Young Children Learning: Talking and Thinking at Home and at School

Young Children Learning provides vivid insight into the way young children think, talk, and learn from their mothers. It reveals the richness of the home as a learning environment and shows how much children can learn through the ordinary conversations of everyday life.

The book describes a research study in which four-year-old girls were tape-recorded talking to their mothers at home and to their teachers at nursery school. At home the children range freely over a wide variety of topics—work, the family, birth, growing up, death. They talk about plans for the future and puzzle over such diverse topics as the shapes of roofs and chairs, the nature of Father Christmas, and whether the queen wears curlers in bed. In many conversations the children are actively struggling to understand a new idea or the meaning of an unfamiliar word. These "passages of intellectual search" show the children to be persistent and logical thinkers.

In sharp contrast, the conversations between these same children and their nursery school teachers lack richness, depth, and variety. The questioning, puzzling child is gone: in her place is a child who seems subdued and whose conversations with adults are mainly restricted to answering questions rather than asking them. These observations show how strongly young children can be affected by the move from one setting to another, and they suggest that, even at the nursery stage, children reserve their best thinking for outside the classroom, with a resulting compartmentalization of the knowledge they acquire at school.

The book challenges the widely held belief that parents need to learn from professionals how toeducate and bring up their children; above all, it persuades us to value parenting more highly and to have respect for the intellectual capabilities of young minds.