Peripheral Visions

beginners without shaming them but still allows for developing expertise. It would be a mistake to develop a society in which participation was so simple that increasing skill (and imagination) carried no rewards, but it is also unwise to arrange things to create chronic insecurity. Whatever sense of self young people bring from home and school is tempered in the improvisational give-and-take these dances reflect.
    For a long time, the assumption has been that the skills and rules of the game of life can and should be learned before the beginning of play. Generally, the rules are learned where they cannot be used: in the classroom, where the rewards of success are unrelated to the real application of a given skill. Some societies rely far more heavily than ours on learning through participation, as in the institutionalized apprenticeships described by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, or the simple permission to be present and occasionally join in, but all societies rely on something like apprenticeship for very early learning. You learn to speak your native language by listening subliminally to thousands of conversations and by joining in where the adults are fluent and you are permitted imitation and experimentation, gaining the rewards of effective communication and not being excluded for mistakes. In language classes in school, students do not usually gain real rewards for getting their message across—food when they are hungry, rapport, a budding romance—instead, they get A’s and B’s for detailed correctness.
    Schools do not exist in never-never land, though it sometimes feels as if they do. At the same time that children may or may not be learning through formal instruction skills to be used in other settings, they are always learning through participation: how to be students, how to survive in the peculiar school environment, how to be a child of a particular race and sex in that era. They are learning how to learn but at the same time how not to learn, what not to learn, and who not to learn from. Teachers, for instance, may be marked off as people not to learn from, just as working-class servants in upper-class British households must somehow be marked off as people not to emulate, in spite of constant contact. Learning to spend the day not learning is no great feat when we realize how effectively most cultures convey to young males that they should not be like the persons who most often care for them. If you, as a young aristocrat, speak like the gardener or nursemaid, you will not be a lady or gentleman. If you, as a male child, go too far in imitating your mother, who is likely to be the person with whom you spend the most time and who does the most informal teaching, you will be a sissy. In many settings, if you as a black or Native American child learn from your white teacher, you are a traitor. Children who fail in school are often the ones who have learned the implicit lessons of participation all too well; the A students may be the failures. Furthermore, knowledge and skills may be acquired never to be used except on exams. Every individual probably learns some behaviors and skills that it is not appropriate to display. Eskimo women know how to build snow houses, but don’t.
    Most people are unaware of the intricate structure of what they have learned from participation, of the intellectual complexity of common sense or the unstated pattern of courtesies that make Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt sound like primers. The assumptions of everyday life are highly abstract; spelled out, they sound like a philosophy lesson. Conscientization and consciousness raising are terms used for the empowering growth of awareness of how society really works. They might equally be used of the intellectually empowering process of becoming aware of the range and depth of knowledge acquired through participation and observation.
    Turning social occasions into minefields of possible solecisms is a splendid way of enforcing a class system—the angry young man from the slums will never get the heiress because he uses the wrong fork and fails to pick up those witty references to the classics that must not be allowed to bounce before they are returned. He betrays his lack of cultural—or class—literacy in differences so pervasive that he appears to be a different order of being. When I was a child, my mother sent me to ballroom dancing classes—not because she felt that they were very important or even that the social