Babies are dumb

Nicanor has learned that some foods are hot, which hurts his mouth when he eats them. He has learned that if I blow on a food, it is hot. When I offer him soup, he says “hot” because soup is a food that is hot. A few days ago, I gave him some water that had been refrigerated, and after he took a taste, he solemnly turned to me and declared, with an air of aggrieved scandal, that it was “hot.”

What a silly baby. But it rings with something I read in John Holt’s Learning All the Time, a book which contains the assertion that “children’s errors are not accidental but reflect their systems of knowledge.” There’s something of the Freudian “no such thing as accidents” in that assertion, that children’s errors stem from a hidden (to us) system, determined by a variety of perfectly reasonable and comprehensible deductions. He ate some hot soup, therefore hot is what soup is; I blew on the hot chicken, therefore blowing is a result of hotness; the water’s coldness hurt his mouth when he drank it, therefore it was hot. All of this makes a lot of sense, actually.

John Holt offers this very nice passage on those hidden systems:

When I taught fifth grade many of my students, filling out forms, would identify themselves as “grils.” I was always touched and amused by this mistake, but I thought it was just foolish or careless. Not for many, many years did I understand that the children calling themselves “grils” were thinking sensibly, were indeed doing exactly what their teachers had told them to do: sounding out the word and spelling it a sound at a time. They had been taught, and learned, that the letters gr made the sound “gurr.” So they wrote down gr. That left the sound “ul.” They knew that l had to come at the end, and they knew that there was an i in the word, so obviously it had to be gril. Countless adults had no doubt told them that gril was wrong, and I joined the crowd. But it was futile; they went on trying to spell girl phonetically, as they had been told to, and could only come up with gril. If I had had the sense to say, “You folks are on the right track, only in this case English uses the letters g-i-r to make the sound ‘gurr,”‘ they would have said, “Oh, I see, “and could have done it correctly.

It’s a book about how kids learn, and though he was one of the major voices behind unschooling, Holt’s endpoint is how we learn to read correctly, even if the correct way words are spelled is often odd and counterintuitive (the truer thing, perhaps, that those grils learned). More than that, there is something so barren and austere about the “correct” version. After all: Is soup hot? When reducible to an objective yes or no question, it’s a one or a zero, a fact so stupid you could teach a computer to know it. And yet soup is hot, in a deep cultural sense, the knowledge that food tastes better when its hot; to read the sentence “I threw soup on him” and not hear and feel the hotness, not know that the soup is surely hot, is not to know what that sentence means. To see someone blow on a food, and know that it’s probably hot? That is going to steer you better than the assumption that until you’ve tasted it, you can’t know if it will hurt your mouth. And of course who hasn’t touched something so cold that it burns your hand? As Freud learned, too, everyday life might be what we’re stuck with, but it’s silly dreams that are interesting.