Peripheral Visions

in the more subtle gestural courtesies and alternate forms they will eventually master. We tell our children to say, “Please pass the butter,” and almost unnoticed they learn to say, “Could I have the butter?” in a tone that makes it accepted as equivalent. Clearly the lesson in courtesy is a vehicle for another less explicit and more profound lesson, like Parvaneh simultaneously instructing Shahnaz to be friendly and to withdraw from strangers. The informal learning, unverbalized and unquestioned, takes precedence over explicit teaching unless uprooted in drastic ways.
    The same is true on matters of values. We instruct our children not to hit, not to make another child cry, and to “be nice to the little girl,” but by example and other subtler clues we also instruct them that in some cases they should hit back and that they should be nicer to some people than to others. Subtle lessons about how social structures really work are passed on to children before they go to school, often before they are exposed to more presentable but contradictory verbalized values, which may then prove extremely difficult to teach. Sometimes when I paused to chat in the Philippines, a mother would say, “This is our fair child and this dark one is the ugly one,” and I would be filled with white guilt and play with the darker child, knowing that there was little I could do to modify an often repeated lesson that would haunt both children for life. If African American children are told, with yanks and impatience, that they have “bad” hair, they may learn a much more general lesson of badness. Joan, with her educational toys, form boards, and color books, was teaching Becky something, although not yet the lessons visualized by educators.
    Discovering the connections and regularities within knowledge you already have is another kind of homecoming, a recognition that feels like a glorious game or a profound validation. When I started describing cultural patterns that were creating conflict between Iranians and Americans, one U.S.-educated Iranian said with pleasure that my analyses made his own informally learned traditions seem “reasonable,” for the first time. If teachers were to approach their classes with an appreciation of how much their pupils already knew, helping to bring the structure of that informal knowledge into consciousness, students would have the feeling of being on familiar ground, already knowing much about how to know, how knowledge is organized and integrated. This might be one way for schooling to assume the flavor of learning as homecoming: learning to learn, knowing what you know, cognition recognized, knowledge acknowledged.
    When schooling conflicts with previous learning on specifics, more general patterns may be disrupted and the sense of how knowledge is put together may be unraveled. So often, schooling depends on the idea “Take care of the pence for the pounds will take care of themselves,” but the pounds are the fundamentals. An American child who has been told to drink her orange juice when she has a cold has learned exactly the same truth about the process of learning as an Iranian child who has been told never to drink orange juice when he is sick: that appropriate behavior must allow for all sorts of invisible relations of cause and effect, taken on trust. Better theories of nutrition are not a fair trade for impaired trust.
    Eating carrots helps you to see in the dark. Garlic repels vampires. Cholesterol causes heart attacks. We all accept a vast number of such beliefs, and simply attacking those that have not been empirically validated creates confusion. The message “you are ignorant” is an attack on all the learning gained up to that point, not just on particular errors. It is more important to learn ways of grasping and organizing and testing such propositions, in the context of an affirmation of the process of learning. We may yet get a different version of the cholesterol story.
    It has been said that the most important intellectual achievement of any human life is learning a first language, yet, except for brain damage, this is something we all have in common. We all enter school speaking a first language. In school we find out its name. A child who has learned to speak a nonstandard form has learned as much about how to learn a language as the child who has learned a standard one; that learning to learn has to be conserved. When a child enters school, even where the