Informally educated children learn through personal observation and imitation, whereas school children tend to learn by waiting for someone else to show them what to do
Ordinarily, children learn by actively using their own prior knowledge to understand new experiences. In Western societies, however, this period of exploratory social learning is short-lived. Children are quickly funneled into school and formal learning, which is perceived to be more advanced and more important than informal learning. They are actively prevented from continuing to learn through exploratory play, as the focus in schools and parents shifts to literacy and numeracy. This brings a rapid onset of a low-entropy state. However, in some other countries, children do not all attend school and thus we can get some idea as to how children learn when they are not funneled in this way.
Studies in Guatemala by Barbara Rogoff and colleagues have shown that children who aren’t formally educated remain in a state of ‘alert awareness’ for longer than children who go to school. They learnt through observation and imitation more effectively than a control group of schooled American children, who waited to be shown how to do something before paying attention, since Instructing a child’s education can prevent them from learning other possibilities by making them more likely to imitate. This is because schools encourage intellectual dependency towards authority by discouraging inquiry.
References
- Fisher, Naomi. (2021). Changing Our Minds Chapter 2. Learning – Scientists, Processors and Rats (p. 54). London, UK: Robinson Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Politics / Education / Psychology / Cognitive Science Status:☀️