Kudos to Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir for bringing overdue attention to children’s role in cultural adaptation. My intent here is to link their thesis to four human drives or dispositions that are generally stronger in children than adults. These are: (1) curiosity, the drive to understand the world around one; (2) playfulness, the drive to behave creatively with the artifacts, routines, and ideas in one’s physical and social world; (3) sociability, the drive to associate with and thereby learn from others, especially peers; and (4) future-orientation, the special interest afforded to material and social changes likely to impact future ways of living. From an evolutionary perspective, these characteristics are strongest in children because they are how children make sense of and adapt to the world into which they are born and the evolving world with which they must deal as they grow into adulthood (Gray, Reference Gray, Lees and Noddings2016). These characteristics of children are implicit in the target article. I just want to make them explicit and elaborate with examples.
Lew-Levy and Amir aptly discuss children’s role in the digital technology revolution. Research as well as common observation reveals that when computers and the Internet first came into homes in the 1990s, teenagers were generally the first to learn how to use them (Lenhart & Madden, Reference Lenhart and Madden2005). In most homes with teenagers, the teens quickly became the family computer gurus who helped their parents solve computer problems (Kiesler et al., Reference Kiesler, Zdaniuk, Lundmark and Kraut2000). Teens also – motivated by playfulness, sociability, and curiosity – expanded the possibilities of this new technology for games, connecting with friends, and finding information. Their future orientation no doubt played a role as they likely knew, at some level, that computers would be an ever-more-essential tool of their future. The older generation might wish to hang on to the past, but not the younger generation. Throughout history, whenever a revolutionary new technology appears, kids glom on to it while many of the older generation are suspicious of it (Springhall, Reference Springhall1998).
An excellent example of how these four innate characteristics combine in children’s innovative learning lies in Sugata Mitra’s classic “hole in the wall experiment.” In 1999, Mitra, who was the science director of an educational technology firm in India, installed a computer in a hole in the outside wall of the building where he worked, a wall facing one of the poorest slums in New Delhi, where most children were at that time unschooled, illiterate, and had never previously seen a computer. He simply turned the computer on, left it there, and told the children who gathered that they could play with it. His famous observation was that groups of children, mostly age 7 to 13, crowded around the computer, quickly learned to use its basic functions, and within days were using it for such purposes as playing games, playing music, painting with a paint program, and finding information (Mitra, Reference Mitra2003).
Here is how I have explained Mitra’s observation with reference to the four innate characteristics (Gray, Reference Gray2013). Curiosity drew the children to the computer and motivated them to explore its functions. Playfulness motivated them to play with those functions, once discovered, and thereby learn to use them skillfully and creatively. Sociability allowed each child’s learning about the computer’s functions to spread like wildfire to dozens of other children who crowded around and played collectively. And I suspect, future orientation, coupled with at least a vague notion that this thing would be a tool of the future, helped motivate their continued interest.
Lew-Levy and Amir also describe the invention of Nicaraguan Sign Language by deaf children who had been brought together in a school for the deaf, where they were taught lip-reading in Spanish, not a sign language. The sign language emerged over time, involving successive overlapping cohorts of students, through their natural interactions with one another outside of the classroom. Although the social contexts for this development are not described by those who documented the emerging language, it seems likely that much of it would have occurred on the playground. Children are highly motivated to play with one another, and social play requires almost continuous communication to coordinate the activities. Even if they could lip read, mouthing words and reading lips is too slow, cumbersome, and private to be effective in group play. To read lips, you must be face to face. One can imagine that, at first, children used a few simple signs to indicate their intentions and reactions, and over time they added to these, and, with more time, a grammar emerged. Relevant to this argument is a research study revealing that the language used by preschoolers in the context of social play was far more complex and profuse than the language the same children used in classroom discussions with their teacher or when sitting around a table eating lunch (Fekonja, Marjanovic-Umek, & Kranjc, Reference Fekonja, Marjanovic-Umek and Kranjc2005).
Finally, it seems worth mentioning that the limited cultural innovations observed in non-human primates appear to originate most often, if not always, in juveniles’ play. An example is that of shore-living macaques that acquired the ability to crack open shellfish by smashing them with rocks (Tan, Reference Tan2017). Young macaques were often observed playfully smashing rocks together, apparently just to enjoy the sounds. At some point, this behavior evolved from smashing rocks against rocks for fun to smashing rocks against clams for food. Nobody saw the transition, but the first instance almost certainly was carried out by a juvenile, as no adults had been observed playing with rocks. This new means of acquiring food quickly spread among the juveniles and was not mimicked by the adults. Only when these juveniles became adults did the behavior become part of the adult food-acquisition repertoire, and then it was subsequently learned by their young through imitation. A study of how many human technological innovations came about originally for fun in children’s play, to be refined later for practical purposes, would be fascinating.
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Kudos to Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir for bringing overdue attention to children’s role in cultural adaptation. My intent here is to link their thesis to four human drives or dispositions that are generally stronger in children than adults. These are: (1) curiosity, the drive to understand the world around one; (2) playfulness, the drive to behave creatively with the artifacts, routines, and ideas in one’s physical and social world; (3) sociability, the drive to associate with and thereby learn from others, especially peers; and (4) future-orientation, the special interest afforded to material and social changes likely to impact future ways of living. From an evolutionary perspective, these characteristics are strongest in children because they are how children make sense of and adapt to the world into which they are born and the evolving world with which they must deal as they grow into adulthood (Gray, Reference Gray, Lees and Noddings2016). These characteristics of children are implicit in the target article. I just want to make them explicit and elaborate with examples.
Lew-Levy and Amir aptly discuss children’s role in the digital technology revolution. Research as well as common observation reveals that when computers and the Internet first came into homes in the 1990s, teenagers were generally the first to learn how to use them (Lenhart & Madden, Reference Lenhart and Madden2005). In most homes with teenagers, the teens quickly became the family computer gurus who helped their parents solve computer problems (Kiesler et al., Reference Kiesler, Zdaniuk, Lundmark and Kraut2000). Teens also – motivated by playfulness, sociability, and curiosity – expanded the possibilities of this new technology for games, connecting with friends, and finding information. Their future orientation no doubt played a role as they likely knew, at some level, that computers would be an ever-more-essential tool of their future. The older generation might wish to hang on to the past, but not the younger generation. Throughout history, whenever a revolutionary new technology appears, kids glom on to it while many of the older generation are suspicious of it (Springhall, Reference Springhall1998).
An excellent example of how these four innate characteristics combine in children’s innovative learning lies in Sugata Mitra’s classic “hole in the wall experiment.” In 1999, Mitra, who was the science director of an educational technology firm in India, installed a computer in a hole in the outside wall of the building where he worked, a wall facing one of the poorest slums in New Delhi, where most children were at that time unschooled, illiterate, and had never previously seen a computer. He simply turned the computer on, left it there, and told the children who gathered that they could play with it. His famous observation was that groups of children, mostly age 7 to 13, crowded around the computer, quickly learned to use its basic functions, and within days were using it for such purposes as playing games, playing music, painting with a paint program, and finding information (Mitra, Reference Mitra2003).
Here is how I have explained Mitra’s observation with reference to the four innate characteristics (Gray, Reference Gray2013). Curiosity drew the children to the computer and motivated them to explore its functions. Playfulness motivated them to play with those functions, once discovered, and thereby learn to use them skillfully and creatively. Sociability allowed each child’s learning about the computer’s functions to spread like wildfire to dozens of other children who crowded around and played collectively. And I suspect, future orientation, coupled with at least a vague notion that this thing would be a tool of the future, helped motivate their continued interest.
Lew-Levy and Amir also describe the invention of Nicaraguan Sign Language by deaf children who had been brought together in a school for the deaf, where they were taught lip-reading in Spanish, not a sign language. The sign language emerged over time, involving successive overlapping cohorts of students, through their natural interactions with one another outside of the classroom. Although the social contexts for this development are not described by those who documented the emerging language, it seems likely that much of it would have occurred on the playground. Children are highly motivated to play with one another, and social play requires almost continuous communication to coordinate the activities. Even if they could lip read, mouthing words and reading lips is too slow, cumbersome, and private to be effective in group play. To read lips, you must be face to face. One can imagine that, at first, children used a few simple signs to indicate their intentions and reactions, and over time they added to these, and, with more time, a grammar emerged. Relevant to this argument is a research study revealing that the language used by preschoolers in the context of social play was far more complex and profuse than the language the same children used in classroom discussions with their teacher or when sitting around a table eating lunch (Fekonja, Marjanovic-Umek, & Kranjc, Reference Fekonja, Marjanovic-Umek and Kranjc2005).
Finally, it seems worth mentioning that the limited cultural innovations observed in non-human primates appear to originate most often, if not always, in juveniles’ play. An example is that of shore-living macaques that acquired the ability to crack open shellfish by smashing them with rocks (Tan, Reference Tan2017). Young macaques were often observed playfully smashing rocks together, apparently just to enjoy the sounds. At some point, this behavior evolved from smashing rocks against rocks for fun to smashing rocks against clams for food. Nobody saw the transition, but the first instance almost certainly was carried out by a juvenile, as no adults had been observed playing with rocks. This new means of acquiring food quickly spread among the juveniles and was not mimicked by the adults. Only when these juveniles became adults did the behavior become part of the adult food-acquisition repertoire, and then it was subsequently learned by their young through imitation. A study of how many human technological innovations came about originally for fun in children’s play, to be refined later for practical purposes, would be fascinating.
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The author declares no competing interests.