Maggie Jackson

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.

A plethora of great soon-to-be-published books have just crossed my desk, and I’m determined to read and blog about them soon – from Ellen Galinsky’s Mind in the Making to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Hats off to them for their great work, now and in the past. More later.

But tonight I’m quickly giving a little airtime to a little known academic study from about 40 years ago: Roger Hart’s Children’s Experience of Place.

Hart spent two years in a small New England town, following around children as they built forts in their backyards, fished at the local river, explored, bicycled, roamed and wandered. It seems amazing that his depictions of life not that long ago seem worlds away from the indoors-centric, cyber-dominant, car-oriented lives of our kids today.

Hart has some wonderful observations.

- “Small patches of dirt throughout the town are the most intensively used of all children’s places.”

- “It is notable that the most important qualities to the children of this town – sand/dirt, small shallow ponds or brooks of water, slight elevations of topography, low trees and bushes, and tall unmanicured grass – are systematically removed from all new residential areas, even the highly applauded new towns”

- Children like to find small places, as “places of retreat, to look out upon the world from a place of one’s own, as places for experimenting with how to put things together… In each of these activities a child is probably exploring his or her relationship with the environment, both social and physical.”

“The large amount of time spent by children deeply involved in modelling the environment in micro-scale” — i.e. building forts or houses out of tree branches and found items or tracing towns and cities in the dirt or sand  – “is one demonstration of their desire to give order and meaning to the larger environment which lies beyond their physical grasp.”

Today, I’ve heard it argued that the Net is kids’ backyard. This is a space for a thin kind of social connectivity, and for exploring worlds largely of adults’ imaginations. But the virtual isn’t a space for coming to grips with one’s own place in the physical world, or for exploring the planet earth.

Consider that natural spaces – even a walk in the park – diminish symptoms of ADHD and improve focus in children even without attention deficiencies. Consider that kids in an age of alarming obesity are spending just 30 minutes of unstructured time outdoors – a week! Consider that kids today are living under a kind of house arrest, unable to walk to school, play outdoors, explore their own communities.

That’s quite a contrast to the world that Roger Hart found in a small New England town.

Hats off to people like Lenore Skenazy and Richard Louv who are fighting to get kids back outside.

It’s dark, cold and the headlines are gloomy. Perhaps that’s why I can’t seem to pick up a paper or magazine without seeing an article about happiness.

Pointing out that employee satisfaction is hitting record lows, the Wall Street Journal visits with corporate consultants who advise gratitude and meditation to dig ourselves out of the doldrums. New York magazine lists 50 steps to “simple happiness” – whatever that is. (No. 10 – offer to help a person with a stroller up a set of stairs – a very New York moment of unhappiness for parents.)

As you can tell from these examples, the emphasis of most happiness “treatments” today seems to be the quick-fix. Get a massage, change your thinking, write thank you emails. It’s happiness in a hurry. Or is it? As I wrote in a guest blog for Gretchen Rubin’s Slate column, “simple things make me content.” And simple things – a nice cup of tea or a chat with a friend – do make humans happy. After all, small moments and actions are the threads that make up the fabric of our lives.

That’s one clear take-away from Rubin’s new book, The Happiness Project, which came out last month. Rubin spent a year trying out all sorts of resolutions to improve her vitality, marriage, parenting, friendships and more. And as she studied happiness, she found that often the small steps had a big effect. A small treat, not a river of splurges, is the trick.

Even the study of happiness isn’t writ large, so to speak, Rubin notes to her surprise. “I often learn more from one person’s highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies,” she writes. In sum, the specifics work. Don’t lose the trees for the forest, you could say. That’s a satisfying morsel of news.

I often talk to groups about the costs of distraction. I speak about problem-solving, information overload, engagement, fragmented “presence,” and our deep-seated need for rich, complex social interaction. And intriguingly, what people wind up discussing most is the social cost of distraction. High-level bankers, corporate executives, educators and parents alike viscerally lament an era when we’re more often connected to a machine than to a human.

That’s why a recent New York Times article about attention and medical errors in hospitals caught my eye.

Just last week I blogged about medical errors due to distraction, and how California hospital nurses are taking steps to reduce interruptions during the dispensing of medicine. The Times article by a San Diego physician provides a perfect follow-on, in discussing how growing procedural efforts to reduce errors in work sometimes lead the profession to overlook their duty to attend to the patient.

Dr. Dena Rifkin begins the article with a compelling story of saving a young woman’s life simply by listening closely and spotting symptoms that her doctors had missed. She also tells of being present when a close family member was treated in a cursory and hurried fashion that missed important clues to his real condition.

Rifkin links these alarming stories to a “fundamental problem” of healthcare today: “a change in focus from treating the patient toward satisfying the system.” Doctors attend to “benchmarks and check boxes,” more than to the sick human. A patient’s treatment can meet “all the current standards for quality care” yet offer “an utter lack of human attention.”

“As a profession, we are paying attention to the details of medical errors – ambiguous charts abbreviations, to vaccination practices and hand-washing and many other important, or at least quantifiable, matters,” writes Rifkin.

“But as we bustle from one-documented chart to the next, no one is counting whether we are still paying attention to the human beings,” she writes. “The best source of information, the best protection from medical error, the best opportunity to make a difference” are the patients, she writes. “We must remember the unquantifiable value of asking the right questions.”

Well said. Whether we are pilots or nurses, doctors or parents, bankers or students, we need to step back and re-examine our relationship to the machine. A life that is foremost computational, quantifiable and clock-driven is dehumanizing. In sickness and in health, we should be restoring our machines to their rightful places as tools, not looking to them as panaceas.

The word panacea derives from the Greek for “all-healing.” But that’s what machines are not.

Interesting tidbit of news with possibly large implications.

BBC Radio contacted me last night asking for my comment on the news that Denmark is allowing top students to take university entrance exams with Internet access. Apparently, the government argues that facts and figures are culled from the Net anyway, not memorized, and the real point of exams is to test reasoning.

Certainly, this experiment isn’t surprising in an age when memory is a little-valued tool. As Plato predicted long ago, writing will spell the death of memorization. Oral cultures live and die by the strength of memory, but the written - then printed, and finally digital – Word made memory superfluous. We can look something up in the portable, accessible info-stores at hand.

Should we miss memory? It wasn’t all that long ago that schooling was still built on a bedrock of memorization, and that texts were known so deeply that they arguably became a part of the reader. We’ve moved away from an oral culture more recently than we might imagine.

I don’t think we should overly worship memory  - the committing to heart of epic poetry by schoolchildren etc. I’m not nostalgic for the day when schoolwork meant memorization, to the detriment of critical thinking. Still, to increasingly depend on a machine to do your thinking, computing and remembering risks, in my view, diminishing, not extending, our capabilities.

A second drawback to Net access during exams is that it’s likely to undercut any test of reasoning through sheer distractability. Even a brief visit to the boundaryless Net too often becomes an extended series of digressions, a journey conducive to “power-bouncing” across a sea of data. The temporal lipping back and forth between Net and exam further could interrupt the analytical thinking that we hope takes place during an exam.

  The argument that kids already multitask their way through their studies holds little merit for me. We need more deep focus and analysis not less, if we are to raise thinking beings in a complex age.