Snowed In

I am trying to finish up my BusyBodies paper, and I came across a neat passage in an article by Seymour Papert about Jean Piaget:

In one of his most famous experiments, Piaget asked children, “What makes the wind?” What follows is a typical Piagetian dialogue:

Piaget: What makes the wind?

Julia (age 5): The trees.

Piaget: How do you know?

Julia: I saw them waving their arms.

Piaget: How does that make the wind?

Julia: Like this (waving her hand in front of Piaget’s face). Only they are bigger. And there are lots of trees.

Piaget: What makes the wind on the ocean?

Julia: It blows there from the land. No, it’s the waves.

Piaget recognized that Julia’s answers, while not correct by any adult criterion, are not “incorrect” either. They are entirely sensible and coherent within the framework of the child’s way of knowing. Classifying them as “true or false” misses the point and shows a lack of respect for the child. What Piaget was after was a theory that could find in the wind dialogue coherence, ingenuity and the practice of a kind of explanatory principle (in this case, by referring to body actions, in other cases much harder to state) that stands young children in very good stead when they don’t yet know enough or have enough skill to handle the kind of explanation grown-ups prefer.

Piaget was not an educator and never enunciated rules about how to intervene in such situations. But his work strongly suggests that the automatic reaction of putting the child right may well be abusive. Practicing the art of making theories may be more valuable for children than achieving meteorological orthodoxy… - Seymour Papert

The emphasis at the end is mine. Kind of a neat thought.