I will tell you that I, having decided to educate my children myself for as long as I could, waded into teaching them to read with naïve confidence. And backed out of it astonished at the complexity of the job. First, you have to teach them to recognize the shape of a letter and label it with a name. You have to be careful, explaining that letters have wrong wayness and upside-downness – that every part of the shape counts.
Yeah, we teach them the alphabet song. But what meaning is in it? The song gives letters an order that really has nothing to do with making words. And it really doesn’t tie the shapes to the names.
Even tying names to shapes isn’t the meat of the learning, because the names only hint at the real meaning behind the symbol: that shape indicates sound. And some shapes actually can indicate several sounds.
From there, you have to move to the idea of making a string of letters – and thus a string of sounds that have to fade into one another the way one musical note in a melody does into the next – and that words do not not always mean concrete things, but also feelings, actions, ideas –
Every one of us has learned these things, one way or another – because the adults around us made the effort and took the time to teach us. Think of the immense complexity of the learning a child does in his first four years. Balancing on hands and knees. Learning to stand, and then to move. And so many other startling truths we’ve forgotten we once didn’t know.
Some years ago at the local university, some person made it departmental policy that all children’s books including talking animals should be shunned. Such a book just wasn’t realistic; children need to be brought up to the real world, not some fantasy place full of anthropomorphized animals. (anthro=people morph=form) Ah, the wisdom of those who feel themselves educated.
Science likes to make pronouncements. What I love are the studies you hear about every so often: “Children who are brought up with reasonable discipline have been found to be more successful in school!” Or: the consumption of sugar has been found to contribute to obesity. Or: if you drop something, it will, according to recent studies, fall downward. I know that you have heard this kind of thing on the news. Tell me that you haven’t rolled your eyes at least once and said, “Gosh. Really?????”
But once in a while, you hear something that knocks your socks off, and that is what I want to write about here: my mental bare feet. It happened some years ago. And I’m willing to bet, though I don’t really remember now, that it was a segment on American Scientific Frontiers. Alan Alda had gone bird watching—in the lab of Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a theoretical chemist (as I recall) who had deserted chemistry for something far less scientifically acceptable: the study of animal intelligence.
Long held scientific strictures concerning animals indicates that they are not actually all that intelligent, not the way human beings are. That they are driven by program (call it instinct if you like) and not remotely by “intent,” having no sense of self. Remember the crack I made in the last post about people without families writing about them? I have to assume that scientists must not be, in the main, people who live with animals.
Animals can’t learn concepts like same and different. They can’t understand counting, numbers, color. Of course, beasts and birds don’t have a lot of motivation for counting things. They don’t keep inventories so they call sell to other people; they don’t need to keep track of their property (or if they do, they have a much more available method of doing it); they don’t have to pay taxes. But we take the absence of their doing these things for an indication that they can’t do them. The same way you’d have to assume that all the people who were born before the harpsichord was invented were incapable of playing a keyboard.
But my opinion isn’t worth much. I read all those damaging, anthropomorphizing kids’ books as I grew up. We were so naïve back then – Black Beauty. Call of the Wild. And I watched Lassie, too. And My Friend Flicka, and Flipper. So my perspective is terribly warped.
I once secretly spied on Scout, our escape-artist Collie, who was way down the yard— preparing to climb the fence and be gone. Before he put paw to fence, I watched him pause, then take a long, deliberate, appraising look over his shoulder at the house. I was so warped by then that I actually assumed he, knowing good and darned well he was NOT supposed to climb the fence, was checking first to make sure nobody was watching him.
Silly me.
That experience Alan Alda had in Dr. Pepperberg’s lab? It had us both scraping our jaws off the floor. The doctor has started her research with a year old African Gray, bought at some random pet store. She hadn’t even picked the bird herself; the clerk had picked it for her, all in the name of impartial science. How could she have known that, thirty one years later, she and this feathered “colleague” would end up doing that could whip up a firestorm in the scientific community.
Parrots. They only pick up what you say and then they repeat it. Like Pete the Repeating Bird, the toy I did NOT get for Murphy for Christmas when he was six. They don’t really know what the words mean. At least, that’s what everyone who has NOT owned such a parrot has thought through the ages.
All she set out to do was to try to find out what is really inside the mind of an animal by teaching one to talk so he could tell her.
This is the short bit of a long interview at Massachusetts School of Law. Part of a series about significant women and their work. It’s about Alex’s number reasoning. The rest of the interview is linked at the end of this piece.
So by now, you’ve noticed that I’ve posted a few YouTube moments here for you. I took a lot of time finding the good ones and harvesting the links. Most of you never follow my links – you lunks. What, you don’t believe I find cool stuff that you’ll get a kick out of seeing? But I hope you watch these, because they are astonishing, astounding, and somehow, deeply spiritual. And still shots are not going to make you understand why I am so deeply moved and intellectually provoked by all this.
G and I just read Alex and Me, Dr. Pepperberg’s personal account of her work with an animal that can live sixty years. This is not a scientific work, but her human story. And what we read there – wow.
Here is a short working clip: the two of them in the lab. Not the highest quality – just a record of the work. Still amazing.
This one is more professionally put together.
I remember, after seeing the Alda piece, thinking – if all the people in the world could realize that the self of an animal is just as real as the self of a human being – we would all be deeply, horribly ashamed and embarrassed by the way we have treated our furry/feathery brethren.
What she did was take the time to teach a fellow creature the things we teach our own children: what the world is made of, and how to use words to function with other minds.
The most brain-reaming thing she reported about her work was this: after long work with Alex establishing a lexicon (a list of words you both can use to communicate concepts), and after teaching concepts like number, symbolism, types of matter, color, similarity and difference, Dr. Pepperberg offered Alex a tray with a small refrigerator magnet number 7 on one side of it and four large blue blocks on the other. Then she asked him, “What bigger?”
It was a tricky question. One little number symbol. Four large blocks. I’m sure Alex would have loved to have been able to ask her any number of qualifying questions before he answered. What he finally said was simply, “Seven.” She had to do the exercise again and again, using “small” numbers and more blocks, “larger” numbers with fewer blocks. Most of the time, Alex showed her that he understood that the number symbol meant an actual number of things, and keeping that number in mind, compared it to the number of blocks, unfooled by their actual size. And came up with an answer. Can your four year old do this?
If you are not shocked by now, I must assume it is because you have never tried to teach a child how to count, or how to associate letter shapes with sounds.
I think we adults often don’t even give our children credit for having minds. So often, the manifestation of their intelligence ends up being a little trying and a lot inconvenient.
Seeing the results of Dr. Pepperberg’s work just changes the shape of the world for me. I have actually heard people say that beating a horse, or riding him with spurs is no big deal because “they don’t feel pain like we do.” I believe that slave owners in the south once said the same of their field workers. But I have seen a mosquito land lightly on the broad back of a horse, and the horse immediately shift his entire skin to fling the thing off. A creature that can feel the touch of microscopic feet can certainly feel whip end of pain.
I guess there’s a larger truth here, too. That we really know very little about the world around us. About each other. How other people may see exactly the same things we do – but perceive them very differently. I believe in truth. But I also believe that we adults aren’t as acquainted with it as we long to believe we are. Anyway, there you are. I’d love to know what you make of all this. If it’s as surprising to you as it was to me.
This is the long story – it’s an interview that I think is about an hour long. Very interesting and covers just about everything.
