Alison Gopnik: prediction

Transcript context

…Let’s say you’re called into a typical American K–12 school. Not a top one, but say 70th, 75th percentile, a pretty good school. They just say to you — maybe this has happened — “Well, you’ve studied all this about children. How can we improve how we teach our kids?” What is it that you tell them? I’ve written about this in my book. I think there’re two different things to say. If you’re thinking about young kids in particular, like early childhood, before 7, say, I think we have a very good model of inquiry-based, often play-based education, where you have a warm caregiver, and you get lots of opportunities to play and explore. I think we have pretty good reason to think that’s the right thing for these very young children. But for what we think of as the school-age children, it’s a really different kind of model. It’s a different kind of thing they’re trying to do. If you think about development — as I’ve argued — as being this shift from mostly about exploration to skills that you’re going to use for exploitation, how do you actually develop those skills? I think we have good reason to believe that some kind of intuitive apprenticeship model is how you develop those skills. You do something that you think is going to be important. You have a teacher who gives you feedback. The teacher also shows you examples of the skill. That kind of interaction. Sometimes, the teacher could be quite mean [laughs] about telling you when you’ve done something wrong. I think that’s a really good way for school-age children to learn. I think it’s not a coincidence, for instance, that so many kids really want to do music and sports, even though we all say, “No, learn how to code. That’s the thing that will actually be helpful to you.” Because music and sports are among the few examples where we actually do this kind of apprenticeship. You do the thing, you get feedback, you try and do the thing again. One of the things I say is, imagine if we tried to teach baseball the way that we teach science. How do we teach science? What we would do is, we would tell everybody about great baseball games when they were little. Maybe when they were in high school, they could throw the ball a lot to second base. When they were in college, they could reproduce great baseball plays, but they wouldn’t actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school. If you taught baseball that way, you wouldn’t think that people would be as good at baseball. It’s funny because, of course, what kids end up — I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I think a lot of faculty have had this experience — because kids are so naturally tuned to this model, what do they get to be good at at school? They get to be incredibly good at going to school. They get to be really good at taking tests. The ones that we get in our first-year college classes are just these masters of all the things you need to do for school. Then we faculty are worried because we say to them, “Think up a new experiment.” They say, “Oh, I don’t know how to do that. Nobody ever taught me to do something on my own or do something creative.” There’s a wonderful idea. Do you know about Goodhart’s law? Sure. We use it in economics. Yes.…

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