Where Our Focus Ought to Be Right Now . . . And Always
Most of us take it for granted that human beings are smarter than other animals. After all, we have by far the largest brains compared to our body size of any other species, comprising, on average, two percent of our body weight. But when scientists in Germany used a series of thirty-eight tests designed to compare our innate intelligence with animals we assume are pretty smart, such as orangutans and chimpanzees, on things like spatial awareness, calculation, and causality, we performed about the same. This doesn't surprise me, actually. Having lived with a series of dogs over the course of the past three decades, I'm convinced there are times that they've pitied me as a sweet little puddin' head, lovable, but not that bright, especially when it comes to things like being aware of a rabbit hiding in the shrubbery or understanding what they want or need when they could not be communicating more clearly.
The only area of intelligence in which the researchers found that humans surpass our ape cousins is when it comes to social learning: the ability to learn from others. As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind:
Human beings, it turns out, are ultra social learning machines. We're born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it's not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that's uniquely human. blushing, after all, is quintessentially social -- it's people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.
That we need one another in order to take advantage of our great big brains, shouldn't surprise any early childhood educators.
Other research, and most significantly, the Perry School Project, the longest running study of the impact of high CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Where Our Focus Ought to Be Right Now . . . And Always
