Every Child is a Scientist

"Let's build a tower to the ceiling!" (physics)

"I made mud!" (chemistry)

"We found ladybugs in the garden!" (biology)

"Mommy said no, but grandma said yes!" (social science)

Every child is a scientist. This has been true since long before the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, long before the Islamic Golden Age, the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians. 

The word "science" has be co-opted by the professionals in recent centuries, codified and made dry and dull with officious processes, reviews, and dense jargon. They sell the myth of "objectivity," the pretense that they are considering nature from the impossible perspective of the gods. In school "science" plays out as "correct" answers, laboratory processes for which the results are already known, and mathematics so abstract as to make the world around us unrecognizable.

The great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "(A)ll training in science should begin as well as end in research, and in getting hold of the subject-matter as it occurs in nature." Whitehead famously defined nature as not a thing outside ourselves, but rather a process that intimately involves us.

When children have permission to play, they cannot help but begin with scientific research. When they say, "Look what I did!" or "Look what I found!" or "Guess what, Teacher Tom?" they are sharing their moments of Eureka! And as educators our responsibility is to acknowledge that moment by saying "I'm looking at what you did," "I see what you found," and "I can't guess what, but I'll bet you can tell me." Ours is not to judge or correct them. It is not to take-over by extending or scaffolding them in a direction of our choosing. They are the researcher, they are the scientists, and we are, at most, their lab assistant. Although most of the time we serve them best by marking the moment with them, then letting them go to the next place their curiosity takes them.

Curiosity and Eureka! driven science stands at the heart of early learning. It's a hands on, full body, life-derived process. The discoveries are localized, previsional, and apt to suggest further lines of inquiry. It's what humans have done since long before we knew it was anything more than life itself.

I once taught a two-year-old who used his index finger to push on the nose of a classmate as if it was a button. I imagine that a loved one had showed affection to him by booping his nose. In this case, however, the other child cried. The boy's was clearly confounded by this response. For the next several days, he tried his nose booping experiment over and over. As we adults scrambled to convince him to keep his hands to himself, he continued to make his study, trying it out on different kids, trying different amounts of pressure, combining it with different facial expressions, choosing different situations. And then, one day, his research into booping was complete. I knew this because he stopped doing it. Perhaps he concluded that booping was a welcome act of affection under certain circumstances, but not at school. Maybe he had, in the process, developed new theories about how to show affection. I don't know and it's none of my business.

What I do know is that our schools seem to have lost sight of what science is all about. It's not the exclusive domain of scientists, textbooks that are out-of-date before they are published, or sterile laboratories. Science happens anytime a person, no matter their age or education, is free to pursue the satisfaction of curiosity about the process called nature. This is what children are doing when they play.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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