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The idea that we need electronic toys to teach children to name colours or count to 10 is challenged by quite a few centuries of human history.
我们需要用电子玩具教会孩子们识颜色或数数字，这一观点遭到几个世纪人类历史的质疑。
Yet because school has been the dominant metaphor for learning, children who are not yet in school have often been considered little more than empty vessels waiting to be filled.
然而，因为学校一直是学习的显性隐喻，所以，还没有上学的孩子往往被认为只是等着被装满的空容器。
“The conventional wisdom about children under five was that there just wasn’t very much going on there at all,” Alison Gopnik, the developmental psychologist, said.
发展心理学家艾莉森·戈普尼克表示: “传统观点认为，五岁以下儿童根本就没有太多的变化。”
“You still hear people saying things like, ‘Oh, children can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality,’ or ‘They can’t think logically’, and all that.”
“你仍会听到人们说，‘哦，孩子们分不清幻想和现实的区别，’，或是‘他们不能按照逻辑思考’之类的话。”
In the 1970s and 80s, Gopnik and her colleagues at UC Berkeley, along with other researchers, began developing better techniques for assessing how developing minds work.
在20世纪70年代和80年代，戈普尼克与其加州大学伯克利分校的同事，以及其他研究人员，开始研发更好的评估发育中大脑工作方式的技术。
They focused not on what children said, but on what they did in creative and problem-solving situations.
他们关注的不是孩子们的言语，而是他们在创造性和解决问题的情况下的行动。
“It turned out that even the youngest babies already knew more and learned more than we ever would have thought,” Gopnik went on.
戈普尼克接着说: “研究证明，即使是最年幼的婴儿也比我们想象的知道得更多，学习得更多。”
“They’re extremely rational and they’re much better in some ways at doing inferential learning” – using patchy information to make accurate generalisations about a messy world – “than any other creature that we know of.”
“婴儿非常理性，在某些方面比我们所知的任何其他生物都更擅长推理学习”——利用零碎的信息对混沌的世界做出准确的概括。
One of the ironies of many so-called educational toys is that they don’t leave much for children to do or figure out on their own.
许多所谓的益智玩具的一个可笑之处在于，玩具没有给孩子们留下太多可以探索或弄清楚事物本身的东西。
You spin the arrow, pull the cord, and a pig oinks, end of story.
你旋转箭头，拉动绳子，猪就会哼哼叫，仅此而已。
“The way I like to put it, the best toys are 90% the kid, 10% the toy,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychologist at Temple University, who has led some of the most widely cited research into the effects of play on child development.
天普大学心理学家凯西·赫什-帕塞克表示:“我愿意这样说，最好的玩具由90%的孩子活动与10%的玩具活动组成。”她领导了一些关于游戏对儿童发展影响的研究（其中一些被广泛引用）。
“If it’s 90% the toy, and 10% the kid, that’s a problem.” (Her comments brought to mind the Fisher-Price Linkimals, which “link, sync, play and learn together”, as the tagline runs – no baby required.)
“如果90%是玩具活动，10%是孩子活动，那就会出现问题。” (她的言论让人想起了费雪公司的Linkimals系列玩具，正如其宣传语所说，“一起链接、同步、玩耍和学习”——不需要孩子。)
Instead of playing with educational toys that dispense information the way a funfair dispenses cotton candy – as saccharine, fluorescent, insubstantial fluff – children could be exploring the fascinating complexity of the world.
孩子们可以探索迷人的复杂世界，而不是玩那些像游乐场分发棉花糖（糖精、荧光灯、小东西）那样分配信息的益智类玩具。
They could be spending time figuring out, before they can ever articulate their insights, the basics of Newtonian mechanics and interpersonal dynamics.
在孩子能够清晰地表达自己的见解之前，他们可能会花时间弄清楚牛顿力学和人际动力学的基础知识。
