Peripheral Visions

researcher, Margaret Bullowa, had collected films and tapes of mother-infant interaction. I used to sit viewing those films for hours, dashing home to nurse Vanni when the baby on the screen reminded me that it was time, hoping to document from the films behaviors I was responding to with my daughter. And indeed I found myself describing a pattern of playful vocalizations between mother and infant that I spoke of as the epigenesis of conversation. My doubled experience of observing my own infant and the infant in the films was a first step in understanding that participation precedes learning.
    What interested me about these “conversations” was that whereas the mother was speaking sentences to the infant, using the words and grammatical patterns of adult language, the infant was responding with little coos and gurgles. The internal structure of the infant’s behavior was quite different from the internal structure of the mother’s behavior, but together they were collaborating in sustaining a joint performance. That capacity, and the delight it gave them both, preceded the differentiation of linguistic structure—learning words or grammar or rules of sentences. In the same way, in the later scene in the Persian garden, Vanni was able to be a participant in a ritual with a complex history and meaning which she knew nothing about. The babies who visited my classroom, not exactly university students, were able to play roles already shaped by culture; classrooms too involve joint productions with only partially overlapping systems of meaning.
    It is hard to think of learning more fundamental to the shape of society than learning whether to trust or distrust others. Little Becky will probably move as an adult some distance from the nuclear family she was growing up in, and will repeatedly need skills in establishing new relationships. Little Shahnaz was learning to withhold trust except from those who were closest—family, siblings, long-term friends—but she came from a considerable network of kin. The ideal marriage in traditional Iranian culture is with a cousin or, if not a cousin, a member of the same community.
    One of the things I treasured in Israel was the determined assertion that community existed even before efforts to build it, although Jews from different countries had deeply different cultures as well as the sprinkling of criminality and pathology to be found in any society. I remember in 1956 visiting a large and long-established kibbutz, with a factory in addition to farming, and being startled to be handed a key to my room, because “there are so many people one doesn’t know”—startled only because until then everything had seemed so open. The best airport security system in the world still relies on the assumption that Jews do not blow up airplanes. As a sixteen-year-old, I lived alone in Jerusalem and went for long walks, far into the night. I hitchhiked all over the country with friends, striking up conversations in the street. Community, like the sacred, is an idea that becomes reality because we believe in it, not vice versa. In Israel, many families skipped a generation in which children grew up without grandparents present, but today, with the aging of a new generation, the grandparents are there again, for the idea of treasured and respected grandparents has survived.
    The lessons of school gain authority because they are layered onto earlier informal learning in the home, which is where we learn how and what to learn and how to transfer knowledge from one situation to another. These vital skills mostly remain outside of awareness. Looking at how much has been learned within a few weeks of birth proposes a new kind of respect both for nonschool learning and for the capacities of the very young. Children and traditional peoples, even illiterate peasants who have had enough exposure to the city to regard themselves as profoundly ignorant, have vast amounts of knowledge long before teachers and social reformers get to them. An awareness of the complexity of the knowledge they already possess could in itself be a revolutionary force.
    Not only do we not know what we know, we don’t know what we teach. All societies pass on complex patterns: conventions of human relations; languages roughly comparable in their basic complexity, whether or not they have ever been written down; details of the environment; skills for survival; abstract notions of causality and fate, right and wrong. Some