How Children Learn

This week I actually found the reading more fascinating than I did something to react to. I found it very interesting how experts haven't up until just recently began concluding that the infant's mind is so powerful. Humorously it makes me think of "Stewie" the infant character from the TV animated comedy, "Family Guy" on FOX. Stewie is a brilliant infant, capable of understanding the world on a much larger scale than most of the humans in his world. The more I read the article and read about the numerous studies - beyond the Piaget and Vygotsky studies I learned about previously - that have shown that infants really are capable of phenomenal things, it made me wonder. If we were born with a clear understanding of the world and language, what incredible things would we be able to accomplish.

Up until I began reading the article, I had no idea that infants had so much capacity. Particularly the non-nutritive sucking study, I was flabbergasted. I would have loved to be observing an infant recognize that the movie they are watching is out of focus simply by sucking. That is simply phenomenal to me. With regards to my Stewie comparison, a study like that makes it that much more believable that what an infant is actually thinking is as complex as what Stewie is able to verbalize. If I can put this in simpler terms, a child prodigy is said to have abilities far above the average of the same age. In terms of this article and the studies detailed within, is it possible to conclude that many children identified as prodigies may have grown up in an environment that is far above average and were exposed to stimuli and the opportunity to develop very complex schemata on a much larger scale than average children?

My final point, based on the fantastic research detailed in this chapter, children certainly have a much great capacity to learn than experts have ever realized before. A friend of mine at church bought the entire "Baby Einstein" video series and has mentioned to me on many occasions some of the amazing things his child has done. His daughter began speaking full words before her second birthday. To continue reading, I would like to see some research data about the "Baby Einstein" series as well as other tools of the like and be able to see how effective these tools are for cognitive development.