Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

— Alison Gopnik

Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.

— Alison Gopnik

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually played, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

— Alison Gopnik

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

— Alison Gopnik

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.

— Alison Gopnik

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

— Alison Gopnik

Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.

— Alison Gopnik

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a perfect thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.

— Alison Gopnik

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

— Alison Gopnik

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

— Alison Gopnik