Children must be taught how to think

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Margaret Mead

The meaning of the quote

In the 1920s, a uniform salesman named Melville Feynman took his young son Richard on walks in the Catskill Mountains. When they spotted a bird, Melville made up names for it in Italian, Chinese and Japanese, then told the boy that knowing every name for a bird teaches you nothing about the bird itself, only what people in different places call it. Then he said:

“Let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing.”

The next day another boy teased Richard for not knowing the bird’s name and told him his father had taught him nothing. Richard Feynman tells the story in the book What Do You Care What Other People Think?.

He went on to win the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The quote asks parents and teachers to do what Melville did. A fact answers one question, while a way of thinking helps a child work out the next one alone. Feynman later joked that the lesson worked too well. He never bothered learning what anything was called, and his father forgot to mention that names come in handy when you want to talk to other people about them.

Margaret Mead wrote the quote in her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa. She had spent months living among teenage girls in American Samoa, where young people grew up with one set of rules that everyone around them shared. Teenagers back in America faced competing churches, moral codes and career paths, with parents and preachers each pushing their own answer.

Mead argued that drilling one answer into a child leaves them helpless in a world full of other answers. Her fix was to train children to weigh the choices for themselves. In the next line she added that because old mistakes die slowly, children also need to be taught tolerance.

Mead wrote the book when news came from newspapers and early radio. Today a 12-year-old can get an answer to almost anything in 2 seconds, from a search engine or a chatbot. With that many answers on offer, knowing which ones to trust is the skill Mead was asking for.

Action steps

Melville’s lesson works at a kitchen table or in a classroom too.

1. Answer a question with a question. When your child asks why the moon changes shape, ask what they think first. Then look it up together and see who was closer.
2. Ask how they know. When they repeat something from a friend, a video or even you, ask where it came from. Keep your tone curious, so it builds a habit of checking.
3. Let them argue the other side. Pick a harmless dinner debate, like cats versus dogs, and have them defend the side they disagree with.
4. Say “I don’t know” out loud. Then show them how you find out.

The next time your child points at a bird, skip the name for a minute and ask what it’s doing.

About the author

Margaret Mead’s first try at college went badly. She spent a disappointing year at DePauw University in Indiana, her father’s old school, before transferring to Barnard College in New York in 1920.

At Columbia University she studied under the anthropologist Franz Boas, who wanted her to research Native American teenagers close to home. Mead wanted Polynesia. They settled on American Samoa, and in 1925 the 23-year-old sailed there alone, unable to swim and still nursing a broken ankle.

The book she wrote about that trip came out in 1928, when she was 27, and became a bestseller. By 1939 she had studied 7 cultures across the South Pacific and Indonesia, and she worked at the American Museum of Natural History for more than 50 years. In 1979, a year after her death, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In her autobiography Blackberry Winter, Mead names her grandmother Martha, a widowed schoolteacher, as the biggest influence on her life. Martha taught Margaret at home for much of her childhood, often outdoors, and gave the 8-year-old a job taking notes on how her baby sisters behaved.

Spelling mattered less to Martha, and Mead stayed a poor speller all her life.

Martha did for Margaret what Melville Feynman did for Richard in the Catskills. You can find the quote in the last chapter of Coming of Age in Samoa, where Mead turns from the Samoan teenagers she studied to the American ones she hoped to help.

Resources

• Coming of Age in Samoa (Book)
• Blackberry Winter (Book)
• What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Book)
• Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture (Website)
• Margaret Mead (Wikipedia)