Reading and the Growing Mind

All parents eagerly await their child’s first word. They sense the moment’s importance even as they, ironically, lack the words to explain why. It isn’t just that they can now talk to their child, as that will take months more development. Some see it as a sign of intelligence, and busy themselves in fruitless comparisons between their child and others. Just as mothers check to see if their newborn has all his fingers and toes to see that he is physically normal, that first word is a check on their child’s mind to see if it is normal.

Just as a child’s hands are designed to grasp objects, a child’s mind is designed to grasp the nature of the world. Parents know he must have both, but what does the latter really mean?

Baby’s hands and mind are built for particular purposes, and both operate by their particular method. Why would it be otherwise? Men learned to skilfully apply their hands to the tasks of living long before science knew how bones, muscles, tendons, arteries and veins work together to enable a hand to grasp. Without the science they trained their children in those skills. Science has not explained how nerves enable a mind to form words and ideas, but that does not mean we cannot learn how that formation occurs and train children in those skills too.

It is obvious that a child’s thinking skills are no more automatic than his grasping skills. At first, his hands serve little purpose, but then they clumsily control his bottle or ‘sippy’ cup, and after years of (proper) training they may well perform a piano concerto. Similarly, his mind seems useless against the onslaught of sensory information it receives. But it is learning. Gradually the baby’s mind ‘notices’ the importance of eye contact, of smiles, and of certain touches and sounds. In fact, he is surrounded with sounds that connect to the things he sees. Soon the child *knows* its mother, its bottle and toys, and other family members. Before he can make the sounds himself, he begins to recognize certain words. Later, he may even tell you of things people said before he could talk!

Just as he may train his hand (and the nerves behind it) to play a piano concerto, so he can train his mind to develop its own concerto: an artful understanding of the world. Language, the precursor to reading, is where that training begins.

From 'Mama' to Things

With his first word, “mama”, the completely dependent toddler discovers that more specific sounds than wailing bring tremendous rewards. He has already learned that there is the one out-there that is his mother, and now discovers a connection between his mother and a particular sound he can make. That is, he discovers that when he wants the mother that he has in his mind, ‘in-here’, he can use that sound to reach his actual mother ‘out there’. He finally experiences direct communication that singles out the very thing he wants from everything else. What a superb step that is! His one sound, “mama”, connects his mind to one special thing in his world. He is no longer an observer; he is a doer.

With no awareness of his own progress, he has found that specific sounds serve as proper names —the sound “mama” becomes “Mama” as the name of only that One thing (a proper noun). At first, he stores the name-sounds of things in memory on a one-to-one correspondence, e.g. Mum, Dad, Rover. This is his way of identifying everything in the real world ‘out there’. But he cannot continue in this way for long, as he would need more proper nouns than he could ever keep in memory.

Though he initially learned the name of the family dog as a proper name, say ‘Rover” or “Dog” he soon sees different dogs in pictures, on the street, on television and even as cartoons. Unaware that his thinking has changed, he grasps that they are all “dogs”, and that “Rover” is just the family dog. Now, one sound can mean one thing, or many things of the same kind. He has leapt from proper nouns to common nouns.

This is where good picture books perform a great service. They properly show the child all those other dogs and cows etc. encouraging him to properly generalize his new words. The fad for strange artwork or cartoon-drawings in picture books appeals to grown ups, but does little to aid a child at this early stage of language development. Simple realism or photographs are best.

Words Shrink the Universe

The toddler is unaware that his shift to common nouns is a momentous development. That word ‘dog’ works for every dog there ever was, every dog there is, and every dog there ever will be —quite literally for billions of them. The child has, with a single word, carved off an enormous chunk of the universe and reduced it to the single idea, “dog”.

When it comes to thinking, a word is worth a ‘million’ things!

This shift from proper nouns to common nouns explains why so many parents have seen a child call a relative or stranger “Mom” or “Dad”. Aside from moments of mistaken identity, the child is struggling with the task of attaching the right common name to other adults, so he tries to use the closest fitting word he has. He has truly reached a new level of thinking.

Concepts, or, How Things are 'Shrunk'

A child can ask, “What’s that?” relentlessly. Clearly, he wants to know the words for everything. It may look as if he is merely asking for words, for conventional labels, but much more is going on in his mind (it has to be!). He is seeing things and/or groups of things that have importance to him —and he suspects a sound already goes with them. The particular sound (word) may be a convention, but the groupings he forms are not. They are the beginning of a very special relationship between his mind and the Universe.

After seeing several dogs, he will have recognized certain qualities all dogs possess, in some degree. He can see that a dog has four legs, a head, body, tail and muzzle etc., each in a common, but approximate, proportion to the others. At first his awareness of the most important ‘dog’ qualities will be crude and he will make mistakes. He has to deal with the considerable number and variety of characteristics of dogs. A dog’s tail can be long or short, but the child will learn the range that applies to dog tails. The more dogs he sees the more he can conclude which distinguishing features identify a dog, and therefore contribute to his idea of “dog”. He is steadily forming the idea of what a dog is.

Once a child grasps “dog” as an idea, his mind can, for the purpose of thinking, treat each dog as interchangeable with any other dog. The child has gone from recognizing what specifics distinguish one object, to what commonalities occur among entire groups of objects. Now his mind can treat all the members of that group as one. He can use that one word/idea when he is thinking about any of the millions it represents... he has achieved an enormous economy of mental space.

Each new group he learns is stored, with (some of) its constellation of facts, in a mental ‘folder’. The folder is properly called a ‘concept’, and labeled with a word. Once labeled with a word, the concept can be treated as a single idea, and therein lies its enormous power. Our conscious mind can work with words while our subconscious keeps track of all the facts that go with it. The word ‘dog’ not only represents each one of the dogs in the universe, forever, but it also represents all the information we have about dogs in our minds. A word doesn’t just label a group of things “out there”; it also labels our matching concept of that group “in here”, in our minds.

A child’s use of concepts is no less monumental than his discovery that “mama” brings him the specifics of his world, because concepts allow him to ‘hold’ vastly more of his world in his mind. And, that process is not limited to things; he can do it with actions (e.g. “running”), characteristics (e.g. “loud”) and relationships (e.g. “his”) —he can do it wherever millions of instances can be mentally reduced to one, easy to retain, idea.

Already, the child’s thinking ability has leapt beyond all other organisms. In fact thinking and creativity makes him as different from animals , as mobility and consumption makes animals different from immobile, sugar producing plants. Baby’s first words signal this distinction, as a landmark moment in their development. It is the answer to parents’ eager concern for their baby’s humanity. Words are not mere memorization, they signal a mind thinking as only a human can. When educators and philosophers focus on words as mere convention they deny nearly everything going on in children’s minds, except for dull memorization –a skill for apes¹.

Concept Formation vs. Memorization

Concept formation is the natural manner in which a child’s mind acquires words and ideas, if he is not encouraged to simply memorize definitions or descriptions. Proper concept formation keeps the child’s mind sensibly tied to the World. Memorization pushes him away from it.

Where the normal object oriented approach is to learn what something is, and its word, the memorizing child tends to learn by remembering a word and recognizing when and how people use it. When he does this, his thinking more resembles that of a parrot. It can say “Polly wants a cracker” at the right times, but the bird doesn’t know what the sounds actually refer to. The memorizing child does not focus on the world of things. His language is people oriented —founded on what other people say. When he uses words the way others do, he gains social approval, believes he is right, but never really has the understanding.

The two types of mind will learn completely different things from the same lesson! Memorizers can do brilliantly, manipulating arguments with dexterity but not validity. Only the most perspicacious parent or teacher will see any difference in the way either child uses words. The memorizer approach is very sophisticated by high school, and is most rewarded in University, where indeterminate debate, or sheer volume of information, are increasingly mistaken for education.

The original, uncorrupted, Montessori approach to early childhood education implicitly recognizes the proper process. It encourages observation and manipulation of objects, rather than memorization.

By the age of four or five the child is ready to move to higher level concepts, such as those arising from characteristics and relationships, i.e. concepts that arise from other concepts. He is ready to find commonalities among groups of ideas. To do this he will continue to use the same natural intellectual tools he has been using, just as he did when he moved from proper nouns to common nouns (described above). However, he is now beyond the elementary grasping stage, and his thinking tools are no longer the automatic ‘grasping’ with which he began. Once he is actually reading, much of his vocabulary will not be acquired by direct observation. He must increasingly work with the explanations and examples of authors and teachers. His use of his natural tools now needs the explicit support, from parents, teachers and well selected books. Yet, it is exactly at this point that school curricula and literature fail him. He is bombarded with ideas at every level of abstraction, of fantasy, and of political correctness. He is too young to understand the tools himself, and incapable of sorting through the confusion. It is his mentors who must protect him from confusion and irrationality, who must know the tools that are his goal and who must guide him in their implementation.