【推荐1】Like toolmaking,teaching was once thought to be an exclusive capacity of the human mind.It is not actually.

“Teaching”requires this:one individual must take time from their own task to demonstrate and instruct with effort and the student must learn a new skill.That’s a tall order.

When a young chimpanzee watches a skilled adult and then imitates ,that’s learning.But the adult has not taken time specifically to instruct,so it is not teaching.In the honeybees’ amazing dance,the dancer takes time to indicate information about a source of food,but observers learn no new skill.They do take time to show,but they do not pass on new skills to learners.

Dolphins teach.Atlantic spotted dolphin mothers sometimes free a caught fish in the presence of their youngsters and let their youngsters chase it,catching it again if it’s getting away.Dolphin youngsters also position themselves alongside mothers who are scanning sandy bottoms for hidden fish,and the mother spends extra time demonstrating.

Other teachers include:housecats who bring back live prey and let their young learn to catch it,and meerkats(猫鼬) who first bring to their growing young dead scorpions(蝎子), then disabled ones,to demonstrate how to remove the poisonous part on their tails.

Like toolmaking and teaching,imitation is also considered to reflect high intelligence.In South Africa lived a baby dolphin named Dolly.One day while she was just six months old,Dolly was watching a trainer standing at the window smoking a cigarette,blowing puffs of smoke.Dolly swam to her mother,got a mouthful of milk,then returned to the window and released a cloud of milk that surrounded her head.The trainer was“absolutely astonished”.Somehow Dolly came up with the idea of using milk to represent smoke.Using one thing to represent something else isn’t just imitation.It is art.

【推荐2】Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years living abroad. Now a pair of psychologist has proven that there is indeed a link.

As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit. (The solution is to use the box as a candleholder and fix it to the wall with the pin.) They found 60% of the students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.

A follow-up study with 72 Americans and 36 foreigners explored their creative negotiating skills. Pairs of students were asked to play the role of seller of a petrol station who then needed to get a job and a buyer who would need to hire staff to run the business. The two were likely to reach a deadlock because the buyer had been told he could not afford what the seller was told was his minimum price. Nevertheless, when both negotiators had lived abroad 70 % struck a deal in which the seller was offered a management job at the petrol station in return for a lower asking price. When neither of the negotiators had lived abroad, none was able to reach a deal.

Merely travelling abroad, however, was not enough. You do have to live there. Packing your beach towel and suntan lotion will not, by itself make you Hemingway.

【推荐1】In a recent series of experiments at the University of California, researchers studied toddlers’ thinking about winners and losers, bullies (欺凌) and victims.

In the first experiment, toddlers (学步儿童) watched a scene in which two puppets (木偶) had conflicting goals: One was crossing a stage from right to left, and the other from left to right. The puppets met in the middle and stopped. Eventually one puppet bowed down and moved aside, letting the other one pass by. Then researchers asked the toddlers which puppet they liked. The result: 20 out of 23 toddlers picked the higher-status puppet — the one that did not bow or move aside. It seems that individuals can gain status for being dominant (占优势的) and toddlers like winners better than losers.

But then researchers had another question: Do toddlers like winners no matter how they win? So, researchers did another experiment very similar to the one described above. But this time, the conflict ended because one puppet knocked the other down and out of the way. Now when the toddlers were asked who they liked, the results were different: Only 4 out of 23 children liked the winner.

These data suggest that children already love a winner by the age of 21-31 months. This does not necessarily mean that the preference is inborn: 21 months is enough time to learn a lot of things. But if a preference for winners is something we learn, we appear to learn it quite early.

Even more interesting, the preference for winners is not absolute. Children in our study did not like a winner who knocked a competitor down. This suggests that already by the age of 21-31 months, children’s liking for winners is balanced with other social concerns, including perhaps a general preference for nice or helpful people over aggressive ones.

In a time when the news is full of stories of public figures who celebrate winning at all costs, these results give us much confidence. Humans understand dominance, but we also expect strong individuals to guide, protect and help others. This feels like good news.

【推荐2】Philosophy of Education is a label applied to the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education. It can be considered a branch of both philosophy and education. Education can be defined as the teaching and learning of specific skills, and the imparting of knowledge, judgment and wisdom, and is something broader than the societal institution of education we often speak of.

Many educationalists consider it a weak and imprecise field, too far removed from the practical applications of the real world to be useful. But philosophers dating back to Plato and the Ancient Greeks have given the area much thought and emphasis, and there is little doubt that their work has helped shape the practice of education over the millennia.

Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and education is an essential element in “The Republic” (his most important work on philosophy and political theory, written around 360 B.C.). In it, he advocates some rather extreme methods: removing children from their mothers’ care and raising them as wards of the state, and differentiating children suitable to the various castes(社会等级), the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. He believed that education should be holistic(全面的), including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed that talent and intelligence is not distributed genetically and thus is to be found in children born to all classes, although his proposed system of selective public education for an educated minority of the population does not really follow a democratic model.

Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education, the ultimate aim of which should be to produce good and virtuous citizens. He proposed that teachers lead their students systematically, and that repetition be used as a key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates’ emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught, among which he clearly mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music, physical education, literature, history, and a wide range of sciences, as well as play, which he also considered important.

During the period of Middle Age, the idea of Perennialism was first formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his work “De Magistro”. Perennialism holds that one should teach those things deemed to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere, namely principles and reasoning, not just facts (which are apt to change over time), and that one should teach first about people, not machines or techniques. It was originally religious in nature, and it was only much later that a theory of worldly Perennialism developed.

During the Renaissance(文艺复兴), the French doubter Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592) was one of the first to critically look at education. Unusually for his time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional wisdom of the period, calling into question the whole structure of the educational system, and the assumption that university-educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example.