ABOUT THE BOOK

What useful insights might we gain by comparing our middle-class ways of raising children with the ways of parents in traditional societies, ways that differ from ours in virtually every respect?

To uncover answers to that question, How Other Children Learn takes a comprehensive look at parenting and children’s learning in five traditional societies:

• The Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa
• The Quechua of highland Peru
• The Navajo of the U.S. Southwest
• The village Arabs of the Levant
• The Hindu villagers of India.

What do we mean when we speak of a “traditional society”?

For now, it’s enough to know that “traditional” societies are those that have not been affected (so far) by “modern” – urban, industrial – values and ways of life. Traditional societies always have been, and still are, found in small villages and camps where people engage daily with their natural surroundings, families put time and effort into coaxing their sustenance from the land, and virtually no adult has had experience with classroom learning.

Now why would modern people like us seek fresh insights in societies like that?
 

How Children Learn in the Absence of Schools

Most Americans – not just parents – care a great deal about children’s learning, but we’ve all grown accustomed to caring about the learning that occurs in classrooms. In modern societies, that’s appropriate. But our focus on classroom learning diverts our attention from the learning that, over millennia, children in traditional societies have been routinely doing in the absence of formal schooling.

Surely we would agree that traditional children also are learning. But what are they learning? How are they learning it? Could our children be learning similar things in similar ways?

Understanding traditional children’s learning experiences will sharpen our grasp of the effect of classroom instruction on the mindsets, values, and self-concepts of modern children. For us parents, it will offer an eye-opening counterpoint to our routine ways of thinking about what and how our own children are learning, and why they’re learning it.

For example, we believe it’s vitally important to talk to – read to, sing to – our toddler to rapidly expand his or her vocabulary, a belief grounded in the high importance we place on classroom success. What you’ll discover in How Other Children Learn is that, in traditional societies, no one believes that talking with toddlers hastens or heightens their mental capacities.

Don’t worry; How Other Children Learn will not argue that it’s useless for us to talk to our toddlers. But be aware that, whenever you do, you’re aligning yourself with a tiny minority of all parents who ever lived. Conscientiously talking with young children identifies you as a member in good standing of an industrial, urban, modern society.

Additional insights you’ll gain as you read How Other Children Learn will derive from the differences and, yes, the similarities it reveals between the learning of traditional children and the learning of our own children.  For example:

• Traditional children learn most of what they need to know to become good adults even though adults almost never take any time to deliberately instruct them.
• They learn by engaging their conscious and subconscious mental abilities, precisely the same abilities that modern children engage to do their learning.
• They pay attention to whatever is going on in their vicinity in a way that is fundamentally different from the way modern children pay attention.
• The processes by which they learn are via observation of adults, trial-and-error imitation and practice, and gradually increasing participation in adult activities.
• Alone and together with other children, they have daily opportunities to learn in these ways – exactly the types of opportunities that most modern children lack.

 

How Parents Parent in the Absence of Modern Expectations

If you read How Other Children Learn, you’ll be astounded by how uninvolved traditional parents are with their children. The term often used in this book is “laissez-faire.” With scant exceptions, the paraphernalia, experiences, and anxious commitment we routinely associate with child-rearing are absent.

You might begin to wonder whether traditional parents care how their children will turn out.

Like us, they care. But the circumstances in which they do their caring is unlike ours in myriad ways: socially, psychologically, ecologically, economically, . . . and of course educationally, because classroom learning is not part of their experience. A consequence of these differences is that it actually makes sense for traditional parents to be uninvolved with their children.

But that does not mean that traditional children are uninvolved with the adults in their village or camp.

Traditional children grow up to become well-socialized, contributing, and responsible members of their societies. How does that happen? And because it happens in circumstances that sharply contrast with ours, can we really gather useful new ideas for our child-rearing by examining traditional parenting?

Consider this example: American parents frequently voice concern about the challenge of getting their children to shoulder responsibilities – “chores” – around the house. Well, it turns out that children in most traditional societies contribute often, and willingly, to the completion of household tasks. It’s entirely possible to gain fresh ideas from a comparison of how traditional and modern parents introduce their children to family responsibilities. In fact, this is the focus of Chapter 7.

Additional insights you’ll attain as you read How Other Children Learn will result from your being able to compare and contrast the child-rearing ways of traditional parents with your own.  For example:

• When not nursing or sleeping, infants and very young children are always positioned in such a way that they can watch and listen to everyone in their surroundings.
• After weaning, parents cease trying to shield their child from danger and stress, and they have no concept similar to our “age-inappropriate experience.”
• In dealing with children, parents consistently remain their competent, mature selves; they do not adopt child-like behavior in an effort to appeal to children.
• Parents never imagine that they are solely responsible for raising their child; they share this responsibility with others, notably including older children.
• They assume that a child who attains puberty – the ability to reproduce – also attains social maturity, the freedom to make decisions affecting him- or herself.

 

The Plan of How Other Children Learn

Following the book’s Introduction, the chapters are:

1: What Do Anthropologists of Childhood Actually Do?

This book is anchored in the published research of anthropologists of childhood. What is the nature of their work? What do they talk about among themselves? With which academic discipline are they frequently at loggerheads? And what are the conclusions they’ve reached so far? Chapter 1 will give you a more secure perspective for understanding the five following chapters.
 

2. Raising Oneself in the Forest: Growing Up among the Aka Hunter-Gatherers of Africa

3. Nothing Special for the Children: Growing Up among the Quechua of Highland Peru

4. Parenting by Persuasion: Growing Up Among the Navajos of the U.S. Southwest

5. According to Nomads’ Values: Growing Up Among the Village Arabs of the Levant

6. The Total-Immersion Family: Growing Up Among the Hindu Villagers of India

Each of the above five chapters begins by discussing the background and context of the featured society under three or four section headings. then the chapter continues under seven uniform section headings, listed below. “[Name]” is the name of the featured society.

• How Newborns Arrive and Receive Care
• Learning to Be [Name]: The Early Childhood Years
• Learning to Be [Name]: The Later Childhood Years
• Informal Learning by [Name] Children
• Formal Learning by [Name] Children
• From an Anthropologist’s Perspective
• Suggested Further Reading
• Bibliography for the [Name] Chapter

 

7. How Do Other Children Learn Responsibility?

This initial summary chapter looks for an explanation for the fact that most children in traditional societies willingly carry out responsibilities beginning at an early age, whereas most children in modern societies resist responsibilities. (Responsibility refers to one’s intention to complete a task, usually one repeated on a daily or weekly basis, that benefits the group to which one belongs.)
 

8. How Do Other Children Learn? And How Do Other Parents Parent?

This main summary chapter overviews the role of education – formal instruction – in the millennia-long transition made by some human groups from traditional-agrarian to modern-industrial. It then reviews anthropologists’ findings about traditional societies in general (with examples from this book’s five focal societies) to reveal what we Americans can gain from understanding how children learn in the absence of schools, and how parents parent in the absence of modern expectations.
 

Appendix A. Tables of Anthropological Findings about Children.

These five tables provide support for Chapter 8. The subjects of the tables are:

1. Background and Context of Other Children and Our Own
2. Contrasting Models of Parenting and Families
3. How Traditional and U.S. Parents THINK about Childrearing
4. What Traditional and U.S. Parents DO about Childrearing
5. Learning and Schooling in Traditional and U.S. Societies

 

Appendix B. Sources of Information for the Five Main Chapters.

Some readers will be curious about the nature and identity of the books and journal articles upon which this book is based, how I found them, and which ones proved especially valuable. The answers are here in this short appendix.