¶ Children as Only Pure Scientists (1)
← Children as Only Pure Scientists | Children as Only Pure Scientists (2) →
Index Entry
Children as Only Pure Scientists:
"The number one characteristic of life is awareness. The child has access only to a priori cognitions. The perception of children is innately naive: they explore and experiment spontaneously, with the urge first to sort out, and then to find order in, and finally to integratively comprehend the harvests of their daily experiences. Thus children emerge as the only rigorous, pure, physical scientists.
“Although they have the most superb imaginative faculties, when children explore they rely strategically only upon their own direct recalls of experimental evidence. With anticipatory imagination they may venture to ask: ‘Suppose I do so and so–what then?’–projecting a physical experiment that they know entails pure, unprecedented risk, which they may intuitively appraise as being ‘barely possible,’ as for instance a ditch over which they may conceivably jump today even though it is wider than any over which they have previously leapt, and only to be attempted now because they also have learned experientially that, as they grow older and bigger, they often find that they can jump further and higher than before. ‘How do I feel about it?’ and ‘Shall I or shall I not try’ become exquisitely aesthetic questions”
