Word: children
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...word "symbolic" to mean that he should ban any references whatsoever to Christmas. He sent teachers a memo forbidding not only carols and trees but gifts and Santa Claus as well. In protest, outraged fathers marched around Coleman's home at night carrying Santa balloons, and 50 children picketed an emergency meeting of the school board. They carried signs reading SCROOGE IS ALIVE AND WELL IN MARBLEHEAD and SANTA HAS DONE NO WRONG-DONT SUSPEND HIM FROM SCHOOL...
...child, by most indications illogical and full of nonsense. Not so, says Jean Piaget, a grumpy, mountain-climbing Swiss philosopher who is also one of the world's foremost child psychologists. Few researchers have so meticulously or provocatively mapped that terra incognita, the mental world of children. For 50 years, Piaget, now 73, has been discovering through deceptively simple experiments that children actually have surprisingly intricate thinking skills that adults should learn to appreciate and understand better than they...
Dreams That Fly. As Freud found that slips of the tongue are keys to the unconscious, Piaget finds that the mental "mistakes" children make are clues to intellectual processes that are really precursors of grown-up thinking. An infant, for example, initially may suck at almost anything that comes near his mouth; soon, when he is hungry, he learns to persevere only when his lips close over a nipple. The reflex-driven gropings by which he learns to recognize the nipple and distinguish it from a rattle, as Piaget sees it, are a first use of trial-and-error logic...
Between the ages of eleven and 15, the child begins to deal with abstractions and, in a primitive but methodical way, set up hypotheses and then test them, as a scientist does. In one experiment, Piaget handed children a weight at the end of a string and asked them to find out what determines the speed of the pendulum's swing. As he watched and asked questions, he found that the children were spontaneously considering all the possible variations: changing the weight, letting it drop from increasing heights, giving it stronger shoves, or changing the length of the string...
Piaget has observed repeatedly that children explore the complexities of their world with immense zest, and his findings have given encouragement and innumerable specific suggestions to the "discovery method" of teaching. Now used in many schools across the U.S. and in Great Britain, the method draws also on the ideas of John Dewey, Italian Educator Maria Montessori and Harvard Psychologist Jerome Bruner. Discovery classrooms, in essence, are informal laboratories where children gain an early familiarity with the principles of Euclidean geometry by manipulating variously shaped objects, and learn fundamentals of counting and reproduction by charting the egg production of classroom...