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Quotes By Alison Gopnik

The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that’s actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and it’s not something that our society does very well at all.

Alison Gopnik
SocietyWorkHappen

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they’re reading books to babies in the womb.

Alison Gopnik
AgeParents Until

Many philosophers say it’s impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that’s not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It’s just that they haven’t explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

Alison Gopnik
ExperienceOthers True

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Alison Gopnik
BestNatureUnderstand

I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.

Alison Gopnik
LifeThinking Three

If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.

Alison Gopnik
Pretty Thinking Watch

The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly.

Alison Gopnik
Computer Learn Understand

I’m the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I’ve always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.

Alison Gopnik
Baby Interested Watch

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

Alison Gopnik
BestDiscover Scientific

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.

Alison Gopnik
Media Song Though

Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we’ve changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.

Alison Gopnik
Absolute Changed Longer

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

Alison Gopnik
Beings Childhood Protected

In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.

Alison Gopnik
HistoryCulture Growing

Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.

Alison Gopnik
Ideas Learn Three

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

Alison Gopnik
HistoryDifficult Together
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