All Authors
Alison Gopnik received her B.A. from McGill University and her D.Phil. in experimental psychology from Oxford. She has been a professor at UC Berkeley since 1988. One of the founders of the 'theory of mind' field, she has published over 160 journal articles and received the APS Lifetime Achievement Cattell and William James Awards, the SRCD Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Science, and the 2021 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Her research uses children's rapid learning as a window into the foundations of human cognition.
Key Ideas
- →Children are not defective adults — they are extraordinarily capable learners whose wide-open attention and exploration serves the same function as scientific hypothesis-testing
- →The job of early childhood is to be open to everything; the job of adulthood is to act on what you've learned — and schools often impose adult modes of focus on children too early
- →Parenting as 'carpentry' (shaping children toward a predetermined outcome) is both scientifically flawed and harmful; parenting as 'gardening' (creating conditions for flourishing) is better supported by evidence
- →Play is not the opposite of learning — it IS learning, and the most efficient kind at that
- →The extended human childhood, unique among primates, is an evolutionary adaptation that allows for massive cultural learning and creativity