Top 33 Alison Gopnik Quotes

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don’t have public support for things like preschools.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: ‘How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?’ The exploration is: ‘Who am I, what am I doing?’

Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you’re 3 or 4 years old.

The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There’s a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.

In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific – this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

One of the things I say is, ‘You want to know what it’s like to be a baby? It’s like being in love for the first time in Paris after four double espressos.’ And boy, you are alive and conscious.

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.

Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world – so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it – is a fully shared and objective one.

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.

We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness – better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they’re reading books to babies in the womb.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

We say that children are bad at paying attention, but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting.

The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that’s actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and it’s not something that our society does very well at all.

I’m the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I’ve always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources, you find that the women are just as likely to be successful.

For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future.

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It’s actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

What makes knowledge automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall – practice, practice, practice.

One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays.

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn’t look like there’s very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It’s easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.

We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn’t be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.

If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.

The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn’t have the same exponential, transformative effect.