Alison Gopnik Quotes

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.

Children are the most learning-hungry beings in the world.

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.

I really learned the power of the tube on Sesame Street and how it can influence a very young mind.

It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Having kids has proven to be this amazing - for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot - I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you're going to be a developmental psychologist.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

Truly, learning appears to be a reverse geometric progression with experiences at one hour, one day, one month or one year dramatically more influential and formative than later experiences. As has often been quoted, 85% of brain development takes place by age 3, and yet we spend only 4% of our educational dollars by that point.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Almost everyone who has claimed to know what kids need to learn or how they learn has turned out to be wrong.

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.

To acquire behavior, the student must engage in behavior

I became a cognitive psychologist because I met a bunch of teachers I really liked.

I really love teaching; I was actually studying to be a preschool teacher.

Teaching which ignores the realities of children will be rejected as surely as any graft which attempts to ignore the body's immune system.

I believe a child's most important job is to explore the world around them through play.

To achieve our goals of educating bold and ambitious children, we must invest in enriching, quality early child care and learning.

We've never tried to educate children. We've never tried to preach to them, just entertain.

Children's ability to learn is infinite when they are engaged.

You can learn at any age, but when you are young, you are like a sponge, and when you are introduced to more different types of things before the age of seven and eight, then you get fascinated by that.