In Societies Without Schools, How Do Children Learn?

Recently I explored what is known about children’s learning in five “traditional” societies, ones that co-exist with ours but are guided by ways of life that contrast sharply with ours. I was struck by how uninvolved adults are with the young. An apt term is laissez faire.

It happens more or less like this: Until newborns are weaned – late by our standards – they get sustained attention from their mothers. When weaning occurs, everything changes. Parents don’t expect to raise their progeny. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that the years-long, labor-intensive process of guiding youngsters to become well-socialized community members is not a major element of parents’ daily responsibilities. So who raises children?

Other children. In large measure, each youngster is raised by the community’s other children and/or by the next oldest sibling or cousin (girls preferred).

Absent are the toys and other paraphernalia of early childhood, scheduling gymnastics, and anxious 24/7/365 commitment that we modern parents associate with child-raising. Either there are no schools or the schooling experience is tempered in comparison with ours. It’s a whole different scene, with a community’s youngsters largely left alone to be socialized by their slightly older peers while adults tend to their day-to-day concerns.

If teachers exist, they’re viewed as figures whom one approaches warily. More significant is that anthropologists debate whether, outside of classrooms, “teaching” occurs at all!

My exploration of traditional societies focused on five: Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa, Quechua herders of the Andes, Navajo of the U.S. Southwest, village Arabs of the Levant, and Hindu villagers of India. I also became familiar with what anthropologists have learned about many other such societies. Yes, there are differences. Nevertheless, in response to this essay’s title, a reasonable generalization is this:

Children in societies without schools learn very largely on their own, with little direct guidance from adults except in matters of manners and morals.

The Nature of Learning in Traditional Societies

In traditional settings, learning how to contribute to family and community welfare is a by-product of children’s ordinary daily activities. Children are often near adults as the latter go about their work. The workers are usually older relatives who are well known and trusted; boys and girls hope to fit in with them. The work is semi-skilled, so it can be observed and imitated with little or no explanation. Are tools in use? No problem. All tools are available for practice; none are hidden because they are “dangerous.” As youngsters gain know-how and strength, they increasingly pitch in. Adults genuinely need their help, so their efforts are welcomed even if, at first, they’re a bit bumbling.

The freely chosen activities of young children in traditional societies often are attempts to replicate what adults do. Aka boys climb a tree to get “honey.” A Quechua child practices kindling a fire. A young Navajo girl explains that when her mother leaves the loom to cook, “I get in there and try to do it.” Such freely chosen activities build the know-how needed for useful labor and instill their group’s values, roles, and quality standards.

Children’s learning is not perceived as separate from the other elements of their lives. It’s been called “the chore curriculum,” available for youngsters to informally observe, imitate, and contribute to, in sharp contrast to “the core curriculum” of schools, which is sequestered in classrooms, textbooks, and scheduled lessons.

Because of the physical nature of the work and the constant opportunities for youngsters to observe, imitate, and pitch in, adults see no need to deliberately teach practical skills and standards, which their children will pick up entirely on their own terms.

If children are going to fit in smoothly, they also need to adopt their group’s manners, morals, and myths. In this case, parents sense that they cannot rely on observation and imitation; instead, they must insist, instruct, and drill. Village Indian adults pointedly teach youngsters to pronounce kinship terms and apply them to the correct individuals. Young Arabs have been overheard reciting up to five generations of their genealogies on both sides, while older daughters have drummed into them that, away from home, they must behave with conspicuous modesty. And don’t forget that, in some societies, the young must be trained to use their left and right hands appropriately.

The Limits of Learning by Observation and Imitation

Eons ago, someone in a hunter-gatherer or nomadic group did something no human had ever done before. She had a unique idea about how to get things done. Let’s say the weather had been favorable, edible plants were abundant, and the group was starting to store food for lean years. It would be useful to keep records about what had been stored, how much, and when. Her idea was how to keep such records.

OK, I made up that story, but my point is this: Someone devised a new way to get work done that could benefit everyone. It was quite complex, so others would need to deliberately learn how to master it. Imagine you’re helping your aunt at the granary and notice her making dents in soft clay tablets. If you’re going to learn to do that, she must explain it to you.

“She must explain it to you” indicates that your aunt must take time to intentionally help you learn her new technique. The first time a human did this is the origin of the distinction between modern and traditional societies. Learning by observation, imitation, and pitching in occurs in both types of society. Learning through direct instruction – planned, scheduled, and formally delivered – is a defining characteristic of modern and modernizing societies.

Learning occurs in traditional societies because children grow up among trusted models of behavior and realize that the way to gain their acceptance is to act like them. Adults don’t need to instruct. They go about their business, content to be watched and imitated.

In modern societies, much learning occurs similarly. But modern life is fundamentally distinct in this: skills of symbol manipulation (math, reading, etc.) are indispensable but too complex to learn by observation and imitation. The young must receive formal instruction.

Formal instruction and modern society are inextricably linked. What links them is the volume and cognitive complexity of what youngsters must learn. Technologically advanced societies could not exist today in the absence of formal instruction of children by adults.

The fact that traditional children learn on their own is greatly admired by some of our fellow educators, who advocate that we should rethink schools so that children can learn what they like, when they like, and how they like. A good idea – if the skill is to herd llamas, grind corn, or care for your just-weaned sibling, thereby imitating your elders and visibly contributing to your family’s well-being. But suppose the skill is to multiply fractions, correctly use gerunds, or distinguish endothermic and exothermic chemical reactions. A modern child rarely, if ever, observes elders doing such things, none of which has any visible effect, positive or negative, on her family’s well-being. Whom would a child try to imitate? Why?

A Different Perspective on Children’s Learning

Exploring traditional children’s lives gave me a fresh way of thinking about children’s learning in any society. Instead of attending to the whats, i.e., the new capabilities to be acquired, I’m now attending to the hows, i.e., the means by which new capabilities are acquired. The main distinction is between those acquired subconsciously and those acquired consciously:

1. Capabilities acquired subconsciously, i.e., outside of conscious awareness
2. Capabilities acquired in part subconsciously, in part consciously
3. Capabilities acquired consciously, often intentionally and with effort, including
4. Functional, culinary, artistic, and other manual skills (practical competencies)
5. Factual information about one’s situation in life (cognitive knowledge)
6. Symbol-decoding, analytical, and scientific abilities (cognitive manipulation)

Category 1 (capabilities acquired subconsciously) comprises nonverbal communication, most of which is learned below the level of conscious awareness. Verbal communication is similarly acquired – which is why adults envy children when we try to learn a new language! There is little difference between how traditional and modern children learn to communicate.

Category 2 (capabilities acquired in part subconsciously, in part consciously) includes interpersonal skills: how to make a friend, behave modestly, show respect for elders, gain others’ cooperation, act angrily without exploding, conduct a performance review, flirt, take the next step after flirting, and more. These are most often gained by imitating experienced others. There is little difference in how traditional and modern youngsters learn these.

Category 3a (consciously acquired functional, culinary, artistic, and other manual skills) comprises practical skills learned while consciously alert, but they don’t involve verbalized knowledge: how to till soil, get honey, set a snare, erect a hut, deliver a baby, paint with watercolors, use a lawn mower, prepare toast or tiramisu. Modern folks expect manuals and videos, but these aren’t essential. Category 3a competencies are learnable by means of imitation. Traditional and modern children are equally able to watch and learn.

Category 3b (consciously acquired factual information about one’s situation in life) is about verbalized information, some intentionally learned, that people have about their family, identity groups, religion, history, culture, economy, politics, environment, personal interests, and the like. Some children must absorb huge quantities of identity group and religious lore; others, very little. Formerly, such information was passed down via oral tradition. Now we use print and online materials, but they are not essential. Again, our children and theirs learn similarly.

Category 3c (consciously acquired symbol-decoding, analytical, and scientific abilities) brings us to something totally different: knowledge mediated by invented symbols that, due to their volume and complexity, cannot be sufficiently learned via observation and imitation. Easy familiarity with numbers and letters, and skill in mentally manipulating them, is essential for modern life. So we insist that every child begin formally studying them at a young age.

Unknown in societies that have not begun to modernize is Category 3c knowledge and our means of transmitting it to our offspring.

Modern and Traditional Learning Compared

When modern and traditional children’s lives are compared, by far the biggest contrast is the necessity for the former to spend years learning cognitive symbol manipulation. Traditional children need not learn such skills, but if their society modernizes, they can learn them.

Otherwise, modern children are just like traditional ones in being fully capable of learning practical skills and socially adaptive behaviors by exploring their natural surroundings and observing, imitating, and increasingly participating in the activities of adults.

Traditional and modern children learn similarly. Their opportunities to learn is what differs.

Traditional children, on their own and in roaming groups free of adult supervision, have daily opportunities to explore, watch, imitate, and learn. Urban and suburban children only infrequently have similar opportunities. Most grow up in nuclear families; aunts, uncles, and grandparents live far away. They rarely have a chance to watch adults exercising their artistic, culinary, functional, or other abilities, except in the kitchen. For some, there’s only one adult whom they have daily opportunities to observe. If both parents work away from home, this option vanishes. If both parents do desk work at home? That’s totally boring to watch!

Traditional families typically need the economic benefits of their children’s labor. Modern families typically don’t. We provide our youngsters with comforts and adult-selected things and experiences while protecting them from activities we deem stressful, dangerous, or age-inappropriate. Our children’s freedom to explore, indulge their interests, and gradually join adults in their work is constrained. They’re loaded with energy and curiosity. What to do?

Electronic media have become their pastime of choice. I won’t repeat the usual alarms about endless media use. My concern is that when children are mesmerized for hours at a time by media, they cannot be observing, imitating, and pitching in on activities or social interactions of adults, or spending unstructured time with their peers roaming and exploring.

We often think of children in societies without schools as lacking a major opportunity to learn. What about our own children’s opportunities to learn?