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For hundreds
of thousands of years, up until the time when agriculture was
invented (a mere 10,000 years ago), we were all hunter-gatherers.
Our human instincts, including all of the instinctive means by
which we learn, came about in the context of that way of life. And
so it is natural to ask: How do hunter-gatherer children learn
what they need to know to become effective adults within their
culture?
In the last
half of the 20th century, anthropologists located and observed
many groups of people - in remote parts of Africa, Asia,
Australia, New Guinea, South America, and elsewhere - who had
maintained a hunting-and-gathering life, almost unaffected by
modern ways. Although each group studied had its own language and
other cultural traditions, the various groups were found to be
similar in many basic ways, which allows us to speak of the
"hunter-gatherer way of life" in the singular. Wherever
they were found, hunter-gatherers lived in small nomadic bands (of
about 25 to 50 people per band), made decisions democratically,
had ethical systems that centered on egalitarian values and
sharing, and had rich cultural traditions that included music,
art, games, dances, and time-honored stories.
To supplement
what we could find in the anthropological literature, several
years ago Jonathan Ogas (then a graduate student) and I contacted
a number of anthropologists who had lived among hunter-gatherers
and asked them to respond to a written questionnaire about their
observations of children's lives. Nine such scholars kindly
responded to our questionnaire. Among them, they had studied six
different hunter-gatherer cultures - three in Africa, one in
Malaysia, one in the Philippines, and one in New Guinea.
What I learned
from my reading and our questionnaire was startling for its
consistency from culture. Here I will summarize four conclusions,
which I think are most relevant to the issue of self-education.
Because I would like you to picture these practices as occurring
now, I will use the present tense in describing them, even though
the practices and the cultures themselves have been largely
destroyed in recent years by intrusions from the more
"developed" world around them.
1.
Hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount to become
successful adults.
It would be a
mistake to think that education is not a big issue for
hunter-gatherers because they don't have to learn much. In fact,
they have to learn an enormous amount.
To become
effective hunters, boys must learn the habits of the two or three
hundred different species of mammals and birds that the band
hunts; must know how to track such game using the slightest clues;
must be able to craft perfectly the tools of hunting, such as bows
and arrows, blowguns and darts, snares or nets; and must be
extraordinarily skilled at using those tools.
To become
effective gatherers, girls must learn which of the countless
varieties of roots, tubers, nuts, seeds, fruits, and greens in
their area are edible and nutritious, when and where to find them,
how to dig them (in the case of roots and tubers), how to extract
the edible portions efficiently (in the case of grains, nuts, and
certain plant fibers), and in some cases how to process them to
make them edible or increase their nutritional value. These
abilities include physical skills, honed by years of practice, as
well as the capacity to remember, use, add to, and modify an
enormous store of culturally shared verbal knowledge about the
food materials.
In addition,
hunter-gatherer children must learn how to navigate their huge
foraging territory, build huts, make fires, cook, fend off
predators, predict weather changes, treat wounds and diseases,
assist births, care for infants, maintain harmony within their
group, negotiate with neighboring groups, tell stories, make
music, and engage in various dances and rituals of their culture.
Since there is little specialization beyond that of men as hunters
and women as gatherers, each person must acquire a large fraction
of the total knowledge and skills of the culture.
2.
The children learn all this without being taught.
Although
hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount,
hunter-gatherers have nothing like school. Adults do not establish
a curriculum, or attempt to motivate children to learn, or give
lessons, or monitor children's progress. When asked how children
learn what they need to know, hunter-gatherer adults invariably
answer with words that mean essentially: "They teach
themselves through their observations, play, and
exploration." Occasionally an adult might offer a word of
advice or demonstrate how to do something better, such as how to
shape an arrowhead, but such help is given only when the child
clearly desires it. Adults to not initiate, direct, or interfere
with children's activities. Adults do not show any evidence of
worry about their children's education; millennia of experience
have proven to them that children are experts at educating
themselves.1
3.
The children are afforded enormous amounts of time to play and
explore.
In response to
our question about how much time children had for play, the
anthropologists we surveyed were unanimous in indicating that the
hunter-gatherer children they observed were free to play most if
not all of the day, every day. Typical responses are the
following:
- "[Batek]
children were free to play nearly all the time; no one expected
children to do serious work until they were in their late
teens." (Karen Endicott.)
- "Both
girls and boys [among the Nharo] had almost all day every day free
to play." (Alan Barnard.)
- "[Efé]
boys were free to play nearly all the time until age 15-17; for
girls most of the day, in between a few errands and some
babysitting, was spent in play." (Robert Bailey.)
- "[!Kung] children played from dawn to dusk." (Nancy
Howell.)
The freedom
that hunter-gatherer children enjoy to pursue their own interests
comes partly from the adults' understanding that such pursuits are
the surest path to education. It also comes from the general
spirit of egalitarianism and personal autonomy that pervades
hunter-gatherer cultures and applies as much to children as to
adults.2 Hunter-gatherer adults view children as
complete individuals, with rights comparable to those of adults.
Their assumption is that children will, of their own accord, begin
contributing to the economy of the band when they are
developmentally ready to do so. There is no need to make children
or anyone else do what they don't want to do. It is remarkable to
think that our instincts to learn and to contribute to the
community evolved in a world in which our instincts were trusted!
4.
Children observe adults' activities and incorporate those
activities into their play.
Hunter-gatherer
children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe
directly all that occurs in camp - the preparations to move, the
building of huts, the making and mending of tools and other
artifacts, the food preparation and cooking, the nursing and care
of infants, the precautions taken against predators and diseases,
the gossip and discussions, the arguments and politics, the dances
and festivities. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering
trips, and by age 10 or so, boys sometimes accompany men on
hunting trips.
The children
not only observe all of these activities, but they also
incorporate them into their play, and through that play they
become skilled at the activities. As they grow older, their play
turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division
between playful participation and real participation in the valued
activities of the group.
For example,
boys who one day are playfully hunting butterflies with their
little bows and arrows are, on a later day, playfully hunting
small mammals and bringing some of them home to eat, and on yet a
later day are joining men on real hunting trips, still in the
spirit of play. As another example, both boys and girls commonly
build play huts, modeled after the real huts that their parents
build. In her response to our questionnaire, Nancy Howell pointed
out that !Kung children commonly build a whole village of play
huts a few hundred yards from the real village. The play village
then becomes a playground where they act out many of the kinds of
scenes that they observe among adults.
The
respondents to our survey referred also to many other examples of
valued adult activities that were emulated regularly by children
in play. Digging up roots, fishing, smoking porcupines out of
holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine
ladders, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying
heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against
attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying
animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing,
storytelling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more
respondents. Because all this play occurs in an age-mixed
environment, the smaller children are constantly learning from the
older ones.
Nobody has to
tell or encourage the children to do all this. They do it
naturally because, like children everywhere, there is nothing that
they desire more than to grow up and to be like the successful
adults that they see around them. The desire to grow up is a
powerful motive that blends with the drives to play and explore
and ensures that children, if given a chance, will practice
endlessly the skills that they need to develop to become effective
adults.
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