Thinking about the unknown.
A long tradition of research suggests that children and adults with no formal education are prone to reason only on the basis of their first-hand experience, and do not encode and reason from novel generalizations supplied by other people. However, recent research reveals that when given simple prompts, even pre-school children can reason from adults' unfamiliar claims. A radical implication of these findings is that young children arrive at school with a pre-existing capacity for thinking and reasoning about the unknown. The assumption that early learning should be rooted in children's own empirical experience could be mistaken.
Harris
Paul L.
PL
Harvard University, 506 Larsen Hall, Graduate School of Education, Appian Way, 02138, Cambridge, MA, USA