Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Paul BloomRead
A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the perception of babies as eager learners while also pointing out their inherent ignorance at birth.
Paul Bloomβs quote highlights the duality of viewing newborns as potential learners filled with curiosity and the reality that they start life with no prior knowledge or understanding, akin to a loaf of bread. It suggests that while they may appear to have a spark of consciousness, true learning and comprehension develop over time through experience and interaction.
Themes
BabiesLearningIgnoranceConsciousnessParents
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a parenting workshop to encourage patience and understanding in child development.
More from Paul Bloom
All quotes βMaybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.
Paul BloomRead
If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.
Paul BloomRead
I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
Paul BloomRead
We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
Paul BloomRead
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
Paul BloomRead
Similar quotes
Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.
Harry S. TrumanRead
Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
We want a book to be a book. We'll have all the interactive bells and whistles but our intent is to engage young people in reading, not to show them a movie.
Levar BurtonRead
I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, 'Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch.'
J. K. RowlingRead
I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools (in America) that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.
Oprah WinfreyRead
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Alan BennettRead