265: Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Kids Learn Best

What do we really know about reading? What do we know about math? What do we, is it really true that if they get a head start that they're going to be the geniuses of the future? Quick answer. No if, is it really the case if you start your kids with tennis lessons or piano lessons when they're four they're going to be world-class. No, sorry about that. So you might as well have fun because what having fun with them does is believe it or not, offers them the strongest, richest curriculum you could ever have in the world. And by the way, it's more fun for you as a parent. So in this time period, in this world where the one thing that seems to be missing is joy, our book is about bringing back joy.

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Welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. If you've spent any time at all in parenting spaces over the last couple of decades, you've probably bumped into the idea that play is how children learn best. And the flashcards and enrichments classes and the baby genius videos might not be doing what we hope. Today's guest is one of the researchers who has done the most to put that idea on solid scientific footing. Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Deborah Lefkowitz faculty fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author with Dr. Roberta Golinkoff of Einstein Never Used Flashcards, first published in two thousand three and just republished in a fully updated edition for the age of smartphones, tablets and AI. The book's core argument is that the characteristics that make play so engaging for children are exactly the characteristics that support the deepest learning. And in an era when parents are monitoring their baby's sleep cycles with automated gadgets and may feel afraid that there won't be any jobs left for their kids to do in 20 years, a message to relax can be a welcome one. In our conversation, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek talks about what play actually looks like in practice, the difference between free play and guided play, what playful learning looks like at home with the everyday things you're already doing anyway, and why she thinks the pressure to get kids ahead earlier may be working against the goal. And at the end, I ask her two questions about research and culture that I've been chewing on for a while that I think are especially relevant to this conversation. My 11-year-old tells me that I have to say some words on the YouTube version that I've never said before. And those words are please like and subscribe. Apparently, it helps more people to see my work. So if you would like to see more regular updates from me on topics like play related to children's learning and growth and development, please do like this video and subscribe so that you'll get new content when it's released. And now let's hear from Dr. Hirsh-Pasek. Welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Well, thank you so much, Jen, for having me.

You have the Einstein Never Used Flashcards book. It's being reissued, reissued, reissued. And I know and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to start by giving away the main message in the book. What do you hope they're going to take from it?

Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. We first wrote this book. It was in two thousand three. I mean, can you imagine that long ago? And they called us and they said, yeah, we just write a preface. And I said, absolutely not. Since two thousand three, right, a lot has changed in child development and a lot has changed in the context of parenting because you had the iPhone, you have the iPad. Now we have AI. I mean, come on. There's a lot going on to make parents unbelievably crazed in the world. And somebody should tell parents that they're OK and that if they just play with their kids, the kids are going to be great. And that's what the science says. So if I cut to the chase, we rewrote the whole book because we didn't want it to just be a preface. We wanted it to be timely for the time that we live in. And we wanted parents to know we've got your back.

Hmm. And what does that mean practically in terms of what parents are going to find in the book?

What parents are going to find is what the science actually says. But in what I call edible science, I mean, a lot of people, they write this stuff and they handouts and brochures. And oh, my God, I couldn't read all that. I'll be very clear with you. I had three kids, three sons and three grandkids. And my three sons were not the same. They were very different. So if you wrote your handbook for one of them, the chances that it would be right for the two others is really not high. So what I wanted to do was to say, look, we got to we got to calm down and stop telling people that they have to micromanage everything that their kids are doing, because frankly, it's impossible. And all it's doing, it makes me as a grandmother, a nervous wreck. I can't even imagine what is making parents today because you think you're going to mess up no matter what you do. So what do we really know? You know, what do we really know about reading? What do we know about math? What do we is it really true that if they get a head start, that they're going to be the geniuses of the future? Quick answer.

No. If is it really the case if you start your kids with tennis lessons or piano lessons when they're four, they're going to be world class? No. Sorry about that. So you might as well have fun, because what having fun with them does is believe it or not, offers them the strongest, richest curriculum you could ever have in the world. And by the way, it's more fun for you as a parent. So in this time period, in this world where the one thing that seems to be missing is joy. Our book is about bringing back joy. I mean, this is like so mind blowing in the last 20 years of this, you know, developmental psychology, working with kids, studying kids. I think the epiphany for me is that exactly the characteristics that help kids learn best are exactly the characteristics evolution built in in play. We learn best when we're active. Not when we're passive. We learn best when we're engaged, not when we're distracted. Duh right. We learn best when something's meaningful. We learn best when something is socially interactive. Well, let's just look at the world now. How much is not socially interactive? Right. We learn best when we present things in a lot of different ways. You know, you can build the castle in multiple different ways with the Lego set. And we learn best when it's joyful. Now, where do you find those characteristics? Certainly, isn't in modern day schools right. Where is it?

Funnily enough, that was going to be my next question.

Play.

It's in play.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what do you think about the kind of learning that's happening in schools?

It doesn't work. I mean, we know that right. There are now years and years of data since this piece called A Nation at Risk was first published. I think it was nineteen eighty one. And since that time, get the scores up, get the scores up. You know, and we have done literally everything we need to get the scores up. OK, so why haven't the scores gone up? Like if I spent that much time in a business working on a product and my product still looked the same as it did 30 years ago, I'd be out of business. Now, the teachers are trying their hardest, but we have a problem where we keep getting told what to do by people who aren't educators, teachers or educators. They're professionals. OK, but a lot of the people who are running the system right now are in government or they're in business, love them dearly. But come on. That's like ask, you know, telling your dentist what you're supposed to do to put in a cavity. Is that really what we want? No, we want the educators to run education.

So I've heard you kind of rattle off some of these characteristics of play a couple of times, but I want to make sure that the parents actually get it and understand it. I know how you define play. So can you can you be more explicit about how I sure can? You know, what does play look like?

OK, so let's imagine that what you want to do. And by the way, I should say we focus on a particular kind of play. I love free play. Believe me, I do it in my life. It is like the coolest ever. OK, but what we need if we want to have learning is you actually have to have an explicit learning goal. OK, and you have to have a way pedagogical approach right. To helping kids find that goal, get to that goal. It isn't going to happen by going outside in your backyard. You're not going to come home and know the multiplication tables. Ok and some things like multiplication tables probably still need to be, you know, still need a little bit of direct instruction. That's OK. But what we also need to put in the mix is let's go through the characteristics that it's active, not passive. That it's engaging, not distracting. And we're going to give an example in a second that's meaningful to you right. Meaningful that you're interacting with other kids in schools right now. That happens two percent of the time on eleven hundred observations that we did a couple of years ago. A forty two classrooms. Whoa. What's going on right. That you need to learn it a couple of times in different ways and it should be joyful. So let's pop into a kindergarten classroom where they're using it. Ok in this kindergarten classroom, the teacher decided she was going to teach about weather. Now, you could have just taught about weather. Look in your book. Here are all the different kinds of clouds. Look over here. We're going to talk about when it's raining and when it's not. The signs are raining. But in this class, life was different. I went to the first clump of four kids sitting there, by the way, so well controlled. They were so into what they were doing. What were they doing? They had a dropper. They had water and they had a circle of a certain diameter. Their job was to fill the circle with a number of drops of water. How many did it take once the kids got the answer? And in this group of four, they didn't all get exactly the same answer. They wrote down their answer and then they compared the answers. Then they looked what would be the average of the answers. By the way, I said kindergarten just wanted to reiterate that and told us how much rain it would take to fill that much space. So I moved to another group. And when I moved to the other group, I saw this kid. He had a cardboard. He's rotating his arm around the cardboard box, kind of like this. I have no idea what he's doing, but he's pointing his box to this kid who's standing in front of a map. To the left of kid with map is another kid scrawling stuff because these kids can't write yet. OK, what is kid in map doing? As we move across the United States from the west to the east, we can see that there's a high front and there will be likely precipitation. And I'm like, are you kidding? High front precipitation. Did this kid really say that she did? And she's in kindergarten. That's playful learning. It's meaningful. It's active. It's engaging. Look how they're interacting with each other. They're doing things by moving across groups and having fun. I remember a beautiful example. Susan Engle used in her book when she was talking about teaching distance and she got a whole lot. One teacher got a whole lot of straws and bought the straws into the into classroom. And the kids had to figure out how many straws connected together would actually allow them to measure the length of the classroom. Well, they learned about length, right? These kids really got it. Then she said, well, I wonder how long it would take to get this to go around the world. And by God, if they didn't work to figure it out, that's learning. They will never forget that lesson.

So somehow, we've sort of gotten into this little rabbit hole of schools. OK, OK. Actually, yeah, it's OK. Your work is actually super relevant to parents. The primary audience.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So how do some of these ideas show up at home right. When we're thinking about the ways our kids learn and maybe we're thinking about, oh, the baby Einstein videos.

And I want my kids to skip them.

You know, there's I never use flashcards after all.

No, no, I never did. But, you know, there's some really fun things that I think we can do that we don't think about. You know, we were like, oh, my God, I got to get dinner on the table. What am I going to do? OK, I'll pop the kid in front of now. Just pick your favorite thing you want to, you know, pop the kid in front of. But for just a moment, we will have to get onto those A.I. toys because they're so horribly awful for your kids that please just ban them. OK, I'll come back to that in a minute. But you could you could just have the kid have a spatula and the kid could have a wooden spoon, give the kid a pot. And while you're cooking, they pretend to cook. Or if you need, you know, half a cup of flour. What's half a cup? You know, is that half a full cup? Notice what they're learning. What's two eggs? Oh, I wonder how many eggs there are in the box. Wow. Is that like one sixth of the eggs? All right. Look what I can do just being in the kitchen. It's unbelievable. Let's talk about another place, the laundry room. This stuff has to get done. OK, it just has to get done. I don't like it any better than you do. But we can sort the laundry into light and dark or color and black and colors. We can sort it to different colors. That's called classification skills. OK, when laundry comes out, how do you fold? Now, that is not easy. OK, but that's using that's using space and proportionality, right? Fold instead of dump. Look, these kinds of skills exist everywhere in your house. And our job is kind of capturing it. You wouldn't believe it. We went last year. I was doing a sabbatical in Sydney, Australia. So my grandkids, who were ten and eight, came to visit. And for about half a day now, I'm in Sydney, Australia right. They're only there for ten days. And you might think I better take them to every single museum, every single art opportunity that is available in Sydney, Australia. Nope. What I did is I said to the kids, oh, here, look, I bought you a pad and I bought you some I bought you some pencils. I wonder if we can go sit at this particular spot that overlooks the Sydney Harbour. And would you like to draw the Sydney Harbour Opera House? They sat there for two hours and working on this drawing. Now, they'll never forget that. And they were learning tons about one of the most iconic buildings in the entire world. They'll never forget that Sydney's on the coast. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. So we talked a lot about sort of micro level practices we can do with our kids. And I want to kind of wrap up by taking a more macro perspective. And I think, you know, there's been research done on this. And anecdotally, I think I could corroborate when you ask parents what they want for their kids. You know, most parents will respond, well, I want my kid to be happy right. Yeah. And there are also all these educational toys and subscriptions and extracurricular activities and intensive sports and all the rest of it. And I'm curious about how you see the connection or lack thereof between our stated goal and the ways that we're spending our time and our money with our kids.

Look, I think I think we're at an influx point in parenting. We've created such craziness. It's truly off the charts. And yes, we say that we want our kids to be happy, but we also don't want them to be left out. We want them to be the leader of the class. We want them to be the kid is going to get, you know, picked first for the baseball team into Harvard and, you know, and then have the best job on Wall Street or whatever it is we want. But the truth is that we need to relax, because if we especially in a world where we have AI. The memorizer, the analytic person is not going to be able to beat what the machine can do. It's not going to happen, at least for me. You know, when I use ChatGPT, I can get answers in three seconds or less to any question. I don't have to look it up. And why should I hire someone to do that? You know, one would hire people to do is to be better humans. Who can get along with people? I'm going to hire people to be creators. And critical thinkers who can design the next baseball glove. So if you really mean it, that you want your kids to succeed. Then give them downtime because that what that's what helps build what we call the default network mode in the brain, which helps to foster creativity. Give them downtime because they're not going to solve stuff if they're schlepping from activity to activity to activity. And as I said before, faster is not better. The kid who reads when they're three is not necessarily. In fact, not even likely to be the kid who's the best reader at age seven. In fact, there was this article that just came out. I thought it was just such an amazing article by Barth. I think it is. It's called Recent Discoveries in the Acquisition of Highest Levels of Human Performance. And it went. Yeah. It asked people who are at the highest levels in the world. OK, in sport, in arts, whatever. What was it like for them? Did they start hyper early? Answer? No. What did they do when they were young? They meandered. They explored.

They did five sports, not one.

You got it. You got it. And the ones that were channeled never made it to that level. So again, I think maybe that will help parents say, oh, let's give the kids a breather, you know, and let's give me a breather.

So I want to close with a question on research, right? Because you've been at this for a long time.

Oh, my God.

In the original book being published over 20 years ago. And I'm curious about your perspective on the role that research plays in shaping cultural ideas about childhood right. It doesn't just reflect our ideas. It shapes them as well, because researchers make a whole bunch of choices about what to study and who to study and how to describe what they see. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you sit with that?

Well, I sit probably in an unusual place. There are a lot of researchers who look for the next question and answer that question and then go on to the next question. And we all do that. And it is the best way to do research. But I think to make real progress and to really be translational and to do what I call edible science, that's good science, but it's also accessible and digestible and usable. I think you have to take risks. When I first started looking at play, which was 20 years ago, the first thing that people said to me is don't study it. And I said, why not? And they said, it's a waste of time.

I knew you were going to say that.

It's a waste of time. It's complete frivolity.

Play is a waste of time.

Play is a waste of time. And researching it is a waste of time. And you shouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole because it's really going to it's going to hurt your career. And I remember thinking, oh, I actually think it's interesting. I think it's it's worth taking the risk, you know. And so I did. But I entered into a frontier space that I think has brought so many possibilities. And that influences the culture when people see possibilities. You know, I think we need research and we need good research and we need the research that goes from this moment to this moment, to this moment, because God knows we don't want to take a drug that isn't like hyper well tested under very strict control conditions. But we also need people who are willing to go out in the world, see what's going on in the world, start researching it and opening that black box of possibilities. And I'll just give you one more example. I had a student, have a student, she's now back in my lab, but now is an expert and I'm her student. But when she was a grad student, she wanted to study creativity. OK. And I, of course, is I'm the enthusiastic guided play cheerleader on the side, telling her it's going to be the greatest thing to ever study. Nobody or very few people are in this field. Oh, it's going to be a frontier. We go into her third year exam and one of the professors says she shouldn't be studying this. How are you even letting her do this? You know, now when she graduates, she has four opportunities to go wherever she wants for her postdoc. She's well sought out and she's made progress in understanding of curiosity and creativity today. Three years from the public announcement of, you know, of open AI. Wow. We're looking for people who are doing creativity. We're looking for people who understand curiosity. And there she is.

Yeah. Yeah. I was revisiting Becoming Brilliant, another of your books, with Dr. Roberta Golinkoff recently, and was just kind of struck by how well that book has held up, even with AI. Right. And one of your key points in that book is there's, I think, five different dimensions of learning, one of which is content. And that's what schools focus on. And almost exclusively, you can write the content of what we should know. And your point at that time was that that's the least important domain. No, it really is low and behold, here we are.

Yeah, I was actually just reading, you know, something from Pennsylvania, from the Pennsylvania Chamber. There, you know, redoing their position statement on education. And when you look at what the workplace is looking for, they're looking for good collaborators, good communicators. You got to know your content. Yeah. I mean, you got to know it. But if you can't be a critical thinker in that, you can't creatively innovate to, you know, what the baseball glove is going to look like in the future. If you can't if you can't tell me, you know, that if you fail, you can get up and do it again. Then it seems to me you're not you're not ready for the workforce of tomorrow because things will change. Just like I have changed our whole world. Nobody's not talking about it right nobody. So we call those the six C's collaborate, communicate content, critical thinking, creative innovation and the confidence to give something a try and persist and learn, even if it doesn't work.

Yeah. So relevant today and my guess is will be relevant far into the future as well. So I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's a real treat to reread the book and come at it with fresh eyes and all of the revisions that you've made. I'm wondering if you can tell people where to find the book and where to find more about you and your work.

Yeah, absolutely. You can find me by just going to KathieHirschPasek.com and there's whole lots of cool stuff there. We can tell you about our recent research. We can tell you about playful learning landscapes where we're changing cities and making them more playful. Classrooms, which is active, playful learning. All that's on my website. And you can it'll direct you to the next place. Visit us at Dr. Kathy and Dr. Rowe. That's R-O on Instagram and any of your feedback. We would like to answer your questions. So just ask away.

Cool. And we'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes for this episode as well. Well, thank you so much for being here. It was such a treat to talk with you.

Thank you, Jen. That was fun.

Thank you so much to Dr. Hirsch-Pasek for this conversation. Links to Einstein never used flashcards. Her website and her Instagram are all in the show notes for this episode. I'll be honest, this book gave me a lot to think about. There's plenty in it that I agree with wholeheartedly. And there's also some content that raised questions for me that I couldn't fully explore in this conversation about topics like what success means and whether that version of success is what we want for our kids. If you're the kind of listener who wants to go a level deeper on those questions, that's a conversation I'd love to have somewhere I can explore these topics candidly. You can find out more about the Your Parenting Mojo membership at yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership, where I share my unfiltered thoughts in episodes just for members. Thanks for listening, and I will see you next time.

Hi, this is Jess from rural East Panama. I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can also donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable mattress ads. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned. And don't forget to head to yourparentingmojo.com to record your own message for the show.