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Experimental Learning: How Children Educate Themselves

Watching the natural world in action, we often marvel at baby animals like ponies or calves, who, moments after birth, are up and moving, rapidly mastering their tiny legs. They do all this just to make us look bad. Just kidding!


In jest, it highlights a powerful instinct for survival. This instinct demands that they quickly distance themselves from their mother, not out of cold detachment but as a vital test of their physical capabilities, essential for their journey ahead. After this initial exploration, they inevitably return, instinct guiding them back to their mother's side when they need a snack.




“Human children are also biologically designed to educate themselves. In a way, they are born with certain instinctive drives shaped over eons by natural selection to serve the purpose of survival and  education,” says author and educational philosopher Peter Gray. He illuminated this concept with clarity when he identified six instinctual drives within children that have been honed over millennia by natural selection:


  • Curiosity: The drive to explore and understand

  • Playfulness: The drive to practice and create

  • Communicativeness: The drive to know what others know and share what you know

  • Willfulness: The drive to take charge of one’s own life

  • Planfulness: The drive to think about and plan for the future

  • The desire to grow up


Now take a second - have you seen every single one of these motivations in a small child, or have you seen every single one of these motivations in a small child? It actually seems that they are not wasting any time at all.


Everything they do, from putting their feet in their mouth, to pulling at your hair, to pulling at your glasses, to pulling at your necklace, to pulling at your ear, are all actions to strengthen their bodies, minds and ability to communicate within their environment. Who knew you have a tiny workaholic scientist hustling every day to answer their own questions, to prepare for the life they want? 


This is the part of the blog where you might ask, “Ok now what is my duty in this regard? How do I help?” Our role, surprisingly, requires less interference and more observance. Allowing children the freedom to explore, to experience, and to engage with the world at their pace is key. Take note, ask yourself what they might be learning, and model self-reflective experimentation yourself. You’re still developing, too.


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