Children’s Minds

What Schools Don’t Understand About Children’s Minds:

I have a graduate degree, I am well out of school, and I feel like I just grew up over the last few years. I’m not a PHD mind researcher or psychologist but talk about when our minds fully mature rings true for me. When I look back at things I’ve done in the past, I have tons of experiences that I can point to and exclaim, “What was I thinking?”

It is interesting to me whenever I read about the history of children and the development of the concept that they are not little adults but are in an entirely separate developmental state. Depending on the culture and region of the world toys were more or less prevalent. Also, depending on the region of the world, rights of passage where you become an adult vary in terms of the age when they are performed.

As a former Anthropology major in school, it always excited me to look at an accepted cultural norm and then say to myself, what if that is not true and we have it wrong. Well I don’t know if I have enough answers to say that we have anything wrong but I’m pretty sure that I can say there is so much we don’t know and are learning always that how could we possibly say we have anything 100% right.

The implications of this inquiry are profound and if I were a PHD and not a common administrative business professional, I’d love to research them. How we incentive, how we teach, how we punish, when we allow children to be prosecuted as adults, when we allow our citizens to join the army, to vote, how we treat each other, sexual consent laws, alcohol consumption, etc. etc. etc. What if we have it wrong or at least partially wrong . . . ?

I’d love it if we experimented with a few different life stages and ways of guiding our youth to act appropriate to their stage in life and understand the challenges that are confronting them. I’ll leave it up to the geniuses of our society to determine what that would be but what about infant, child, adolesant, teenager, big kid, bigger kid, almost adult, adult in training, etc. I don’t know what I’m saying . . . its Sunday, its kind of nice outside and I wanted to think about possibility and new ways of looking at the world. New ways of looking at each other . . .

These are a few cool blogs that I found on the subject:

http://mindhacks.com/

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/

http://www.spring.org.uk/