Freedom to Learn

What a wonderful summing up of the most basic and most brilliant thoughts on teaching. Really. Works for the aborginies, works for everyone.

As a homeschooling mother I grapple with the question of teaching all the time. Ideally, children would be raised in natural environments and communities that support these methods of teaching. Alas, that's far from the case both in schools and in homeschooling.

BTW I'm really drawn to Peter's point number 2 about providing children with "cultural tools." I think the intellect is developed through practicing with these "tools." In this very anti-intellectual culture perhaps if we talk about "cultural tools" people might warm up to the idea of intellectual development!

Peter,

If you travel north from Boston, into Nova Scotia, Canada, there rests a small island connected by a causeway to the mainland. It is a rural, tucked away community with a pop. of ~650. This community has been perhaps one of the most successful sporing communities in Canada, with the local schools winning numerous championships and developing many athletes. I just finished a scientific case study of this community for the completion of my masters degree. I think you would be quite intrigued by the findings, as they support much of what you have said. Although instruction was obviously used in the community, by far, the majority of learning occurred through social learning/role modelling. The community revolved around sport. Sport became/aligned with the moral system of the community, held mostly together by a intense rivalry with a neighbouring community. Role modelling was increasingly facilitated by adults in the community, who were motivated to self-sacrifice for the community sporting needs. On the whole this created a very interwoven system that, I believe, led to its sporting success.

I have a question: We now know that selection has increased within the past 10,000 years. Sloan-Wilson, Haidt and others suggest that cultural group level selection may have shaped human psychology. Could the idea be entertained, that as a form of niche construction, certain motivations evolved to sustain the moral system of the group, specifically leadership behaviours for creating "opportunities" for the youth, rather than "instruction".

My trouble with understanding the evolution of man until our contemporary times is how he came to be as he is today? I have read a few other articles from other esteemed anthropologists and their debate with psychologists over the development of the human psyche and find it difficult to believe that for 99% of our progression we lived in patient and egalitarian communities. Yet in the last 1%, or post-Agriculture [as I believe you put it] some of the more ugly human traits have risen to the surface to dominate modern communities.
In one of the other articles the author had referenced the belief that alpha males were cast out and those who conveyed selfish tendencies were ostracized by the HG communities as well. Genetically speaking these traits [if they were genetic] would have obviously been obscured as those outside of the community most likely perished due to man's certain lack of success in independent survival.
My questions are how come these (virtuous) traits seem obsolete now for man? Is nurture really the greatest developmental tool in terms of this egalitarian philosophy in HG societies? Do people today simply conform to whatever the mentality of our current sovereign societies deem necessary, therefore our more hideous qualities are accentuated [particularly certain capitalistic nations]?
I know that all you can answer is in theory if at all, but I am perplexed by how man seems to have become much more egocentric in his lat one percent of evolution which strikes me as a regression.

Interesting questions, Mike. My own studies of psychology (which admittedly pale in comparison to others on the site thus far) have lead me to a possible conclusion here. HG societies shared everything. Food, water, clothing - all resources belonged to the collective group. Sharing was essential to the survival of an HG group. Hunters and gatherers provided food sources to everyone, including crafters who provided the tools for hunters. Others made shelters, clothing, etc. If one group within a community failed to share with the others the community as a whole starved.

Agriculture changed all of that. Now, one person was capable of providing both domesticated meat as well as non-meat food to themselves. At the same time, since one person could now feed an entire family, a partner could focus on clothing and tools. Food and the tools to cultivate it became "mine" as opposed to "ours."

Farmers - especially those raising both crops and domestic animals - have no compelling need to share their food or other resources. Thus, they require some extra incentive - namely, something else of value - in order to share. Perhaps a tool maker provides farming tools. Or in the case of the modern world, money, in exchange for food. With the rise of agriculture food and the other items essential for human survival became, for possibly the first time in human history, personal as opposed to communal belongings.

Where sharing in HG communities was necessary for survival, sharing in the earliest ages of agriculture worked against personal survival. Farmers who shared food without receiving something of value in return - and in particular something of value to their own role as a farmer and provider of food - risked food shortages and starvation. Thus we might consider that it was the rise of agriculture itself, which first "taught" our species the "value" of greed and the "need" for hoarding our personal belongings.

As an unschooling mom I didn't know I was being hunter gatherer, but my kids have pretty much free access to the tools of our house and farm. Out of the handful of edible weeds I know, which we harvest along with the veggies in the garden, I have shown my daughters, 5 and 7, maybe once or twice how to identify them. Then they have brought them to me to verify their own findings. Now they are teaching their toddler brother how to get the nectar from the wild honeysuckle that grows on the fence.

The hunter gatherer culture intrigues me. We in the US have been trained to associate communism with dictatorships, yet capitalism has also been far from egalitarian and democratic. I think it is the Western value system, the imperialist ego, that nature and humans must be tamed and controlled through hierarchical institutions, which have prevented true equality. It is based on fear, or anxiety as you mentioned, and not on trust and mutuality.

Thank you, Peter, for a great article. And so far a fascinating discussion, which really stands out from the usual flame wars that constitute comment sections around the Web.

II'm currently re-reading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book "Mother Nature: a history of mothers, infants, and natural selection". From her writings and others, I don't get this rosy view that HG societies were all living in some sort of peaceful paradise. This point is raised by some when responding to articles like Peter's here, but it's a straw man - I don't think any serious student of anthropology would suggest that life pre-agriculture was always a bowl of cherries. Humans appear to have exhibited considerable variation in their cultural beliefs and practices (particularly in terms of mating, the role and power of women, dominance of males, acceptance of violence and warfare, etc) and some societies didn't seem to me like ones I would enjoy living in, while others certainly had an air of Eden about them. I think what we can say, however, is that none of these societies attempted to forcibly educate their children (waste of precious time and resources), but instead relied on kids' natural ability to learn, and probably allowed that natural ability to flourish simply because it would never have occurred to them to do otherwise (if it ain't broke...).

As I raise my children, who have never been to school and completely direct their own learning (unschooled), I see in them this natural ability and drive to learn whatever they see is important in our culture (which not only includes manual skills, but the so-called "academics" such as reading, writing, and math). We modern people have lost sight of this innate ability to learn; most have never seen a truly unschooled child and most have no idea what natural learning looks like. Studying HG societies is a good way to bring that picture to more minds. However, one need only observe unschooled children to see the very same mechanisms, instincts, and behaviours at work in the modern child that were likely at work in a child living 50,000 years ago. Quite something!

Great article! I have learned quite a bit from your posts. I have one question about the lesson of this article in a modern context: my kids seem to gravitate towards screens (TV, computer, gameboy, etc.) when self directed. How do you reconcile self directed learning when there are these distractions (assuming you categorize them as such).

Thanks!

I agree whole heartedly with the notion that children need to play with the tools of their culture in order to learn and to successfully integrate into that culture.
Could you please comment about the difference between the tools that are/were used in traditional cultures that were passed along to the children directly from adults with those children's best interest at heart, and those that are now widely available to children that have been passed to them by multinational corporations with no ties to these children, and whose interest is only in making money by selling their products? I'm wondering if we're not in the middle of a huge cultural experiment where there is no accountability for the free access to these tools, and I can't help but worry that giving children free reign to do as they please with them won't have catastrophic consequences.

I've been participating in a call series devoted to cultural mentoring - where techniques are drawn especially from intact cultures that still have a strong connection to nature. It's regularly mentioned that an intact hunter/gatherer culture is very effective at passing on that culture to subsequent generations, especially a connection to the nature/place where that culture lives, but this competency is usually unconscious. That is, the people who live it do what they know (having been taught/mentored in it), but they don't necessarily realize how it's working in practice.

One example of a cultural mentoring technique is called "story of the day" - In a traditional society after the children have spent the day wandering around (perhaps having been given a mission to collect some plant and bring it home), an elder will engage in a conversation with the children to find out about what they observed. Through the questioning/conversation, edges of awareness will be noted and stretched (the questions that couldn't be answered encouraging the child to pay more attention the next time). A child's natural curiosities will also be observed and encouraged.In addition, it helps that the reports brought back are useful for community. Over time, these conversations will result in a child learning (self-teaching) far more than they probably would have otherwise.

Though the specifics of the interaction are going to be different in different contexts, the "story of the day" principle can be effectively adapted to modern life.

Jon Young is the director of the program doing the call series and he has spent many years studying and practicing cultural mentoring techniques, especially as they apply to nature connection. Here's a brief video introduction to the call series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgqJjYROhDs

There are other resources and such available as well. Including at the Wilderness Awareness School
http://www.wildernessawarenessschool.org/about_wilderness_awareness_scho...

I thought both parts of this article were very interesting.

It has definitely been my experience that when we are doing physical things, gardening, working on the house, our son can be an interested observer and occasional helper, and has been since around age 2. And yes, he is allowed to use real tools for woodworking, and can safely use a chisel.

His interest in woodworking has waned recently (he's 4). Partly I'm sure this is just because interests are fluid, but partly I think it is also because we have run out of ideas for projects well suited to his abilities. This comes back to "Providing materials and conditions for practice" from the first part, which to me is one of the more interesting and underconsidered parts of education.

On the other hand when I want to do something which is non physical, reading, working on my research, using the computer, then my son quickly becomes a nusiance, not just getting in the way in a friendly manner, but continually urging me to stop. It is very understandable how these things are so different from his perspective, and evolutionarily, but so many of today's adult activities (including some of the most enjoyable ones) are this kind of more intangible activity. Does anyone have any ideas how to apply the philosophy of letting children observe and participate to intellectual pursuits?

Returning to "Providing materials and conditions for practice", I spend a certain amount of my time doing just the sort of so-called teaching you disparage, specifically university level lecturing in a techinical field, but I never though of the lectures themselves as where the core of teaching takes place. The most important part in my view, and my favorite part of teaching, is making good problem sets. Before everyone runs and hides or thinks I am commenting on the wrong blog let me try to justify this.

Good problem sets are about problems which are interesting in their own right, hard but accessible given the level of the students, and which really show the structures we are exploring in the course. This is the same idea as the predators bringing back practice prey of appropriate difficulty. I don't remember much about the lectures I attended as an undergrad, but I remember, quite fondly, many of the problems I was set. They are where the learning takes place. Correspondingly, choosing them well is the heart of teaching technical subjects.

I probably haven't convinced anyone, but there you go.

I'm a teacher. I don't choose what I teach; the state does. Teachers know wonderful things about how children learn, but we're not allowed to do anything about it because we are expected to pretend that all children can pass a test that's deliberately written in a way to cause half the children taking it to fail (in order to "prove" the bell curve). My ability to keep my job is based on how many of my students, most of whom only hear English in school, pass the test.

I have read about unschooling, after suddenly having both homeschooled and unschooled children in my classroom, and I understand how a child in the above H/G scenario is therefore prepared to take his or her place in society. My question is how is an unschooled child prepared to take his or her place in society? Is such a child limited to alternative professions that don't require any college education? And while it's great that such an option is open for those children who want that future, I still like the idea that there will still be people around with the other sorts of skills and education as well.

I make it clear to my fourth graders that it isn't my job to teach them everything, nor is that even possible. My job is to teach them ways to teach themselves, to introduce them to ideas and concepts that they wouldn't otherwise get to know, and to give them enough experiences that they can find something that interests them -- something they'll learn about on their own, just as I learned about things that interest me on my own. I want to make their world bigger so that they have the same opportunities and potential as middle class children from English-speaking homes. I also let them know that, according to the state, my only job is to make sure they pass the AIMS.

@pawnhandler: Unschooled kids can and do go to college and there is no profession that is not open to them should they choose to pursue it

@ScottDavid: Well said; I agree with you 100%. In our family, screen time is considered as valuable as any other pursuit; it is not demonized. My son's passion for gaming is given equal importance to his sister's passion for science. He enjoys a wide range of activities, likely because he's never been told that he "shouldn't" be playing (or playing so much) and also because he has plenty of free time for all the things he wants to do.

@KY: As a university instructor myself, and an unschooling parent, I don't consider university teaching to be quite so antithetical to natural learning. In theory, kids have a choice to be there, which already sets it apart from regular school. Second, they are essentially adults by the time they begin: they often have a good idea of what they want to do and see university as a necessary step towards that end. With that said, I do think that much of undergrad work is as rote and boring as regular schooling, but at least the "end" is more obvious with respect to the "means".

Grad school, on the other hand, is more heavily mentor-oriented and hands-on (at least in the sciences) and as such is quite a different experience from a high school classroom. My most successful and enjoyable teaching situations were when I mentored students in our research lab. I think mentorship should be given much higher priority in our education system (especially high school); in my experience it is a far better method for learning, and represents the closest situation we have to Natural Learning (i.e. that described in Peter's articles).

From my recollection of The Headman Was a Woman, I had the impression that there was rather more supervision of hunter gatherer children than what you're suggesting - especially regarding dangerous play. Dangerous play could involve something as simple as climbing tall trees - not necessarily involving exotic equipment.

In my reading of the anthropological literature on hunter-gatherers I have found, over and over, descriptions of very young children, even toddlers, playing with knives, axes, fire, etc. I have also seen films shown by hunter-gatherer researchers of toddlers engaged in such play. However, as you suggest, children that young are always in sight of adults. If the play became really dangerous, or if a child was hurt, an adult would step in. Until children are about four years old, they play essentially always in camp within sight of adults. However, beyond four years old, hunter-gatherer children regularly play in age-mixed groups away from camp, away from adults. In such settings I'm sure that the older kids look out for and help out the younger ones. The age mixing itself adds a big element of safety, I'm sure. -Peter