much authentic, exponential capital-L Learning will take place!

How Toddlers Learn is How Humans Learn.