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Olivia's picture

Babies and interactions

I never doubt about how smart babies are. Just how babies picking up a language is amazing enough. In class, we talked about how babies are more creative than adults, and babies think more possibilities. Education seems like rules imposed on them, and it makes the possibilities shrink as a baby grow. The example we discussed in class is how professors guide us with our papers. We are taught to write papers in certain ways. And the comments on the paper sometimes limit the possibility of writing a paper differently. The "improvement" of writing a paper is merely writing closely following the rules. Why do we need to write paper in a particular standard way? Is education not good?

If we write a paper for ourselves, we can write whatever we want. But the problem is that we write our papers for other people. The audience is not ourselves. We need to explain things clearly in order to let other people understand. The interaction with other people causes us to limit our possibilities of writing papers.

I think interactions between humans may have an effect on our loss of creativity and other abilities which we had as babies. For example, babies have the nature to tell the truth (like the child in the "The Emperor's New Clothes"). But as we interacting with others, we start to restrain that nature because we need care for others' feelings. If some words hurt others, we may not say them. Also because there are other people out in the world, we cannot do whatever we want as babies.

Thus, maybe education is a way to learn how to interact with others?

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