When Alison Gopnik thinks of what makes a good education, she thinks of a big Victorian house in Philadelphia and a smoky bistro in Montreal.

The house is where Gopnik, an internationally recognized expert on how children learn, spent her childhood. The bistro, on Montreal’s downtown Mountain St. in the early 1970s, is where she spent much of her free time as a student at McGill University.

Her childhood was stimulated by parents who laughed at Woody Allen, debated architecture, took her to museums, dressed her as the Greek goddess Athena or Shakespeare’s Ophelia for Halloween, and had her read Henry Fielding novels out loud around campfires.

By comparison, she found elementary school “hopelessly dull.”

When she was 12, her parents moved to Montreal to teach at McGill. As a teenager she hobnobbed with artists, scientists, journalists and political activists at a place called Le Bistro, immersed in the revolutionary spirit of the times while drinking Pernod and smoking Gitanes.

“For me, intellectual life wasn’t something you achieved, it was something you breathed,” Gopnik wrote in an essay on her upbringing. “The education most children get should be more like my informal education.”

She’ll be making the argument as a presenter at the annual ideaCity conference in Toronto from June 16 to 18, an eclectic gathering that might remind Gopnik of her bistro days.

At 54, Gopnik is the prolific and effusive professor of psychology—and affiliate professor of philosophy—at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research in child development radically challenges schools — “They don’t teach the way children learn,” she argues — and the way many scientists think of babies.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have long viewed infants as “irrational, amoral and egocentric,” says Gopnik, the author or co-author of four books, including The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosophical Baby.

In the 1950s, psychologist B.F. Skinner believed they learned by responding to stimuli. Linguist Noam Chomsky later argued that theory could not possibly account for the amount of learning that occurs in childhood. He proposed that language, and much else that we end up knowing, is innate.

Gopnik’s research on infants up to 5 years old instead indicates that, “fundamentally, babies are designed to learn.”

“You want to know what it’s like to be a baby?” Gopnik is fond of saying. “It’s like being in love for the first time in Paris after four double espressos.”

Infants, as every mother knows, have a knack for “getting into everything.” Gopnik argues they’re actually learning like scientists — exploring their environment, testing hypothesis and drawing conclusions.

“That’s a very rational approach,” she says in a telephone interview. “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.”

In an essay to be published in the July edition of Scientific American, Gopnik reviews some of the experiments — conducted by her or others — that show babies using their experiences to try and make sense of the world.

In one experiment, 18-month-olds faced a bowl of raw broccoli and a bowl of goldfish crackers. The experimenter tasted some of each, making either a happy face or a disgusted one. Then she put her hand out and asked, “Could you give me some?”

The infants “gave her broccoli when she acted as if she liked it, even though they would not choose it for themselves,” Gopnik writes, adding it shows babies are able to take the perspective of others.

Some experiments suggest babies trying to grapple with the laws of physics. They will, for example, look longer at unexpected events — like a toy car apparently passing through a solid wall — than predictable ones. They also seem to learn by drawing references from statistical patterns and probabilities.

Twenty-month-olds were placed one at time in front of a box full of ping-pong balls — 80 per cent of the balls were white, 20 per cent red. The experimenter took five balls from the box, and then asked the child to give her a ball from some red and white ones already on a table. The children showed no preference between colours if mostly white balls were removed from the box.

“Yet they specifically gave her a red ball if she had taken mostly red balls from the box — apparently the children thought her statistically unlikely selection meant that she was not acting randomly and that she must prefer red balls,” Gopnik writes.

One Gopnik experiment resulted in preschoolers beating adults at deducing how to make a machine light up with an unusual causal relationship.

“The adults seemed to rely more on their prior knowledge that things usually do not work that way, even thought the evidence implied otherwise for the machine in front of them,” she writes.

Gopnik believes the long period children spend dependent on caregivers is evolution’s way of freeing them to exercise brains with an immense capacity for learning and creativity. Adults tend to instead make priorities of planning, executing and exerting executive control.

“Children are really the research and development division of the human species and we’re production and marketing,” she says.

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Yet resources for mothers or preschool caregivers are non-existent or woefully inadequate, she adds. And where child rearing and apprenticeship into jobs and adulthood was once the function of extended families and communities, it now falls largely — and solely — on the shoulders of parents and schools.

Gopnick says some parents wrongly conclude from her research that “taking out the baby Einstein tapes and reading drills” will boost learning. The best learning instead occurs through hands-on exploration guided by experts — the kind enjoyed by graduate students in university.

It’s largely missing from elementary and high schools, which tend to focus on what Gopnik calls “routinized learning” — the mastery of skills through practice, repetition and discipline.

Done well, routinized learning helps develop top pianists or baseball players, for example. But “schools are both not progressive enough and not disciplined enough,” Gopnik argues. “We don’t give (students) a disciplined induction into a skill . . . and we’re not giving them discovery and learning, either.”

“If baseball were taught the way we teach science (in schools),” she adds, “we would talk to them about famous baseball players till they were eight or nine and then maybe, when they were ten, they would be allowed to throw the ball occasionally. We wouldn’t allow them to play a game until they got to graduate school.”

This partly explains why a young Gopnik and her five siblings “alternately ignored and despised school,” as she puts it. Yet they became a magazine writer for The New Yorker, the head of the National Academy of Sciences ocean studies board, a Near Eastern archaeologist, the Washington Post art critic, and a public health manager.

She has written that each could trace the roots of their vocation “somewhere in the polymath atmosphere of the Gopnik household.”

Her parents, Irwin and Myrna Gopnik, dropped out of college to support their growing family. Though poor, they were firmly anchored in the intellectual richness of the postwar period. “Science, Art and Modernity,” Gopnik writes, “were our constitutional principles.”

They lived in a public-housing project in Philadelphia before moving, when Gopnik was five, to the big Victorian house she remembers so fondly. She devoured books and made models of the Acropolis in the backyard. Her parents eventually returned to their studies and earned PhDs — her father in English literature and her mother in linguistics.

At just 15 years old, Gopnik began studying philosophy at McGill University — the result of having skipped two grades, and of McGill temporarily accepting Grade 11 graduates while the province scrambled to set up its new, pre-university CEGEP system.

“I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is,” she says. “And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.”

In 1988, when she was hired to teach at Berkeley, dual citizenship between Canada and the U.S. wasn’t allowed. Gopnik eventually, and reluctantly, gave up her Canadian one. “I still think of myself as a Canadian,” she insists.

Her three sons — the youngest is 22 — are dual citizens and one of them, Andres Gopnik-Lewinski, is a psychology major at the University of Toronto. Last week, he began an internship at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

In August, Gopnik will marry for the second time.

“It just goes to show you that development continues forever,” she says.

Alison Gopnik speaks on Friday, June 18 at the ideaCity conference, being held at Koerner Hall in The Royal Conservatory of Music. For tickets, please call 416.362.4332 or visit www.ideacityonline.com