Alison Gopnik quotes - page 3

What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, 'If you've never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you're not really an intellectual.' (Alison Gopnik)
Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults. View quote
Alison Gopnik
The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly. View quote
Alison Gopnik
As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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)
What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old. View quote
Alison Gopnik