Trusting What You're Told: How Children Learn from Others

262 Pages·2012·0.825 MB·English

by  Paul L. Harris

TrusTing WhaT You’re Told

TrusTing WhaT You’re Told
How Children Learn from Others
j
PauL L. Harris
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, Eng land
2012
Copyright © 2012 by President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Harris, Paul L.
Trusting what you’re told : how children learn from others / Paul L. Harris.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 06572- 7 (alk. paper)
1. Learning, Psychology of. 2. Children. I. Title.
BF318.H363 2012
155.4′1315—dc23 2011046701
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Early Learning from Testimony 8
2. Children’s Questions 22
3. Learning from a Demonstration 45
4. Moroccan Birds and Twisted Tubes 63
5. Trusting Those You Know? 78
6. Consensus and Dissent 98
7. Moral Judgment and Testimony 113
8. Knowing What Is Real 132
9. Death and the Afterlife 152
10. Magic and Miracles 173
11. Going Native 194
Notes 213
References 222
Acknowledgments 242
Index 245

TrusTing WhaT You’re Told

introduction

W
e adults could scarcely find our way in the world, either literally or
metaphorically, if no one told us anything. Imagine planning a journey
to a distant city you’ve never visited before. Even to conceive of that
plan—to know of the city’s existence and to want to see it—calls for a
wealth of geographic information that only other people can supply.
Deprived of the testimony of others about the land in which we live,
our spatial horizon shrinks to the places we have already seen and those
we can see just ahead of us. Much the same can be said of our temporal
horizon. If no one ever told us about the past, it seems unlikely that we
would ever think about the Great War, the Roman Empire, or the Stone
Age, let alone the eons that preceded life on earth. Our intuitions about
the span of his tory would be cramped by our own short biography.
In spite of this manifest de pen dence on information supplied by
other people, pro gres sive educators have conceived of young children
as hands- on learners who learn best in the here and now from their
own active observation and experimentation. The possibility that chil-
dren’s early learning might be intimately linked to what they can con-
jure up in their imagination on the basis of what other people tell them
has been downplayed. Maria Montessori offers a well-k nown example
of this emphasis on the priority of first-h and experience. In the Mon-
tessori classroom, the teacher aims to take a back seat, on the assump-
tion that young children’s engagement with concrete materials is the
optimal vehicle for learning. Indeed, for Montessori, the teacher’s quiet
withdrawal was the hallmark of good teaching.
Montessori’s focus on children’s autonomous learning is part of an