Learning Happens When We Finally See the World From a Previously Unimaginable Perspective

We were taking the kids on one of our regular neighborhood rambles, a walking field trip around the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle where our school is located. This was the children's turf, so to speak, a place they all knew quite well.

I'd had the idea of printing out road maps of the vicinity, which we used to plot a course, then each child was given a clipboard with their own map in order to keep track of our progress. These five-year-olds were mostly familiar with the concept of maps. There was lots of talk about treasure maps. Many wanted me to point out where they lived. But it quickly became clear that maps, once we were out in the real world, were a challenging abstraction.

We began by making big Xs on our maps over our starting point. This was easy since I'd pointed out the shape that indicated the Fremont Baptist Church. We then chose a direction and walked a block, stopping at the corner to find where we now were on the map. The children struggled so I urged them to stand with their backs to the school while holding the map in the same orientation. That seemed to confuse them even more. We retraced our steps, maps before us, but it wasn't until I suggested that they imagine they were a bird looking down on the world from on high that they began to get the idea. Not all of them and not right away, of course. It's always difficult to imagine the world from a new perspective, especially one you've never actually seen before, but among them enough understanding emerged that by the end of the trip, our ramble was being led by the children who got us home in one piece and on time.

They had, as a group, learned to begin to see the world from the previously unimaginable perspective of a bird or a cartographer.

Two thousand years ago, we figured out that our Earth was a globe. It took us 1500 more years to understand that it moves. Most people were not ready for this knowledge. Indeed, they resisted it because the earth was so obviously flat and stable. The proof of our own eyes, told most of us that a spinning spherical planet meant that we would be thrown off into space. Duh!

During the early part of the 5th century BC, an Ancient Greek named Anaximander published the first geographical map of the world as a globe. It was a transformative for humanity. His insight forever changed our perspective of the place we live. Today, most of us take basic cartography for granted, seeing it as manifestly evident, but it was clear as I worked with these children, that understanding maps, like with most things we learn, required a significant, world changing, shift in perspective.

On the day we are born, we have a new perspective thrust upon us. Up until that moment, we only knew the world from the perspective of the womb, but suddenly we find ourselves in a cold, loud, smelly, bright place. And it never ends. Throughout childhood, we find ourselves constantly compelled to adopt and adapt to new perspectives. There is a world beyond our mother's faces. That child we see through the window is, in fact, a reflection of ourselves. There are no actual tiny humans living inside our television screens . . . 

Young children thrill and delight us with their capacity for learning. They are born to it because they are less wedded to their hidebound perspectives. Of course, they struggle sometimes, but unlike so many of us adults, their advantage is that they are far less committed to staying in the darkness once they've seen the world in a new light. We can't help but be astounded at a young child's capacity to shift perspective, to move beyond their natural intuitions and consider the world from a whole new perspective. So often, as adults, we actively resist, or even fear or hate, any perspective that conflicts with the one we already hold, yet if we cannot or will not see that there is more to the world than what we can currently see, we have simply stopped learning.

This is why I'm so suspicious of adults who insist upon "teaching" children, forcing the ignorance of their fixed perspective, their orthodoxy about this or that. In standard schools we "educate" children with curricula and textbooks that were out-of-date before they are published. We judge and test their ability to recite "right" answers and avoid the "wrong" ones in a world in which answers are always conditioned upon perspectives and there is always a new perspective. 

Learning about new perspectives is the purview of play. When a child holds a new toy, they turn it around and around, they slam it on the ground, they throw it, they place it on tables, under tables, behind doors, in their mouths. As physicist and philosopher Carlo Rovelli writes, "There are no recipes for success; there is only trial and error." When we understand that perspectives are all there is, we see learning as an ongoing process of sacrificing what we think we know, the status quo, for a new way of looking at things. This is why we play and this is why when we stop playing we stop learning.

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