Education on Easy Mode

Education, education, education: both a tremendous opportunity and a weighty responsibility.

Expressed in high-minded terms, the education of the next generation is the most important duty of any civilisation. With schools and teachers increasingly failing in their duties of care across the West, many parents are giving serious consideration to taking a more active role in their children’s education. But with such an important task, where does one begin?

Fortunately, much of education can be—and is—undertaken by children themselves. Until the will to learn is drained from their young minds by the prison-like wasteland of school, children are naturally curious and inquisitive creatures. Before their induction into systematised education, they strive to acquire an entire verbal language merely to communicate with parents and peers; anyone who has attempted to master a language in adulthood will be aware of the immense mental reorganisation that such a task demands. And yet children do it willingly, unbegrudgingly, and with a marvellous competitive enthusiasm.

By harnessing this natural inclination of children to learn, parents can make education fun, unstressful, and brilliantly effective. The most natural method of early education is through guided play. This is ‘education on easy mode’—but to understand how it works, we first have to consider how a child’s brain actually develops and grows.

According to the pioneering developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, children pass through four developmental stages. This theory is widely accepted in modern psychology, although the delineation of stage boundaries remains a matter of debate. A child’s brain is essentially a machine with a long and convoluted start-up sequence, whose functions come online gradually over 16-18 years. 

In this respect, humans are different from other animals who emerge from the birth canal with most of their sensorimotor skills intact. A newborn foal can stand and walk shortly after birth, whereas a human child must be carried and cared for over many years before it becomes a remotely useful member of society. The trade-off, of course, is that we develop large brains that are capable of the greatest cognitive feats in the animal kingdom (such as persuading ourselves that men can become pregnant).

The Sensorimotor Stage (From Birth to 24 Months)

When a child acquires language skills, its mode of interacting with the world changes radically. Until that point, children’s development is focused around the acquisition of ‘sensorimotor skills’: learning to accurately understand the local environment through the five senses (touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell), and learning how to coordinate bodily movements.

This process begins with simple reflexes. Babies are born with a suite of involuntary reflexes which gradually evolve into voluntary actions; the grasp reflex (whereby a baby involuntarily seizes anything placed into its palm) evolves into intentional grasping of objects. Other primary reflexes include sucking objects placed in the baby’s mouth, as well as following interesting objects with its eyes.

In the various phases of early infant development, the child begins to copy and repeat movements that it sees; to respond to reinforcement learning (i.e. internalise reward or punishment in response to certain actions); to develop habits, and to intelligently coordinate sight and touch. 

From the age of 12-18 months, babies are driven by overwhelming curiosity to experiment with everything in their environment. Such is the strength of this curiosity that Piaget referred to babies in this phase of early development as ‘young scientists’, who conduct primitive behavioural experiments in order to find new approaches to solving puzzles and challenges.

Concluding the first stage of development is the internalisation of schemas. From the age of 18-24 months, infants become able to use primitive symbols (i.e. using one object as a stand-in for another, such as pretending that a broomstick is a horse), and form long-lasting mental representations. 

One of the most important parts of the sensorimotor stage of learning is the development of object permanence: the realisation that objects exist in the world independently of one’s own actions and perceptions. Before this is learned, the game of peek-a-boo is a source of endless fascination; the parent’s face appears and disappears from the world as if by magic. This realisation usually marks the beginning of the next stage of brain development: the preoperational stage.

The Preoperational Stage (From Two Years to Seven Years Old)

During this period, children acquire the vast majority of their foundational language skills, as well as other talents and abilities such as perfect pitch. Neuroplasticity is significantly higher before the age of seven, so children who encounter and grapple with foreign languages prior to this age are much more likely to exhibit foreign language skills or display native bilingualism in later life. Due to neuroplasticity, savants and child prodigies must begin their monomaniacal mastery of a discipline before the age of seven—however, the ethics of such a parenting approach are beyond the scope of this article.

In psychology, the term ‘operations’ refers to the use of logic and the manipulation of ideas. This stage of development is called preoperational since children at this age are not yet able to perform either of these functions.

During this time period, young children are likely to engage themselves in regular play. One feature is parallel play, in which they will play in the same room as other children and adults, but are more likely to play within their own world rather than share their play with others. They might pretend to be characters they are not, such as firemen, soldiers, or shopkeepers. Inventing imaginary playmates is another step towards learning how to share play with other people. As they age, children gradually become able to incorporate others into their imaginary worlds. 

Through play, children are learning a multitude of skills simultaneously. Role-playing activities gradually develop the social skills that children require in later life. Solitary play trains the capacity to manipulate objects and ideas deliberately, and can be seen as a precursor to more advanced operations.

The goal of this stage of development may be seen as the development of symbolic thought: the understanding of other people (and objects) as having life, agency, and feelings.

The Concrete Operational Stage (From Seven Years to 11 Years Old)

By the age of seven, children have acquired the necessary foundation for logical thought (something which New York Times columnists manage to unlearn in later life). For the next four years, children are busily engaged in developing the capacity to think logically about their surroundings, primarily through the manipulation of physical objects.

In particular, children of this age develop the capacity for ‘conservation’: realising that some properties of an object remain the same, while its appearance may change. For example, children learn to recognise that two differently-shaped beakers contain the same amount of water if you pour one into the other (younger children remain convinced that the taller beaker contains more).

They are also able to reverse things mentally, imagining a book opening and closing, or a ball of plasticine being returned to its original shape. With time, their egocentricity further reduces (except in the case of contemporary architects) and they become able to consider the thoughts and feelings of others, rather than merely recognising that such things exist.

A common limitation of concrete operational thought (i.e. the thinking ability of children at this level) is that it is limited to reasoning about materials and objects that are physically present. Reasoning about hypothetical or abstract problems will tend to fail, with the child either making mistakes or becoming overwhelmed with the scale of the challenge.

The Formal Operational Stage (From 11 Years Onwards)

Older children are capable of thinking extensively about ideas, rather than things. These are called ‘formal operations’ and are ideally freed from physical constraints. Children capable of formal operations are able to understand mathematical division without reference to concrete objects and do not require an analogy of slicing up pies or sharing baubles.

Formal operations are something of a superpower, enabling humans to handle hypothetical problems and speculate broadly on the potential consequences. With intelligent children, this is where their thinking power can begin to challenge or surpass that of the parent (which is ultimately the goal of a successful education). 

The challenge of keeping an adolescent intellectually stimulated and minimally constrained by the lives of their parents is a timeless problem. Ultimately, by the formal operational stage of education, a child should have learned ‘how to learn’ independently of constant adult supervision, and should be able to enjoy exploring new and interesting ideas in books or popular media.

Piaget termed the goal of this stage of development ‘scientific thinking’. Yet it appears, in this humble author’s opinion, that many adults never actually achieve ‘scientific thinking’. Perhaps this fact underlines the failure of modern education as an institution. 

Using Piaget’s Theory in Practice

The information above may seem dense or overwhelming. However, it provides a foundation of basic knowledge about early childhood development that may be used to improve educational outcomes.

Piaget’s theory of early development is an intricate piece of research, and its conclusions are well attested by numerous psychological studies. To truly master this research and understand its implications would be the equivalent of completing a high-level module in a psychology degree. For those interested in reading more, the following website offers an excellent breakdown.

The broadest and most useful conclusion is this: children learn most effectively through play, and the type of play that’s suitable for a child evolves according to the child’s age in a well-understood manner. 

As a result, matching the style of play to the child’s age and ability can provide invaluable learning experiences that utilise children’s innate curiosity and do not seem like formal lessons.