# What is a Child?
What is a child?

It's not an adult, let's begin there. Children obviously go through various stages of development, from natal all the way up until puberty and becoming young adults. There are a lot of different stages.

It's important to understand those stages they go through because those stages are indicative of 99.9% of childrens' cognitive ability. It follows a fairly clear pattern, and most models we have have been tested for 80-90 years, or had been in development since that time. That's quite a long time to say OKAY this table is factual or at least useful.

One of the models we have is Digotsky, Piaget and Bruna. Basically, these different theories have a lot of overlap. They say the same thing from a different angle, if you look at how they break down the stages fo development they correlate in many ways.

# Vigotsky
He said social interaction influences cognitive development, which is very important. That is nurture over nature. That means children are strongly influenced by the environment they're in.

Identical twins are given up for adoption by different parents in different places, and even tough they have some similar innate abilities, the results are often very different because of teh environment they're brought up in. A good example that shows the environment can strongly affect what happens to a child. Naturel resilience can be effective, but teh environment is always a strong effect.

## Biological and Cultural Development
These don't occur in isolation from each other. They feed off each other. Many variables. People often do a univariate analysis, but it doesn't work.

Language plays a strong role in cognitive development. The type of language (English, French, Chinese, Arabic) is going to affect to thinking style. This also ties into the culture. But even within the same language - the dialectic you're using - or you're understanding of the words. The ideology you follow changes your perception of things.

Even speaking the same language, but with a different ideology, we can see that defining what it is to be a woman becomes an impossible issue to understand.

## Zone of Proximal Development
If you imagine the rings of a tree, the center zone is the area that the child already knows. Then, we have an outer ring where they'll expand to. What a child can achieve through work - the zone of cognitive development. Outside of that, you have a range that's too far. You can teach a child to parrot things that are far out, but they don't really understand it. Indoctrination works this way in that they don't understand something, but it keeps being hammered into them, so they adopt it by parroting it.

Cults work in a similar way - you don't have to understand it, you just need to repeat it. Propaganda is also like this. If you keep repeating it, you'll believe it whether you want to or not.

## Emulating
Children will naturally try to emulate the adults. Traditionally, a lot of emulation came from the Mother, because the mother would stay at home. The population, especially when Vigotsky was forming these, were not in cities - they were in the countryside. We have now an inversion of populations.

Cities couldn't support many people before, with some exceptions like Rome having 1 million, or Nunava with a huge urban sprawl - huge ancient populations. But generally speaking, countryside populations were higher.

Parents influence the child, or a caregiver would influence the child.

Now, we have someone who spends many hours with children. The teacher.

So, for better or worse, a majority of the influence is going to come from a teacher.

Vigotsky was saying that language is a means to transmit information to a child. Most children are fairly stupid, they don't have a power of insight. They generally believe what adults tell them, especially if they trust that adult like a teacher. They will internalize whatever they get told.

Language becomes a very powerful tool for intellectual adaptation or abuse. You can teach the children the right thing or the wrong thing - this is somewhat concerning.

# Piaget
His stages of development were
- Sensory-motor
- Pre-operational
- Concrete-operational
- Formal-operational

## Sensory Motor
Birth to 2 years
A child is understanding the world through sensors and actions - by doing something. They don't have the language capability, yet. But children are learning language - they're just not at the stage where they can create output.

## Pre-Operational
2 - years
Understanding the world through language.
From 2 to 7 years old - once they start to learn to talk, they rarely shut up - fascinating to listen because you can learn so much about their personality. It is a sign of something not quite right if they don't.