Logos Review · Issue 1 (Spring 2026) · Special Topic: Education
Xu Jing
Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, USA
Abstract: Seeing Children as Cognitive Agents argues a shift from viewing children as passive recipients/objects to recognizing them as active reasoners and meaning-makers. Combining auto-ethnographic vignettes (a mother–son dialogue on the value of education and violin learning), reinterpretations of classic Sinophone ethnography, and cross-cultural developmental tasks (including a cultural reframing of the Marshmallow Test), the paper advances a simultaneously universalistic and pluralistic account of children’s learning and moral development grounded in cognitive anthropology. Key claims: (1) In real contexts children are subjects and interlocutors—they read intentions, negotiate meanings, and thus require methods and pedagogy that honor situatedness and intersubjectivity; (2) Peer interaction and play form the horizontal axis of moral and cultural learning; punitive effects hinge on children’s inferences about legitimacy and relational order rather than linear stimulus–response; (3) Cultural practices can redefine experimental measures, warning against confounding habit with ability; (4) Aesthetic wonder fuels the explore–exploit engine, urging curricula and school governance to preserve exploratory space and grant substantive participation in decisions; (5) Current large language models struggle to capture children’s creative meaning-making in play/symbolic action. Methodologically, the paper includes children in knowledge co-production; practically, it proposes a “bend-down/stand-up” posture for teachers and child-participatory decision-making, offering implications for educational research, curriculum design, and human–AI dialogue.
Keywords: cognitive anthropology; children as agents; moral development; intersubjectivity; peer learning; explore–exploit trade-off; cross-cultural experiments; child participation in education
https://doi.org/10.64053/PYHG2600
A Soul-Searching Question
In early September 2024, my fourteen-year-old son returned to the United States after spending his summer vacation in China. One early autumn evening in Seattle, surrounded by verdant pines and cypresses, I took a walk with my son to talk about his trip. He suddenly asked me, “Mom, you got into Tsinghua University. Why did you come to America? Who in Seattle ( meaning, ordinary Americans ) has even heard of Tsinghua? ( The implication being, who in China hasn’t heard of Tsinghua? )” This sudden, soul-searching question struck me like a sudden blow. I stood there, stunned, pondering why he would ask this and how I should respond. This child, who had grown up with a great deal of freedom in Seattle, had experienced a profound cultural, and even existential, shock during a short one-month trip back to China. He knew little about American university rankings, yet he had already sensed what Tsinghua University means to parents and students in China and had felt the pressure of its educational competition. He saw how young children were busy and exhausted even during their summer break, and he confided in me: “Mom, I only want to go back to China for vacation in the future, not for school. For a while ( during my time in China ), I was a bit confused about the purpose of life.” It was only then that I understood what was really troubling him: he was astonished to discover that getting into Peking University or Tsinghua University was the ultimate goal for so many families in China.
I tried to answer him: “When I was young, I did think getting into Tsinghua was very important. But is getting into a good university the only value in life? No, I don’t see it that way anymore. Life is vast. Regardless of which school you attend, life will be filled with many hardships and sorrows, but it will also have many joys that have nothing to do with what university you went to.” I then turned the question back to him: “Is your life right now meaningful and filled with hope?” He answered, very naturally, “Yes.” My son’s soul-searching question points directly to the value of education, and even the meaning of life itself.
For a long time, it has been I who has been gazing at my child, from his birth to his growth into a happy and confident teenager. Yet, a simple conversation in our ordinary life made me realize that I was also being seen by him. Children have, in fact, always been cognitive agents —— active agents endowed with a powerful capacity to learn, perceive, think, understand, and construct knowledge. Every child is a unique individual who connects with the surrounding world through their own mind and emotions. As a mother, like the vast majority of parents, I am beset by parental anxiety at all times and in all places: What is the purpose of education? What constitutes a good education? Is there a single best theory of parenting? Can we design our children’s growth? Parental anxiety largely stems from a top-down posture that treats children as objects to be viewed and molded. While the value of education is a matter of opinion, the process of seeing children as cognitive agents, which I have gradually come to in the interweaving of my research and parenting, has had a therapeutic effect on me. For this reason, I am grateful for the opportunity to study children, especially from the perspective of cognitive anthropology, which lies at the intersection of anthropology and cognitive science. From anthropological fieldwork to psychological experiments, from contemporary China to diverse cultural contexts across time and space, from being an observer to a parent, I am constantly awed by the creativity of children. The world of a child’s mind draws me in like a magnetic field, for it holds the secret of what it means to be human. With this humble essay, I wish to look back on my intertwined journey of parenting and research, introduce my interdisciplinary scholarly path and analytical cases, and see children as the cognitive agents they are.
Wonder and Awe
The year my son was born, I was a doctoral student in anthropology, also taking courses in developmental psychology. I personally experienced the mutual illumination of fieldwork and theory. I sporadically documented moments from my son’s infancy, marveling at the miracle of a small life’s growth. The most interesting part of parenting is not how we teach, but how we learn — learning to lower ourselves to see the world through a child’s eyes. Not long after my son was born, I was giving him a bath one day when I noticed he was staring quietly at the white wall opposite him. The ripples in the bathwater were casting fantastical light and shadows on the wall, and he was mesmerized. We had a picture of a duckling in our home, and I would often hold him and hum “The Little Yellow Duck” song, sometimes pointing to the picture. One day, when he was a few months old, as I said the words “little yellow duck,” his gaze suddenly shifted to the picture. He had established a logical connection between a linguistic sign, an external object, and his mother’s communicative cues.
These moments are like flashes of insight. An infant’s gaze opens a window for the researcher into the pre-linguistic human mind. Many psychological experiments explore an infant’s innate knowledge, learning mechanisms, and cognitive development by measuring their looking time or analyzing how they align their gaze with adults and share attention and intentionality in social scenes. When I took my one-year-old son to the supermarket, my eyes saw only household goods. But this little person, walking unsteadily from his own height, spotted a large ball—his favorite toy—on the bottom shelf of an aisle. He pulled me along, pointing at the ball, his eyes fixed on that single object. A child has their own perspective, one that is not the same as my own accustomed view. That scene left a deep impression on me. When my son was six, he came home from school, and as usual, I asked him what he did that day. He said very seriously, “A flytrap!” and then vividly described two different flytrap devices he had heard about from a friend. In a day of school, what I cared about was what the teacher had taught in class; for him, the highlight was the flytrap, or rather, the novel things he had heard from his friends. The next morning, he woke up and couldn’t wait to tell me the difference between bees and wasps — a bee stings once and sacrifices itself, while a wasp can sting a hundred times and be fine. It was as if he had discovered a new continent, and this, too, was something he had heard from a friend. My adult brain had almost never processed information about flytraps, bees, or wasps, but the eager look in my son’s eyes showed that the world he cared about was not the same as the world I took for granted. Perhaps understanding the world as a child sees it is the very beginning of education.
The journey of accompanying my son as he learned music, however, truly opened my eyes and gave me a profound insight into what good education is. I still vividly remember the first time I took him for a trial violin lesson. At five and a half, he was sensitive and shy. Walking down the narrow hallway, he hugged me and said, “Mommy, I’m scared.” I asked, “What are you scared of, sweetie?” He said timidly, “I’m scared I won’t play the violin well.” I had never learned the violin and couldn’t empathize, so I could only offer platitudes and abstract reassurances: “I know you’re afraid of not doing well, but with anything, if you practice seriously, you can learn it well. Like when you didn’t know how to ride a two-wheel bike, but Grandma took you to practice every day, and you learned, right?” He nodded with a glimmer of understanding, his small hand gripping mine tightly. At the door to the classroom, we heard a medley of sounds —some melodious and skilled, others the scraping noises of a beginner. I said, “Look, sweetie, there’s another child who is just starting and can’t play well either. But if you keep practicing, you’ll sound as good as that other music, right?” On the door of the teacher’s studio was a quote from the Japanese music educator Shinichi Suzuki, which was also the teacher’s educational creed: “When love is deep, much can be accomplished“. I am mentally preparing myself for the five-year-old mind. I want to come down to their physical limitations and up to their sense of wonder and awe” ( Suzuki and Suzuki 1993 ). While the Suzuki method receives mixed reviews in academic circles, these words moved me deeply, humbling me to “see” the child.
When we entered the studio and met the teacher, my impression was excellent. She was an elderly woman with a full head of silver hair, who spoke slowly and was gentle and patient with children. I asked her how a restless little boy could learn an instrument as difficult as the violin. The teacher smiled warmly and said, “I especially love teaching children. It’s truly marvelous. You have no idea how much potential a small child has!” And so, we embarked on a new journey.
This teacher had taught many young boys, including some who were quite rambunctious. As a beginner’s violin teacher, her first principle was not to stifle her students’ interest. She rarely criticized them and had no strict requirements for practice time, instead tailoring her approach to each child, nurturing their feeling for music. Every lesson, I could feel the teacher’s love for music education and her affection for the children, which perfectly matched the “When love is deep” motto on her door. A year later, the teacher taught a new practice piece, and my son loved it. I asked him why he liked it ( as it seemed to be a rather tedious exercise ). He explained that he liked how the melody had dramatic highs and lows and different speeds. I was astonished: where did this little boy, who only knew how to play with his Transformers, get such a nuanced and natural feel for music? Halfway through a lesson, the teacher asked him, “I think that’s enough for today, shall we stop here?” My son shook his head, saying he wanted to finish learning the whole piece. The teacher followed his lead and continued. I watched him practice closely; he was so focused on every new fingering, every note, every rhythm. He was mobilizing his entire mind to analyze, recognize, and generate new moments of understanding. His eyes were fixed on the fingerboard, his long, dark eyelashes resting like butterflies, each instant as beautiful as an oil painting. On that day, I saw that his inner motor had started, and he had entered a beautiful new world. I am grateful we found such a good teacher. My son has now been learning the violin for nearly ten years, and his love for music has only grown. He will pull me over to appreciate a piece he loves, or tell me how listening to Mahler’s 5th Symphony gives him a sense of awe that transcends the tangible world and defies words. I envy him for having such a passion, a constant emotional outlet for all the joys and sorrows he will face in life. In contrast, some school subjects fail to spark his interest at all, and I cannot force him; after all, he must walk his own path in life. Even though I have only raised one child, I have seen how distinct a child’s individual will can be, and I have gradually come to understand Shinichi Suzuki’s words: to “rise up, and follow their sense of wonder and awe for the world.”
Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue
Seeing children as cognitive agents and following their wondrous mental worlds—this perspective stems from my understanding of child development and continues to nourish my research, shaping my academic trajectory of exploring the world of children beyond disciplinary divides. Mainstream social sciences, including anthropology, do not pay much attention to child cognition. There was even a widely circulated paper titled “Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children?” ( Hirschfeld 2002 ). Although children are crucial to understanding core anthropological questions like “what it means to be human” and “cultural acquisition,” mainstream anthropologists have paid little attention to children’s cognitive abilities and developmental mechanisms, and have overlooked the significance of child cognitive development for understanding society and culture. Even in educational anthropology, most research focuses on “parenting,” emphasizing educational systems, philosophies, and strategies, rather than on understanding the rich inner world of thought and emotion of the child.
Many anthropologists hold outdated, pre-cognitive science biases about child cognition. One is a behaviorist bias, which treats the child’s mind as a black box and focuses only on external environmental stimuli and behavioral responses, without needing to consider the complex mechanisms of information processing in the brain. Another is an extreme constructivist bias, which treats the child’s mind as a blank slate ( tabula rasa ) to be shaped by the environment ( Xu, 2024: 15 ). In the discourse of social science, the child is merely a product of the environment, which includes social structures, cultural ideas, and political-economic systems.
Cognitive anthropology emerged from the “cognitive revolution” of the mid-20th century, which opened up the black box of the human mind ( Miller 2003 ). It regards the mind and cognition as fundamental to understanding human behavior and social culture, and thus places special importance on child development. This field lies at the intersection of anthropology and psychology, placing the interface between social culture and individual cognition under a theoretical spotlight. It both studies psychological mechanisms and maintains anthropology’s cross-cultural perspective and reflexive spirit, which has become the theoretical direction I have dedicated myself to ( Xu, 2020 ). From the perspective of cognitive anthropology, children are not the objects of education, but its protagonists. Humans have a long childhood, and children are unprecedented learners on this planet. It could be said that learning is a child’s nature. Children demonstrate strong agency in language acquisition and in constructing their knowledge systems of the biological and physical worlds, which is what makes education in these domains possible. My research focuses on children’s social cognition — that is, how children understand social roles, cultural customs, moral norms, and so on. When we talk about the transmission and evolution of human culture, most research focuses on the role of adults. Yet, the fact that humans have been able to accumulate such a wealth of social and cultural knowledge, and that our species has even managed to thrive, is inseparable from the learning capacity of children themselves ( Lew-Levy and Amir 2024 ).
Children’s learning is active — they proactively explore the world rather than passively receiving information ( Gweon and Zhu 2024 ); it is reflective — children, like scientists, can constantly reflect on and revise their knowledge systems ( Gopnik 2010 ); and it is intentional — humans can act based on intended goals from infancy and also develop the ability to understand others’ intentions ( Wellman 2014 ) ( Xu, 2020 ).
Twenty years ago, I happened to watch a Chinese documentary, Kindergarten, which recorded the daily life of a boarding kindergarten in Wuhan. The words and actions of the children, seemingly naive, were also thought-provoking, and I was inspired with the idea of studying children. For example, in one scene, a female adult from the film crew ( let’s call her “Auntie” ) is talking to a little boy:
Auntie: “Who is your favorite classmate in your class?”
Boy: “A girl?”
Auntie: “Yes.”
Boy: “Umm… I don’t know…” ( hesitantly and shyly )
Auntie: “You don’t know? I think you like someone but you’re afraid to say.” ( smiling as she asks )
Boy: “How can you tell?”
Auntie: “I can just tell. You hesitated for a long time. I probably even know who it is, the one in white.”
Boy: “If you already know, why are you still asking me?”
I have shown this clip in lectures at universities in China, and the students always smile in knowing agreement. Some students told me they saw the influence of the cultural context in this brief exchange: “Even if there is a relatively strong bond of trust between the interviewer and the child, in the Chinese cultural context — where young children are not supposed to have crushes and where Chinese people are generally shy about discussing feelings — the little boy still chose to hide ( his thoughts ).” Other students saw the mutual interpretation between the researcher and the research subject in this specific research setting: “In that situation, the child hesitates in his response, and the interviewer observes the child’s hesitation and then infers why the child is hesitating.” This short clip showed me that: 1) Children in their preschool years have already developed the ability to perceive and infer the thoughts and feelings of others, a capacity known in cognitive science as “Theory of Mind” ( To M ), which is the foundation of rich human social cognition. To understand the developmental mechanisms of child cognition requires systematic knowledge and rigorous methods from psychology. 2) A child’s mental world is deeply influenced by their socio-cultural environment; how society and culture shape an individual’s lifeworld is a domain of anthropological research. 3) Moreover, the epistemology and methodology of anthropology emphasize the situational knowledge and the intersubjectivity between the researcher and the researched. The researcher and the subject, each with their own complex systems of meaning, power positions, life experiences, and communicative intentions, engage with each other in a specific context.
Twenty years later, looking back at this clip from Kindergarten, I realize that the interdisciplinary approach of cognitive anthropology has not only helped me explore theoretical questions about how child cognitive development interacts with the socio-cultural environment, but has also inspired me to pursue deeper epistemological questions about how knowledge about child development is produced. For example, the “Relevance Theory” co-authored by French cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber and British linguist Deirdre Wilson (1996) provides a philosophical framework that transcends disciplinary boundaries and highlights human cognitive agency. Viewing my research field through the lens of Relevance Theory, whether it is anthropological fieldwork or controlled psychological experiments, the knowledge we produce about children is the result of interpersonal communicative interaction. The researcher and the subject mutually interpret each other in a specific behavioral context and within a multi-layered system of meaning, making cognitive inferences about each other’s communicative intent to find the relevance between utterances/communicative signals and the context. It is not just adults; children, too, participate as cognitive agents in this process of interpretation, inference, and communication. In the Kindergarten interview scene, for instance, the little boy tries to find the relevance between the interviewer’s verbal cues and the context and to infer her intention, which leads to his puzzlement: Why are you asking what you already know?
Regarding epistemological questions, in my new book, ‘Unruly’ Children ( Xu 2024 ), I emphasize that a child’s active ability to “read faces and interpret moods” has a significant impact on fieldwork results, and may even be the foundation that makes ethnography possible. In other words, through the lens of the child, I rediscovered the inner texture of ethnographic practice and writing. This new book is a re-examination of classic ethnographic materials from Sinophone anthropology. In the late 1950s, anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf conducted more than two years of fieldwork in a Han Chinese village in the Taipei Basin. It was the first ethnographic study in the Euro-American academic world to focus on Han Chinese children. They collected a large amount of data, including interviews, observations, and psychological tests, but for various reasons, they never completed a systematic analysis of this material ( Xu, 2023 ). My reinterpretation of this material focuses on the children’s rich social cognition, because all the texts are the result of communicative interactions between the local children and the various researchers. Taking children’s fights as an example: when Margery Wolf administered a questionnaire in the local primary school, a key question was about fighting. Assuming they were bullied by a peer, how would the children react? The children’s chosen answers were not to react or not to fight back, because they had been taught from a young age that children should not fight.
However, in a different context, when Margery Wolf’s research assistant interviewed the children in the village and asked the same question, many of the children said they would fight back, “an eye for an eye,” and would not hesitate to act when necessary, without regard for the “correct answer.” The same question elicited starkly different answers, reflecting the children’s sensitivity to the research context, the researcher’s identity, and their intentions. In the children’s eyes, the American anthropologist Margery Wolf was a strange foreigner whom they dared not approach. They feared her in person but nicknamed her “big-nosed one” behind her back. When filling out her questionnaire in the formal atmosphere of the classroom where only Mandarin was allowed, the children obediently gave the correct answers. But the teenage local research assistant, whom the children called “Big Sister Chen,” was a playmate they were close to. They spoke to her in their mother tongue ( Minnan) , so they did not mind revealing their true feelings and described events in vivid detail. Ultimately, when we study children, children are also studying us. I chose a photograph taken by Arthur Wolf of children playing as the cover for my book, because this picture captures the moment when the gazes of the researcher/photographer and the research subjects meet — their mutual seeing.
It is not just anthropological ethnography that needs to consider the intersubjectivity between children and researchers. Psychological research, known for its controlled experiments, also faces the problem of interpreting meaning. Children are not just “subjects” but also “interlocutors.” Their verbal and nonverbal behaviors in an experiment reflect their cultural knowledge and their understanding of the research situation ( Xu 2019 ). Take the classic study in developmental psychology, the Marshmallow Test, for example. The experiment assesses a child’s capacity for delayed gratification ( the ability to resist an immediate impulse for a greater reward ) by testing whether they will wait for a second marshmallow instead of eating the one in front of them. Recently, cross-cultural comparative research has led scholars to reconsider the meaning of this experiment. For instance, in the same experimental procedure, Japanese children show a longer delay of gratification time when waiting for a marshmallow reward. However, when the reward is changed to a wrapped gift, American children’s waiting time exceeds that of Japanese children. The results do not reflect a difference in the children’s abilities but rather a difference in cultural habits. In Japan, waiting to eat is an important pre-meal ritual. In the United States, delaying the opening of gifts is a common cultural practice at occasions like Christmas or birthday parties ( Yanaoka et al. 2022 ). My collaborators and I have also found subtle cultural differences in our ongoing experimental research. In one task, we show participating children a few simple body movements and then ask them to imitate them. Some Chinese-American children in Seattle hesitate, trying to guess which movement is the “correct” one, or they perform the movement they are best at, as if the experiment is a test by an authority figure. This is related to the educational culture they have been immersed in since a young age, and possibly also to my identity as a Chinese-American adult. In contrast, children from the Republic of the Congo are shy to imitate, because in their tribal culture, body movements ( dance ) are a collective ritual, not an individual performance. What knowledge, norms, and expectations a child brings into an experimental setting, what kind of researcher they interact with, and how they interact all determine whether a psychological experiment is truly measuring the intended concept and to what extent it achieves its measurement goals. When children are seen as cognitive agents, psychological experiments and ethnographic fieldwork are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin.
Moral Development
Moral capacity is one of the mysteries of humanity; the complexity of human group morality far exceeds that of the animal world. However, on the topic of moral development, anthropology and psychology have followed divergent paths, each with its own limitations. Psychology focuses on individual psychological mechanisms and holds strongly universalistic assumptions about humanity and morality. Anthropology, on the other hand, critiques decontextualized, universal moral reasoning, focusing instead on people in diverse and specific structures, institutions, and discourses and their ethical practices shaped by their lifeworlds. In the 21st century, empirical research in cognitive science has discovered that human moral knowledge and emotions emerge in infancy, making child development a crucial direction for studying human moral psychology. Meanwhile, the body of thought on morality and ethics that has emerged in anthropology over the past two decades has largely ignored the dimension of child development, thereby obscuring the child as a cognitive agent ( Xu, 2020 ).
My research attempts to build a bridge between anthropology and psychology, to promote a theoretical dialogue between cognition and culture. Based on the epistemology of ethnographic fieldwork, I integrate multiple methods — including interviews, observation, questionnaires, psychological experiments, computational text analysis, and behavioral modeling — to understand children’s moral development and learning. My research advocates for a new theoretical orientation, one in which moral development and learning are simultaneously universalistic and pluralistic. These two aspects are not contradictory but are interwoven and complementary. 1) At the ontological level, humans share basic moral concerns that transcend cultural differences, such as care, reciprocity, fairness, and authority. 2) At the ontogenetic level, these universal basic moral concerns manifest in childhood as moral intuitions, supported by multiple social-cognitive mechanisms. These cognitive mechanisms originate from the motivational need to solve different types of problems or to regulate different social relationships. From a young age, children learn to manage the order and even the contradictions between different moral concerns in specific situations. 3) At the educational level, different communities across time and space show significant variation in their understanding of moral development, their ideal values, and their socialization practices ( Xu, 2019: 657; Xu, 2024: 17-18 ).
Whether in moral psychology or moral anthropology, the theoretical lineages remain rooted in Western-centric thought. Therefore, my research carries a reflexive stance toward current theoretical concepts. It connects intellectual threads from Sinology about “moral cultivation” ( renlun jiaohua ) with the vibrant child experiences discovered through fieldwork to discuss moral development in a Chinese cultural context, highlighting the cognitive agency of children. The “child training/socialization” research paradigm, long prevalent in Sinophone anthropology, is in fact a top-down gaze at the child, focusing on adult parenting philosophies and strategies, not on the child’s own experience. This paradigm is related not only to the social science approach that views the child’s mind as a black box or a blank slate but also reflects the lineage of Chinese moral thought, “especially Confucian thought, which places ‘filial piety’ and vertical family relationships ( the father-son axis, the mother-son axis ) at the forefront, viewing the child as the vessel for Chinese moral cultivation and family ethics, and as the object onto which ethical discourse is projected, in order to construct the archetype of the ‘innocent child’” ( Xu, 2023: 76 ). My research, in contrast, focuses on child cognition, exploring how children actively acquire moral knowledge and construct ethical norms, rather than passively receiving instruction.
My first book, The Good Child ( Xu 2017 ), and its related publications are based on fieldwork in a Shanghai kindergarten in the 2010s. The book explores how, in an era of shifting value systems and intense parental anxiety, children handle complex educational messages and acquire moral knowledge and emotions related to fairness, reciprocity, empathy, and hierarchical authority. I found a tension between what children actually know and the explicit instruction they receive. For example, their sharing is not based on a collectivist, egalitarian principle, but rather reflects considerations of individual reciprocity. Children’s understanding of basic moral concerns also shows their sensitivity to specific social orders and cultural concepts. For instance, their understanding of reciprocity is permeated by the cultural influence of renqing ( human feeling/social connections ). Their acquisition of the moral discourse of “behaving well” led me to reflect on the concept of fairness ( a horizontal moral order ) emphasized in Western theory and to see the deeply rooted concept of hierarchical authority ( a vertical moral order ) in the soil of Chinese culture ( for a detailed review, see Xu, 2020 ). My second book, ‘Unruly’ Children ( Xu, 2024 ), shifts the research perspective from a modern global metropolis to a traditional Han Chinese society in the Taipei Basin of the late 1950s. The protagonists of the book change from kindergarten children sitting in neat rows “behaving well” to children running and laughing in a village. Although this book analyzes the classic fieldwork data left behind by the senior anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf, my intention in writing it was not just to reconstruct a vanished childhood history and an obscured academic history, but more importantly, to see children anew.
In contrast to the widely known educational ideals of “obedience” and “being good,” what emerges from the fieldwork materials is the image of the “unruly” child who talks back to parents, feigns compliance while acting in defiance, and teases adults. This led me to reflect on what constitutes a “traditional Han Chinese family.” The main title, ‘Unruly’ Children ( with “unruly” in quotation marks ), carries the book’s core argument: from an adult’s perspective, I see children who repeatedly defy instructions, but when I shift my gaze to the child’s perspective, especially focusing on the playful interactions among children, I see a scene of order that contrasts with “unruliness.” Children reach agreements, resolve conflicts, and in the space between cooperation and conflict, they linger and play, constructing the rules and norms of their own small world.
Encountering the “unruly” child opened a new research direction for my understanding of moral development. I saw the perplexing question of parent-child interaction: why is punishment ineffective? Although children who fight are severely punished by their parents, although they give the “correct” answer of not fighting back to the American anthropologist Margery Wolf, and although in psychological tests they say that a “boy who fights will become a hooligan,” these criticisms and punishments have no immediate effect. If we see the child as a cognitive agent, then the process of punishment is not a mechanical “stimulus-response,” but a complex exchange of information. Returning to the “Relevance Theory” mentioned earlier, a child will try to infer the adult’s intention behind the punishment, evaluate whether the punishment is just, and may feel shame or anger, not just fear. Savoring the children’s emotional experiences and communicative reasoning during the process of being punished in the fieldwork data not only gave me research inspiration but also reminded me to be more self-reflective as a mother raising my own child. I saw the importance of peer learning, which is also part of the child’s cognitive agency. From Western theories of moral development to the intellectual traditions of China, the emphasis has been on the vertical axis of educational relationships (adult and child) and top-down moral cultivation. This new book, however, highlights the horizontal relationships of the child’s world: peer groups and siblings. Children work together, play together, gossip together, invent their own games together, and also mock the strange phenomena of the adult world together — for example, by imitating the gods who walk backwards in festival processions, imitating police raiding a gambling den, imitating adults shoving each other after drinking, or imitating hosts fighting over who gets to treat a guest, pulling each other back and forth. I saw the secret of human intelligence: the world of children’s play is witty and humorous. They use their creativity to recode rich cultural meanings, re-contextualize them, and give them new meanings that belong to them. When I used a cutting-edge large language model to systematically analyze more than 1,600 naturalistic observation texts, I found that even this highly efficient and high-speed artificial intelligence algorithm, when faced with these moments interwoven with play and imagination, could not well decipher the enigma of the children’s creative meaning-making. I look forward to future research that continues to use moral ethics as a window to explore the cognitive agency of children and its relationship with artificial intelligence.
Conclusion
In 1950, Alan Turing, the “father of artificial intelligence,” envisioned the following in his famous paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”: “It can be maintained that the child’s brain is like a notebook bought from a stationer’s, with very little mechanism in it, but plenty of blank sheets”; “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would hope to obtain the adult brain” ( Turing 1950 ). More than half a century has passed. The convergence of cognitive science and computer science has given rise to powerful artificial intelligence. AI researchers are now joining hands with developmental psychologists to crack the code of intelligence from the perspective of child learning. For example, using 61 hours of first-person audio-visual data from a single child, rather than massive internet datasets, a machine learning algorithm was trained and achieved remarkable results in word acquisition ( Vong et al. 2024 ). Nevertheless, a program that truly simulates the child’s mind has yet to be created. A child’s brain is clearly not the “blank notebook” Turing imagined, yet we still know very little about the initial conditions and complex learning mechanisms of the developmental puzzle that is the child’s mind. In other words, our understanding of the cognitive agency of children is still just the tip of the iceberg.
Psychologists use the “Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff” framework from machine learning and reinforcement learning to compare the intelligence/algorithms of children and adults. The former is characterized by exploratory learning, open to unknown possibilities, which may not bring immediate optimal returns. The latter is characterized by exploitative learning, using existing knowledge to make decisions in order to maximize short-term gains ( Gopnik 2020 ). The keynote speech at the 2016 International Congress of Infant Studies ( ICIS ) is still etched in my mind. Professor Karen Adolph of New York University, who studies infant walking, realized that when researchers step out of the “laboratory” mindset, they see a more wondrous world of infants. By adult standards, based on controlled experiments, infant walking appears to be “exploitative learning.” Babies walk because there is something attractive in front of them; they walk in the shortest, most efficient pattern; their walking is goal-oriented. However, when researchers removed the artificial laboratory apparatus, they discovered that infant walking is often aimless. Their gaze might shift from one place to another; their walking paths are complex and non-linear. Even in an empty room with no objects to serve as goals, they still walk nonstop. When researchers stepped out of the lab and used head-mounted cameras to track and record children in their natural state — or, in my words, when they stooped down to enter the child’s perspective — they saw infants using their own eyes, their own feet, and their own bodies to openly perceive this world. They learn for the sake of learning, their exploratory spirit forging ever forward.
The long period of childhood is a gift to humanity. The child is a wondrous co-existence of being and becoming, of the present and the future. Faced with my fourteen-year-old son’s soul-searching question, I am glad that he once had a childhood where he could freely perceive the world, unconstrained by short-term goals. I look back at those mystery-like wonders I witnessed, those moments of being lost in the world that made my soul tremble: my son feeling an ecstatic beauty in the shifting notes of a violin, marveling at the lives of bees, wasps, grasses, and trees, staring at the ripples on a white wall… And then, there was that almost divine moment: when he was very, very small, he was sitting on the bed a few feet away from me while I was writing at my computer. I glanced over in his direction, and suddenly our eyes met. The little baby was looking at me, his gaze filled with an indescribable gentleness and curiosity, a quiet joy and complete trust, the primordial love of life. In that instant, the stars twinkled. In a child’s loving gaze lies a mystery that no algorithm can ever decipher.
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This is the English version of an article published in Chinese in Logos Review (汉语学志). Read the Chinese original (中文原文) · All English articles
