Invitations and Challenges — 1
An adolescent invited me, once, to marvel at how children knew their worlds. Knowing, she argued, lay in priorities and connections, in what fascinates children, in how it fits or propels the world they know. As adults, we build bridges across rifts that we imagine separates the children from us; that is quite incorrect. Our task is to structure experiences that bring our worlds in contact, like two ships that meet in an open sea and careen toward each other, exchanging sailors and wares. I have since risen to her challenge—I speak with children to understand them and to introduce them to slight bits of my world, hoping that in their time, they may do the same with me.
A few months ago, I invited my nephew to a series of concerns that might challenge a preschooler. A wedding was our open sea; he responded to my questions, trivialised them, and gave them enough thought to be led to revisions. I, similarly, understood a fair bit of his world, the parts that he shared. This is an account of our dialogue as faithfully as I can reproduce them.
Key to the Puzzle
We were put up in a hotel where the rooms opened with magnetic keycards. These keys, which doubled up as power switches, came in neat paper pockets with our room numbers written on them. I spotted Y (pseudonym), in primary school then, using his key at our door as if he were trying to open it. He claimed that this was the way to go until I showed him the lights near the handle which indicated whether the card was accepted. Slightly shocked, he understood that the doors had a key specificity, which he demonstrated by going all the way to his room and opening his room with his key, then coming back and opening my room with mine.
I never told him about the key specificity, merely pointed out the lights. This discovery, which held him on the borders of a new experience—possibly new knowledge—was entirely of his own making. He had hypothesised something and tested two doors; there was a renewed solidity in this conception. The next thing he wanted to test was a combination—would the cards squared and thrust into their receptacle open both doors? He tested this on my door, annoying some adults. The lights did not encourage him, so he gave up this pursuit, perhaps with some scepticism about his hypothesis. I saw this as an opening in his conception and asked him, “Why do you think your key opens your door and my key opens my door?”
“Because this is the key to your door and this is the key to my door,” he said, pointing out the obvious duality of the cards.
This is a fair analysis; he was repeating the property of specificity, misunderstanding my question that asked him the reason for this specificity. “But how do the keys know which door to open?” I asked, animating the objects so that he would be compelled to think about it further. A key cannot know things, he knows at his age, so there had to be an explanation that he had not considered.
He inspected the cards for a while and then showed me the pockets. There, on his pocket, was scribbled his room number. He pointed to my pocket and saw the room number scribbled on mine. “This is how the keys know,” he said, as if the keys were learning their tasks from the penmanship of the receptionist. I was impressed, because he had correctly linked specificity with a notion of difference. Unless keys could be distinguished in any way, they would not have compelling reason to be specific to a door. However, the difference he had noticed was restricted by the constraint of visibility. Embedded circuits are not seen, and in primary school one can be excused from appreciation of such phenomena.
However, it might be important to destabilise this view somewhat even at his age, forcing him to seek out solutions from others. There were two ways that I could do this instead of directly telling him that he was wrong. First, I could ask him how the writing on the pocket could transmit information to the door, but this would entail a long conversation about ideas he might not be willing to accept—ideas, for instance, of arbitrariness of numbers or writing. Second, I could demonstrate that information could not be transmitted to the door. I switched the pockets for our cards and asked him if the card in his pocket would open his door now. He realised the gap in his reasoning.
That there are unexplored reasons gives us intrigue and motivates us towards knowledge; some ideas should perhaps be placed at the horizons of where children are. As an educationist, I often struggle with the balance between exploration and mystery. Here, I left him with this question, telling him that he could ask anyone else in the world for an answer but me. Children, including him, often snicker at this lax criterion. They tell me that they will just Google the answer, or in resource-poor centres where I teach, that they will look at an atlas or a textbook. I understand this anxiety—we never engage students in active research, only passive absorption, so the idea of looking answers up often seems like misuse. Children feel that the correct thing to do would be to chance upon the answer by some strides in individual thought—by being ‘smart’—and being therefore justly rewarded for it. I told Y he could even ask his parents, as long as he could explain the answer to me. We parted on this question.
