Peripheral Visions

We mention it in shadow form when we warn that even a single dose of some drug may be addictive, may offer a sense of rightness that is forever compelling. We do not expect most children to cleave to geometry, or to the final couplet of a sonnet, as to a revelation of who they are. Yet the human species has been honed through aeons of evolutionary change for readiness to learn, in small ways as well as in the dramatic ways I have been speaking of. Each new recognition of pattern, each appropriated skill, could offer a moment of homecoming, building toward an understanding and a capacity to participate in a complex social and biological world. It is in this sense that the model of learning as coming home can inform schooling.
    Most of the learning of a lifetime, including much that is learned in school, never shows up in a curriculum. When school begins much of this invisible learning is negative: the inadequacy of parents as sources, the irrelevance of play, the unacceptability of imagination. School teaches the contextualization of learning and the importance of keeping different areas of life separate: home from the workplace, Sundays from weekdays, and work from play.
    The knowledge that children bring with them into school has not been learned in an orderly progression. It can be codified and systematized (and sometimes is by linguists or anthropologists), but it is mainly passed on in contexts where it is presented not in explicit linear sequences but through spirals of partly apprehended repetition. Learning to speak implies grammatical rules and category systems, ways of mapping and classifying the world. Children’s rhymes and stories contain metaphorical statements about the structures of the real and the social worlds, often coding vast stores of information. Childhood has its geography and natural history, its ethics and metaphysics, not without pain and effort, but often without alienation.
    San children grow up with an intimate knowledge of their environment, a complex grammar and mythology. Ties between persons are coded in three kinds of overlaid kinship and naming systems that take up several pages of diagrams in an ethnography. San children never see the diagrams but instead see living patterns of gift giving and mutual aid, gradually sorted out in the course of childhood.
    The San have no indigenous tradition of schooling, no professional teachers, but like every human community they do teach. We are the animal that relies most on learning in our adaption, and even more distinctively the animal that relies most on teaching to evoke a portion of that learning. Just as the long human infancy requires reliable adult care, so the learning of survival skills requires reliable adult teaching: human biology depends on love. A San father takes his son out on the veldt with a spear to learn to track wild animals, just as an American father takes his son to the park to learn to hit a baseball. A village mother in Iran may give a warning or a demonstration before a daughter is allowed to use a loom or a sewing machine, wool or butter, knives or fire. Often what is taught would not be learned if it were not embedded in a relationship, for it may have no obvious relevance: a child’s hands may be moved through gestures of ceremonial, the sign of the cross or the beginning forms of dance. A parent may teach a child the words of a prayer, presenting it line by line for memorization, often enough in an unknown language. “In the name of Allah, the merciful and the compassionate,” “Hear, O Israel,” “Our Father who art…”
    Much that looks specific is really general instruction in relationship. In Western societies, we overestimate the importance of odds and ends of explicit teaching, without noticing what is learned implicitly. When we teach “Don’t say ‘it’s me,’ say ‘it’s I’” or “Say ‘thank you’” or “Don’t scratch in public,” we are using relatively trivial explicit teaching as part of the process of imparting informal knowledge of a highly abstract kind about correctness, public and private spaces, and the nature of authority. Educated parents put considerable effort into correcting certain “classic” errors of grammar (“It’s me”) while blithely ignoring complex syntactic processes that children master without ever having them explained. Similarly, parents spend considerable time telling children to say “please” and “thank you” without instructing them