Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

Last week, I wrote about Ellen Galinsky’s important new book , Mind in the Making, on the seven life skills that every child needs today. Recently, I caught up with Galinsky and asked a bit more about the book’s genesis and her views on learning. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

MJ – What vision of learning did you have for the book?

EG - We’re born engaged in learning, because it’s basically a survival skill. If we couldn’t figure out the world, we wouldn’t survive. For a long time, we’ve understood learning as the acquisition of content and facts. More recently, there’s been a push for learning skills that will help young people when they reach the workforce. In writing the book, I was particularly interested in the kinds of learning that can help children now and will also help them in the future. I thought a lot about moving from a 20^th-century to a 21^st-century view of learning. We get stuck in an either/or situation: either content, or skills. To me, the point is, it has to be both.

MJ – In what other ways are you trying to broaden our definitions of learning?

EG - When parents are asked what they want for their children, most say they want them to be caring, contributing people who have meaningful lives. They don’t want them just to become successful in academics (which of course is important, too). The skills I’m writing about are for a well- rounded person, not just a one-size-fits-all person. A person on Twitter wrote me that the reason she likes the book is that: “Your message is clear: The self-motivated, independent children who are resourceful and know how to cooperate are our future.”

MJ – It seems to me that the seven skills you’ve highlighted are also fairly low-tech, and I love that about the book. They’re based on simple, everyday activities that any parent can inspire and guide.

EG – I remember meeting a low-income parent who said that she wants the same things for her child as a rich parent can give their children. In writing the book, it was important to me that whatever I was suggesting be something that any parent could use for children of any age. Often it is the simple things done differently – “simon says” played the opposite way – that promote learning. I will be appalled if people take this and make stuff that parents have to buy. Of course, it’s the job of marketing and product developers to find things to sell us. But we’ve been promised quick fixes with Baby Einstein or Brainy Bay: “do this, and then you will have a child who’s a genius.” We’ve been through that, and hopefully we’ve learned from that. Learning should be fun. If it’s just drill and practice for your 2 year old, that’s not good. I used to watch in horror as a friend drilled her baby: “This is a lesson about balls.” As I watched, I was thinking, “Just let him explore the ball. Ask him questions that promote his interest.” What I found consistently is that children are born with all the right equipment to gain knowledge. They have what I call in the book an object sense, a numbers sense, a people sense. The brain is wired to understand knowledge in specific ways.

MJ – How have our views on childhood changed in regards to learning? We used to have a Lockean view of children, that they are a “tabula rasa” or blank slate, needing to be filled with facts. Or we had a perspective inspired by the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that children are naturally gifted with curiosity and other traits that become devalued by schooling. Where are we now in our views of children?

EG – We have had a burst in knowledge about child development, particularly with neuroscience and with the ability to study children’s learning from many different disciplines. This knowledge has taken us beyond the “tabula rasa” or “put them in the sun, and water them and they’ll grow” viewpoints. There are no genetic expressions without experience, nor vice versa. For example, we used to think there are nine different types of temperament, and children are born with one of them. Now the latest thinking on temperament is that children vary in terms of how they react to new experiences, and how they regulate their responses. It’s much more of a process than a personality type. We also now know that children’s brains are wired in ways that enable them to grasp complicated knowledge. For example, work by Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin shows that babies have the ability to grasp which sounds in their language or languages go together. It is a process of detecting patterns in what she calls a “sea of sound.” But we have to build on this knowledge to promote the learning of life skills and content.

MJ- The idea that learning opportunities are all around us, every minute of the day is both inspiring and perhaps daunting to parents today who are so anxious about raising children the “right way.” What would you say about today’s anxious parents?

EG – There are so many people who criticize parents about their desire to do the right thing. As parents we’ve always started out wanting to be perfect and that probably is a good thing. We then realize we have to be good enough. I have studied parental growth and development and think that that needs to be understood by all those who write about parents – and by parents ourselves. When we reach the ‘good enough’ stage, we tend to relax and enjoy the process more.

MJ - What surprised you as you researched and wrote the book?

EG – Although I have an extensive background in child development and its research, creating this book felt like such a learning adventure. That to me was the biggest challenge of the book: to capture in words the mystery, the excitement, the wrong turns researchers made, to tell the story of researchers as people. That’s why I told the story of Dan Stern, who became a baby researcher because, as a toddler himself who could speak only Czech, he spent months in an English-speaking hospital, where he learned to watch behavior, since he didn’t understand language.

When I was getting ready to start to write a chapter, I would immerse myself in reading the interviews I had done with researchers. I would immerse myself in the research, then I’d go find out things I didn’t know. Then I would put it all aside and write the story I was discovering as an outline. As I was writing the outline, I was seeing so many new connections. Those connections always surprised and delighted me.

Ellen Galinsky’s new book isn’t for the faint-of-heart. Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs is inspiring, even joyful, and an essential handbook for any parent. But it’s provocative. In essentially teaching adults how to instill a love of learning in children, Galinsky also may change how we see learning - for the better.

Consider the seven skills that Galinsky chooses: focus, perspective-taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges and self-directed learning. These essential and complex skills are a far cry from the reading, writing and arithmetic goals and drills that still dominate teach-to-the-test schools. They’re also a gentle, crucial reminder of the importance of “upgrading the human” in a world mesmerized by computational, tech-driven and store-bought lessons. Finally, as Galinsky notes, these seven skills are capabilities for lifelong learning.

“These skills are not only important for children; we as adults need them just as much as children do,” she writes. “And, in fact, we have to practice them ourselves to promote them in our children.”

That true of perspective taking. We teach children etiquette and problem-solving, even discussion and debate. But rarely do we help kids learn how to understand the perspectives of others, despite the importance of this skill to social relations, school learning, and even a child’s sense of security. After all, understanding how other people operate helps you get along with peers, parents, teachers and later with bosses. It’s the starting point of lifelong “emotional intelligence.”

By highlighting the work of top researchers, Galinsky shows how parents can teach perspective-taking, and how infants and toddlers are astonishingly ready to learn. Even 6-month-olds have a rough sense of others’ goals and intentions, and 18-month-olds understand that people can have different tastes than they do. Cultivating this nascent skill can be simple: the kids of parents who talk about people’s feelings more, have better perspective-taking skills.

Galinsky isn’t the first to begin thinking about new literacies for the digital age. I recently discovered the important work of Guy Claxton, a UK professor who argues that we have to prepare students for lifelong learning by teaching them dispositions – such as curiosity, courage or reflection.

Or consider the words of the new Rhode Island School of Design president, digital designer John Maeda: “I sense a real shift going on in the world from the global and technological back to the local, the human and the authentic. … Policymakers and employers should take note: the power of the visual, the tactile, the nonlinear – of the artful, open-minded thinking – is something that we can no longer afford to discount.”

These important thinkers all understand that “how” we learn is as crucial as “what” we learn. And the impact of this change in mindset is enormous, as Galinsky’s compilation of research shows repeatedly. Focus can predict literacy, vocabulary and math skills in preschoolers. Rich, idea-laden talk between parents and children is correlated with higher IQ at age three. Motivated learners see setbacks as chances to try harder or use different strategies. They don’t “wilt” in the face of challenges.

Again and again, I was surprised and delighted by these and other research findings in Mind in the Making. They underscore the growing realization today that babies and children are highly capable creatures, ready and eager to learn. As Galinsky teaches us, we all need to be their partners in learning.

Next Post: A Q and A with Ellen Galinsky

“Information becomes a distraction, a diversion… ” With those few words, President Obama recently created a stir about technology’s effect on our lives.

During his commencement speech at Hampton University, Obama said: You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments – some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and IPads and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. … We can’t stop these changes, but we can channel them, we can shape them, we can adapt to them.”

Bloggers lambasted the president as a “technophobic old fogy” and implied hypocrite for critiquing the very gadgets that were used to propel him to office. But many technorati were so shocked by his seeming criticism of the gadgetry that they missed the president’s important points about our 24/7 media environment. (And perhaps some of the grads missed these points, too, given that at least a few right behind him on the podium were texting during his remarks. Check it out on YouTube.)

First, was he really criticizing iPads? No, he wasn’t singling out gadgets or calling them “bad” or “good.” He was citing the tools that bit by byte in total create an escapable 24/7 info flow that often distracts us from what’s important in life. Luddite? No, Obama was taking an important, needed stand on a trend that, as he said, puts “new pressure on our country and on our democracy.” Simply put, deluges of accessible info don’t automatically produce good thinking. Tech-fluency doesn’t always equate with the ability to create knowledge. We are mistaken if we think that simply having the tools and the access to information will put our country and our young ahead in coming years.

Why? First, being barraged by info makes people “check out” – they are literally paralyzed by choice. That’s been proven again and again in psych studies. This is one reason why whatever pops up first on Google is “good enough” for many of us. One small but in-depth study by the Associated Press found that consumers 18-34 were “snacking on the news,” unable to go beyond barrage of daily sound bites and headlines – despite a hunger for a deeper understanding of current events.

Second, ease of access is not an end point. To read or research or think critically involves discomfort – confusion, uncertainty, effort. And those are precisely the kinds of states of mind that are devalued in today’s point and click world. When we’re literally enveloped in information, it’s easy to become sated with what comes easily. And it’s easy to gravitate to the fluff – the celebrity or self-help trivia that diverts us from learning how to green the earth or battle racism. Obama was correct: info-tainment is the new soma.

Finally, the info-stream can’t help us, if we can barely pay attention. It’s important to remember that the personal context of our information-gathering is splintered, fractured and hence, corrosive to learning. We rarely pay attention to one thing, so it’s no wonder we can’t separate the wheat from the chaff in the info-floods. The students texting behind Obama’s back are a sad emblem of our inability to focus on the thorniest problems of our day - and on each other.

I’m not trying to pick on students in general; most that day were obviously riveted and engaged. Besides, haven’t we always tuned out when we’re tired or bored? Absolutely. Haven’t students always passed notes or whispered during lectures? Of course. We didn’t invent inattention in 2010.

But watch the texters listen to Obama – laughing as he made a serious point, eyes glazed over as he spoke of the pressures facing educators and students in the 21^st century. Perhaps you’ll wonder, as I did, if a student – whatever his or her political affiliation - can’t sit on a podium with the U.S. president and fully attend to 20-minute remarks, then what can capture that student’s uninterrupted attention? They may even have been texting or tweeting about the speech. But that still adds up to split-focus – a diminishing of the attention needed to fully digest his words.

If the real-time, in-the-flesh president is a distraction, then perhaps our addiction to technology is threatening – not just pressuring - our democracy.