Learning Without Lessons

Abstract

This work is designed to fill a rather large lacuna in the field of child development and education. A growing scholarly consensus challenges the universality of Western-dominated research in psychology. All or most markers of the child’s growth and development are now subject to reexamination through a cross-cultural lens. By the same token, the study of education has been similarly restricted as norms and theory are constructed almost exclusively from research in Euroamerican schools. This work aims to fill a substantial portion of this gap, in particular to document and analyze the myriad processes that come to play as indigenous children learn their culture—without schools or lessons. It will characterize the conglomeration of learning-rich events as instances of “pedagogy in culture.” The construct has several connotations, but paramount is the idea that opportunities for learning occur naturally in the course of activities such as work, play, nighttime campfire stories, and so on, that are not primarily intended to educate. Two significant sources of data will be drawn on: focused, empirical studies in cultural psychology and accounts of childhood in the ethnographic and archaeological records. These latter sources have been underutilized in speculations on the nature of child development and learning. The overall conclusion from this study is that the pedagogy found in communities before the advent of schooling differs in very significant ways from that practiced in schools and in the homes of schooled parents. These differences help to account for the early failure of many introduced schools to educate their naïve subjects successfully.