The respondents to our survey referred also to many other examples of valued adult activities that were emulated regularly by children in play. Digging up roots, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, story telling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. Because all this play occurs in an age-mixed environment, the smaller children are constantly learning from the older ones.
Nobody has to tell or encourage the children to do all this. They do it naturally because, like children everywhere, there is nothing that they desire more than to grow up and to be like the successful adults that they see around them. The desire to grow up is a powerful motive that blends with the drives to play and explore and ensures that children, if given a chance, will practice endlessly the skills that they need to develop to become effective adults.
What relevance might these observations have for education in our culture?
Our culture, of course, is very different from hunter-gatherer cultures. You might well doubt that the lessons about education that we learn from hunter-gatherers can be applied effectively in our culture today. For starters, hunter-gatherers do not have reading, writing, or arithmetic; maybe the natural, self-motivated means of learning don't work for learning the three R's. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, there are countless different ways of making a living, countless different sets of skills and knowledge that children might acquire, and it is impossible for children in their daily lives to observe all those adult skills directly. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, children are largely segregated from the adult work world, which reduces their opportunities to see what adults do and incorporate those activities into their play.
Yet, in the next installment, I am going to argue that the same natural means of learning that work so well for hunter-gatherers indeed do work equally well for our children, when we provide an educational setting that allows those means to work. My next installment, which I expect to post on Wednesday, August 13, will be about a school in Framingham, Massachusetts, where, for the past 40 years, children and teenagers have been educating themselves with extraordinary success through their self-directed play and exploration.
Stay tuned.
Notes:
1See, for example, Y. Gosso et al. (2005), "Play in hunter-gatherer societies." In A. D. Pellegrini & P. K. Smith (Eds.), The nature of play: great apes and humans. New York: Guilford.
2 See, for example, S. Kent (1996), "Cultural diversity among African foragers: causes and implications." In S. Kent (Ed.), Cultural diversity among twentieth-century foragers: an African perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
