Peripheral Visions

School is the effort to inculcate in the young, whether overtly or covertly, arrogantly or persuasively, something they could not or would not learn in their home environment, often something that alienates them from the home environment at the same time that it gives them access to a wider or richer world. For many children, learning is leaving home, perhaps never to return. On reservations, Native American children used to be separated from their parents and forced to live in boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their mother tongues. Yet in more benign forms, the contrast between home and school is illuminating and offers an open door to a world that is wider but not necessarily separate.
    Learning is the fundamental pattern of human adaptation, but mostly it occurs before or after or in the interstices of schooling. Preoccupied with schooling, most research on human learning is focused on learning that depends on teaching or is completed in a specified context rather than on the learning that takes place spontaneously because it fits directly into life.
    There is another literature about learning based on experiments with laboratory pigeons and rats. This applies across species, separated from the shape of lives, and for a long time had little to say about becoming a viable pigeon or a successful rat or an inquiring human being. My father told a story of a psychologist who was asked whether, since rats are essentially nocturnal, he had ever tried running his experiments at night. “No way,” he said. “They bite.” “You see,” Gregory used to say, “all that theory is based on the learning curves of sleepy rats.” It is not that it might be possible to work out a percentage difference between the learning of sleepy and alert rats and in that way to correct the faulty learning curves. The sleepy rats were groping their way through a task that alert rats simply reject.
    Gregory had extreme distaste for experimental psychology as he had encountered it, and although the field has changed somewhat, assumptions decades old still linger on in textbooks and the memories of practitioners. Another story he told was of the rat runner who decided that, since rats do not naturally live in mazes, he would try maze-learning experiments with a ferret, for ferrets live by searching for their prey in the complex interlocking tunnels in rabbit warrens. According to the story, the ferret went through the maze systematically, going down every blind alley until reaching the reward chamber, where he devoured the haunch of rabbit. The next day, returned to the maze, he again went down every blind alley but ignored the tunnel leading to the reward chamber. As Gregory said, “He’d eaten that rabbit.” Perhaps the ferret had learned the complex maze perfectly the first time through but interpreted it through his knowledge of rabbits: the chamber whose occupant was recently removed would not yet be reoccupied, but any other chamber might have been only temporarily vacant, and the ferret might find the owner at home the next day.
    The ferret was engaged not in an abstract learning task but in one that was intimately related to its pattern of adaptation. This is a kind of learning we know less about, learning that evokes the very being of the learner. In all the learning that involves the introduction of some alien skill, adaptive responses—seeking rewards or avoiding punishment—do play a part, but the learning itself does not match any innate adaptive pattern. No innate readiness welcomes it.
    Much of traditional schooling is concerned with making children devote themselves to studies that make no sense in the context of their lives. Sleepiness is approximated by apathy, coercion, punitive levels of boredom. Research studies on human learning used to be done on college sophomores required to do tasks in the context of the classroom—the equivalent of sleepy rats. Nowadays it is more common to pay research subjects, using a carrot instead of a stick to involve them in tasks with no intrinsic rewards, and the same habit is spreading in anthropological fieldwork. Yet for a species like ours, whose survival depends upon learning, it must be intrinsically rewarding, like sex. It may be that the whole process of education prepares children for the self-alienation of civilized adulthood by turning them into permanently sleepy rats, too docile to bite.
    Virtually all the learning that precedes schooling—walking,