Sublime

Our own view is that children’s whole conception of people, objects, and words changes radically in the first three years of life. And it changes because of what children find out about the world. We already said that babies start out with complex, abstract, coherent representations of the world and rules for manipulating them. They use those repre

“I just can’t see where these people get their insights from, because all the evidence shows it’s the other way round: our brains are more supple, more plastic, more creative” when we have had the chance to “learn through play. The primary technology for learning is play. You learn to learn in play. And in a world where information is always changi

knowledge as you acquire it.

the importance of engaging in purposeful practice instead of mindless repetition without any clear plan for getting better.

“the child’s best interest is not always what will make him or her happy, but rational understanding,”

Alison Gopnik notes that the word “parenting” was essentially never used until the 1950s, and only became popular in the 1970s. For nearly all of human history, people grew up in environments where they observed many people caring for many children. There was plenty of local wisdom and no need for parenting experts.

The advantage of learning is that it allows you to find out about your particular environment. The disadvantage is that until you do find out, you don’t know what to do; you’re helpless. We may have two evolutionary gifts: great abilities to learn about the world around us and a long protected period in which to deploy those abilities.

László’s has plenty of holes that keep it from becoming a model of scientific purity. There was no control group, for starters. All three of the Polgár sisters received the same education. There was no fourth sister who went to school the normal way and missed László’s special training. There was no randomization. László didn’t adopt a random child

mental representations