Peripheral Visions

language of instruction is very close to the language of the home, he or she is still at risk when teachers spend their time teaching correct forms instead of celebrating the fact that every child already speaks some language pretty well. The structure of school emphasizes what you don’t know.
    A great deal could be gained from the traditional first language classroom by making systems learned without being verbalized explicit. If this could be done without devaluing the earlier, unverbalized learning, it could make available an additional layer of learning to learn. For example, English speakers go through their entire education without ever becoming explicitly aware of the rules they use, regularly and accurately, for forming plurals in spoken English. Children know this stuff when they arrive at school; all they need to learn is how to spell it and how to handle a few special cases. But discovering the rules offers a kind of self-knowledge, the discovery that one is cleverer than one knew, in ways one had never noticed. * Sometimes teachers are unaware of their own unverbalized knowledge and take it for granted as a foundation, failing repeatedly in the attempt to teach pupils from other backgrounds in whom that knowledge is absent or different. The fact of patterning is far more important than knowing which pattern is in fashion in a particular period.
    English teachers, even while offering the standard alternatives, could honor the elegant patterned quality of many “mistakes” (such as the use of like in reporting dialogue: “He’s like, ‘What can I do?’ and I’m like, What can I tell him? And he’s, ‘Maybe I’ll go home.’”). Black English uses its own set of variations with equal regularity. Affirming patterns already learned would mean a profound modification of the teacher-student relationship: skills achieved could be built upon or varied rather than replaced and students could be treated as expert sources on their own experience. Conflicts between home learning and school learning could be replaced by comparisons of alternative patterns instead of a dissonant jangle. Schooling could offer the chance to choose behavior that will be adaptive, rather than forcing it.
    The rules for how different kinds of knowledge fit together, which allow for the transfer of knowledge from one situation to another and for what linguists refer to as the generation of novel performances from underlying competences, are especially likely to remain unstated. Skills in seeking out and judging information that are explicitly taught are the tip of an iceberg whose base is formed when children learn to distinguish between fiction and news on television, to formulate the thousands of questions toddlers ask, to choose an adult likely to give intelligible answers, and to understand why some people are annoyed by questions and others pleased.
    Everywhere in the world, the contexts of learning change with maturation, switching from play to courtship to ritual. Cultures have mechanisms to accelerate learning at key points in the life cycle that build on the ancient link between learning and altered states of consciousness, like those that often form part of initiation rites. When adult participation in a society requires unlearning something already learned, the pedagogy may be draconian, yet often children accept it as a necessary transition to adult identities, part of becoming themselves. Without physical mutilation and fasting, we too maintain solemnity and unpleasantness in schooling, and insist on undoing earlier identities and confidences. Teaching children that there is a correct time and place for learning, we also teach them to stop learning when they manage to escape from school, or to keep what has been learned specialized to one context and quite inaccessible for use in others, like tourists who become tongue-tied in Paris after years of high school French.
    The polarity between initiation and alienation recurs in system after system; so does the polarity between persuasion and coercion. Often in missionary situations education is focused on matters that parents agree in wanting their children to master but comes blended with material that would alienate them. There is a profound tension between the idea of learning as coming home, carrying with it a steadily widened definition of home, and the idea of learning as leaving home. Jewish children exposed to Christmas celebrations at school, African American