The Child's Mind

John White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134538195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How does a child's mind work? And what should parents know about it to help them in their daily interaction with children?This book is a fascinating, non-technical introduction to the mental life of the child. Written in a simple, accessible way for those without an academic background in philosophy, the book explores and explains key elements of the child's mind without overwhelming the reader with complicated theories. Some of the areas discussed are:

• how children learn concepts
• the acquisition of beliefs, skills, knowledge and understanding
• the place of memory
• can we teach thinking skills?
• what is intelligence?
• imagination and creativity
• the development of emotion
• connections between home life, education and the school curriculum.

Chapter 1
What is the child’s mind?

Two perspectives

What is the child’s mind?

There are two ways of looking at this. An ancient belief is that human beings are essentially immortal souls. In this earthly life we are embodied. Our bodies are unlike those of other animals. Our soul animates them. In this life it enables us to keep our animal nature under the proper control of reason. When we die, our body decays but mental functions somehow live on. Not all of them, no doubt. Some may be too bound up with the body and perish when it dies: toothache, the sense of smell, butterflies in the stomach that come with fear. But beyond the grosser phenomena are subtler, more refined, less obviously bodily-dependent features of our mentality—perhaps our capacity for abstract thought, for contemplation, for holding to our beliefs, for remembering things. When we die, it may be only the higher part of our mind that lives on. On some views it is this superior, reflective part of us that we call the soul. It is what we really are.

Many today reject all this. They would say there is no scientific basis for it. There is no evidence that we survive death. Perhaps the very notion that we can is meaningless. We need to start with what we know and not with a theological fairy story. What we know is that human beings are a species of animal. Like other species, we have evolved from other forms of life. Our minds are not entities distinct from our bodies and outliving them. Our mental life is continuous with that of other animals. Some of these are capable of intelligent action, feelings of fear and pain, abilities to see, hear and smell. Peculiarly human attributes such as the capacity for abstract and creative thought can only be understood in the light of this broader biological background.

Eighty years ago the educationalist Fred Clarke (1923, p. 2) wrote ‘the ultimate reason for teaching Long Division to little Johnny is that he is an immortal soul’. You find few such pronouncements in today’s more secular society. Yet the ancient view lives on in more subtle, sometimes unnoticed, ways.

Among other things, it affects ideas about education. As mentioned, it holds that if the soul—or mind—can outlive the body, these must be separable phenomena. The essential attributes of this enduring mind have least to do with the physical. Physical pains, sense-perception, desires for food, drink, sex make no sense in the absence of bodies. But thinking, at least some thinking, is different. The more detached from their bodily concerns children’s thinking is, the closer it is to their essential nature.

We see the shadow of this traditional outlook—which goes back ultimately to Plato, via Descartes—in the prestige we attach to abstract thinking. It appears in the pride of place given to mathematics in the school curriculum. And in the belief that intelligence is best displayed through performance at the abstract tasks used to measure IQ. True, the school curriculum typically contains other disciplines than mathematics and mathematically-related subjects like science. It also includes one’s native language, foreign languages, history, geography, art, music, physical education. Even so, there is something of a pecking order among these in many educational systems. The more intellectual subjects—those more concerned with the acquisition of knowledge— are the most important, then the arts and physical education. It is as though the most abstract studies such as mathematics are put at the top of the pile while those below them get graded according to how close they are to this abstract ideal.

Some work I recently did on the school curriculum for a national British agency illustrates this well. I was looking at the match between the new aims for the school curriculum and specific requirements for all twelve National Curriculum subjects. I presented my report in alphabetical order of subjects. Art and Design came first, followed by Citizenship and then Design and Technology. This seemed the obvious way of doing things. I thought nothing of it

But this struck the agency officials with whom I was dealing as most surprising. They had taken it as read I would follow the standard order the government followed in all its documentation:

English, Mathematics, Science, Design and Technology, Information and Communication Technology, History,Geography, Modern Foreign Languages, Art and Design, Music, Physical Education, Citizenship.

Buried in this is an official hierarchy of importance among curriculum activities, a hierarchy that broadly—admittedly not entirely—reflects the traditional priority given to the abstract and theoretical.

When we say colloquially of a child that ‘she has a good mind’, do we refer to her prowess in the gym or ability to draw or to play the clarinet? Hardly. We mean her intellectual abilities in knowledge-oriented disciplines like mathematics, science, history, languages. It is her powers of theoretical thinking that are at issue. The arts come lower in our estimation because they are associated not so much with the rational pursuit of truth as with the pleasures of the senses, with emotion and imagination.

The curriculum also contains physical education. The very name reflects a sharp division between mind and body. PE generally comes below intellectual activities in the school’s pecking order, a healthy body being seen as a prerequisite for a healthy mind. Mens sana in corpore sano. More muscular variants in the English public school tradition have given bodily activities, in the form of team games, more status. But even so the basic idea here has been to tame the body, keep it exercised, healthily tire it out and control its sexual tumescences so that the mind can operate more freely.

I have emphasised the tendency of our culture—originally often for religious reasons—to divide mind from body and to rate the former higher than the latter. There is also a sociological side to this. The pecking order has traditionally run, too, through types of school. Abstract and other intellectual activities have been most closely associated with élite education in grammar and private schools and in the universities. Mass schooling has in the past traditionally had the more utilitarian aim of fitting people for a life of predominantly physical labour.

‘He’s not an academic’—the words of a successful, self-made owner of a conservatory firm. He was telling me about his son, who had just joined him in the business and would take over one day. ‘Why should he be?’ I felt like replying.

Problems with the traditional conception

Can children’s minds and bodies be separated in the way the traditional conception requires?

For secular thinkers, the Platonic-Cartesian association between minds and souls which persist after the death of the body is obviously troublesome. For those who accept some version of evolution theory, so is the absolute divide between human beings and other animals. Is it really true that dogs and cats and chimpanzees have no mental life?

There are problems, too, in the assumption that minds are some kind of enduring entity or substance. We are familiar enough with physical entities, with chairs and tables, stones and stars. We think of them as occupying a certain volume of space, as having dimensions of length and breadth, a certain weight, and so on. But what kind of entity would a mind be like? It does not seem to be a spatial thing. Could it be an entity which exists in time but not in space?

Just because the word ‘mind’ is a noun, we should not jump to the conclusion that it picks out substantial things in the way that other nouns—‘planet’, ‘shirt’, ‘sea cucumber’—pick them out. We also use nouns like ‘stupidity’, ‘indignation’, or ‘pride’ but do not imagine that somewhere in the world there are entities to which these words refer. We understand them as abstract terms formed from the corresponding adjectives, ‘stupid’, ‘indignant’, ‘proud’. Might we get further in thinking about minds if we started with the adjective ‘mental’?

If we did, rather than asking ‘what is the mind?’ we could now ask ‘what are mental phenomena?’ While we had problems in giving an account of what kind of entity a mind could be, we would face no such difficulties—at least initially—in listing mental attributes.

Different people’s lists will differ, but the following items will appear in many of them: thinking, remembering, feeling, wanting, deciding, being afraid, reasoning, seeing things and hearing things, imagining, intelligence, motivation. We could then ask ‘what do items like these have in common in virtue of which we call them “mental”?’

One thing is for sure. The list shows immediately that associating the child’s mind with rational thought or with the intellect is on the wrong track. We will not find the common factor there.

Take seeing things. Sophie looks round the room and sees a radiator, a door, a bookcase, a lamp. Did she have to think anything out in doing this? If the room had been very dark, she might have had to work out whether that dim shape was a lamp, whether that other one was indeed a vase. Thinking would certainly have come in at that point. But as things are, in good light, she simply looks round the room and sees things. There is nothing to decipher or reason through here. The whole process is immediate and unproblematic.

Take wanting. Jacob is thirsty and wants a drink. Or he is at school, it is 3.30 and he wants to go home. Desires like these are rarely based on reasoning things through. Sometimes they may be. I am hungry and want to eat. Shall I finish off the packet of salami in the fridge? Shall I go out for fish and chips? Shall I ring up for a Four Seasons? In the end, having reviewed a few pros and cons, I settle on the pizza. That is what I come to want. But while a desire like this is the product of reasoning, not all our wants are like this. Sometimes desires just happen to us, even sweep over us. We are insulted and we want to strike back; sexually roused and want satisfaction of a different sort; tired and want to sleep. In none of these cases need thinking come into the picture.

Take pain—a toothache, say. When my tooth plays up I can have all sorts of thoughts about it: ‘What should I do?’ ‘Shall I try the emergency dentist?’ ‘What about crushing aspirin against it?’ But the thinking that I do is not itself the toothache. The toothache comes— and I think about it. Sometimes, indeed, a toothache may come and I do not think about it at all, I just feel it in all its intensity.

These counterexamples—sense-perception, wanting, pain—help to undermine the association of the mental with rational thought. Minds are more inclusive.

If so, what stamps a mental phenomenon as mental? In virtue of what do we call seeing and hearing, problem-solving, wanting to play the Lottery, feeling a headache, all aspects of mind?

Before we turn to that, a comment on the educational upshot of all this. If we accept that mental phenomena are not restricted to intellectual matters, which path shall we take?

One way is to preserve the traditional link between education and the intellect and say that only certain types of mental phenomena— those to do with truth-seeking, reasoning and reflecting—are of interest to educators.

Another is to abandon this traditional link and say that education has to do with the development of other aspects of the child’s mind than the intellectual. In this book, as should become clearer as the rest of the argument unrolls, I shall be taking the second of these paths.

This, incidentally, is a point at which this book diverges from another work with a similar title, which has now deservedly become a classic text: Margaret Donaldson’s (1978) Children’s Minds. This is a psychological, rather than a philosophical, piece of work. Its main focus is a critique of a Piagetian approach to children’s thinking. It does not set out to provide, as this book does, a comprehensive look at the child’s mind and its interrelated features. Donaldson takes ‘mind’ in the narrower, intellectual, sense and her book largely about children’s reasoning abilities and their acquisition of basic skills. Unlike this book, it does not discuss the educational significance of the imagination, the emotions, or motivation.

Conscious and unconscious mind

If rational thinking is not the hallmark of children’s minds, what is? We seem to need a broader category of the mental that includes not only thinking but also things like seeing, wanting, feeling pain.

What about ‘consciousness’? When I look round the room and see that purple-leaved plant whose name I can never remember, my consciousness is directed onto it. Seeing something is a way of being conscious or aware of it. Similarly, when I have a pain in my knee, I have a conscious experience of an unpleasant kind. My consciousness can thus take different forms. As I type these words, I see them coming up on my computer screen. In the background I hear traffic noise from the main road. At the same time, and more focally, I am thinking out the argument I am constructing. More peripherally again, I feel a slight ache in my right leg; and experience a correspondingly slight anxiety about whether anything is amiss with it. All the italicised words are different forms my consciousness may take.

Among the educationally interesting features of consciousness is the distinction, just indicated, between focal and peripheral awareness. There is no sharp division, only a difference in degree. Teaching, understood as an activity intended to bring about learning, usually requires the learner to concentrate on, or pay attention to some subject-matter, to make it the object of his or her focal awareness. One of the difficulties of teaching is that what the teacher wants to be focal is sometimes only of peripheral co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What Is the Child’s Mind?
• Chapter 2: Concepts and Concept Learning
• Chapter 3: Beliefs: Maps By Which We Steer
• Chapter 4: Do Minds Develop?
• Chapter 5: Who Needs Intelligence?
• Chapter 6: What Is Thinking?
• Chapter 7: Imagination and Creativity
• Chapter 8: Motivating Children
• Chapter 9: Educating the Emotions
• Chapter 10: The Whole Child
• Appendix: More About Minds
• Works Referred to In the Text