An anti-education book review

School is unnatural. That is a three word summary of David Lancy’s book Learning Without Lessons

In his 2024 book Learning Without Lessons David Lancy takes aim at the modern education system from an anthropological point of view. The book aims at demonstrating a number of assumptions.

1. In the world as a whole, children learn more from looking at and copying people who are older than them than from verbal instruction. They learn through what David Lancy calls the chore curriculum, as opposed to the modern core curriculum. Parents in traditional societies tend to do little to actively instruct their children. Instead their children instruct themselves, sometimes in defiance of their parents who consider them too young.

2. Children are mostly eager to work, if they are allowed to do it the traditional, copycat way.

3. Children mostly dislike lesson-based school and need to be forced into it.

4. Modern societies are crowded with misunderstandings about how children learn, erroneously stressing the importance of teaching even infants and fetuses.

Having raised six children to various ages (currently 2 to 19), I in no way doubt that David Lancy is right on those points. I believe that more or less every parent would agree with me that one of the most challenging parts of raising toddlers is the conflicts that constantly arise when the toddler wants to do things themselves although they are unable to. Which parent hasn’t carried a bag in an uncomfortable position so a toddler can “help” carrying it? And we have probably all noticed how difficult it is to explain to a child which shoe to put on which foot and how to fit a jigsaw puzzle together. And why can’t toddlers just learn how to build Lego houses in a bonded pattern so it doesn’t fall apart so easily? I try to teach them and they don’t learn.

The reason for that kind of “stupidity” is explained in David Lancy’s book: Kids don’t learn mainly from condensed instruction but from seeing elders doing things repeatedly. If I fitted jigsaw puzzles and built Lego houses as a part of my everyday routine, surely they would learn, just as they know how to put dishes in a dishwasher or use a screwdriver.

I also know that providing children with the opportunity to watch grown-up activities is the easiest way to keep young children calm. When I’m doing something practical like cleaning, carpentry or gardening, the children tend to be remarkably well-behaved and fight little with each other. As soon as I sit down and read a book, they will freak out within minutes. Evidently, watching a caretaker doing things on their own is very important in the world of toddlers. Even more so if they can participate on the fringes. I can get surprising amounts of work done with two toddlers accompanying me. Not just housework, but also gardening and construction work. When I for example do woodworking I give both children ear muffs and allow them to roam when I saw and plain wood. Child 5, aged 4, regularly volunteers to conscientiously clean up the wood chips, without anyone asking. (The same child stubbornly resists when required to tidy up his own Lego bricks as a condition to watch YouTube movies in the evening.) For this reason I have learnt to fit in all the housework and also much gardening and construction work when the kids are at home and awake and to read and write only when the kids are asleep, away or thoroughly busy. Just like the indigenous mothers David Lancy describes, I consider the children’s play time to be my work time.

I didn’t learn this from anthropology. First of all, I learnt it from a child-care instruction book by a Swedish writer called Anna Wahlgren, written in 1983. Anna was a colorful personality who defied her upper class roots and came to live like a lower class single mother-of-nine. Her nine children had three different fathers of which none stuck around for long. The family moved often from town to town. Anna provided for the family through writing magazine columns and novels with titles like In the Name of Love.

In essence, this renegade Swedish upper class woman discovered on her own what David Lancy reports that parents in indigenous, tribal societies know: That children most of all want to be included in what grown-ups do and they learn through being allowed to participate and imitate. She even had some home made theories of evolutionary psychology to explain why. And, most strikingly, her life story gives proof to her laid-back ideas of childrearing in one important way: Her descendants became just as successful as her ancestors and siblings. She was the daughter of a master builder and a restaurant manager and the sister of a photographer and a builder. She later became the mother of a literary critic who became the president of the Swedish academy, a notable game developer, a writer and a cookbook author.

That is, it didn’t matter that Anna Wahlgren broke away from her social class and took on the living habits, mating habits and child raising habits of the lower classes and of indigenous, uneducated people (including abstaining from helping her kids with school work or giving them advice in their future choices). She smoked and drank alcohol during her pregnancies. For a time she even pulled her children down to the Third World on an entirely concrete level: She married an Egyptian and moved with her children to his village in Egypt. While there a four year old son caught diphtheria and died. And in spite of those quite atypical hardships, Anna’s surviving children were just as over-represented in the Swedish cultural elite as her ancestors and siblings. Through her own work as a writer, Anna demonstrated a road of success in the cultural area for her children, and several of them just followed. Not because they were tutored for that role, but because they could imitate their mother, like so many children in so many places before them.

Are babies human?

There is another reason for me to agree with people from simple societies: They tend to consider newborn babies to be less than fully human. David Lancy writes:

WEIRD parent–child speech patterns are predicated on an assumption that the infant is a complete person from birth and that all the adult capacities are present in nascent form, to be stimulated and scaffolded by special speech forms such as baby talk and motherese. In contrast, many societies withhold fully human status, at least until the child is mobile and has acquired speech (Lancy 2014).¹

Later, he writes:

The infant’s progress in learning its culture goes largely undetected. Instead, caretakers are more acutely aware of its failings. It cannot speak or understand speech; it cannot feed, dress, or clean itself. The sounds it makes and its uncontrolled body movements suggest that it is more animal than human, and, of course, its initial foray into self-locomotion—crawling—merely reinforces the notion that it is beast-like. Many societies are not overly troubled by this and wait patiently for the inevitable transformation.²

After having cared for six babies, I’m convinced that the wild people are right also on this point. The belief that babies are small versions of humans lies behind a lot of the ineptitude in modern Western baby care. Since Westerners believe that babies are human, they believe that their baby is communicating with them in a somehow human way and are trying to understand the baby’s message. And they fail miserably, because babies are not very much like humans.

For example, modern Western parents tend to believe that when their baby screams, it is expressing its needs. So they are trying to “read” their baby in order to guess what the baby wants. Been there, done that. The problem is that the baby has no idea what it wants. It most often is hungry, but it doesn’t know that itself. Thereby it needs to be distracted to stop screaming and start eating, because it is so occupied with screaming that it doesn’t notice that it has a food source in its mouth.

And very sleepy babies don’t look tired. They look as if they are in severe pain. Only with my fourth child did I discover this, because I was lucky enough not to have a “cholic baby” until then. From the age of a few weeks, the baby would start screaming ceaselessly and pull his legs toward his belly, as if cramping, from about eight in the evenings until midnight. It certainly looked as if he had a severe stomachache.

But the before-mentioned Anna Wahlgren had taught me otherwise. So although it looked like a stomachache, I guessed that the baby was really sleep deprived because he napped so little during the day. I set out to force-sleep him by rocking him in a pram at even intervals during the day. I kept a record of his sleeping times with the goal that he should sleep six hours every day (in addition to his eight-hour night).

And the “cholic” disappeared. The same thing happened with my subsequent two children, who were also “cholic babies”. This was one of many indications I had that babies should not be reasoned with like humans. Instead, they should most of all be cared for, like very demanding exotic pets.

Nowadays I believe that one of the most important skills for caring for a baby is to have the right expectations. Basically, a baby is a demanding - and very cute - animal. One of my favorite nicknames for a baby is The Little Human Package. Isn’t it amazing that there is a human in here? I ask when I’m doing my stupid baby talk. The baby doesn’t look like a human and doesn’t behave like one, and still, there is a human peeking out from there, waiting to be gradually unfolded with some care and some time. There is no reason to be impatient: The human unfolds when it unfolds. In the meantime, everyone will be happier if babies are accepted for the kind of animal they actually are.

And now, what?

Indigenous people are more right about how children learn than anxious middle class Westerners. Indigenous people are also more right about the nature of baby cognition than mainstream Westerners. That was the easy part. Now that I, like many other Westerners, don’t believe in the Western middle class teaching paradigm, what should I do? That is the difficult part.

Learning Without Lessons offers little advice. Which should be fine, because it doesn’t market itself as a book of advice. Still, I lack accounts from one important group: The Amish.

David Lancy contrasts the Western middle class teaching paradigm with two other types of communities:

1. Dirt poor Third World societies where formal education hasn’t been established

2. First World lower class groups to which the ideology of formal education hasn’t trickled down.

Those groups are hardly role models. More or less, we educated Westerners tend to cling to our education paradigm, even when we don’t believe very much in it, because we are afraid that the only alternative is the poverty of the Third World or the anarchy of the lower classes. The uneducated groups that David Lancy describes are all at least partially failures, both according to themselves and according to others.

That is why the Amish are so important. They are not uneducated and lower class because they have failed to be anything else, but because their culture explicitly orders them to occupy the niche of an uneducated, well-behaved rural lower class. They are lower class by choice, and thereby they lack a number of the less enviable characteristics of communities that are lower class by accident. Most of the indigenous communities Lancy describes are very poor, with their members torn between hopes of a better life through education and their traditional lifestyle that at least can sustain them. The Amish constitute the middle road between those extremes. Following the Amish way does not condemn a person to grinding poverty. It doesn’t mean abstaining from life-saving health care. The Amish are not lower-class in the sense of disruptive people on the edge of the social fabric. Rather, they have carved a niche for themselves as a well-behaved, orderly, hereditary lower class. And, maybe most important of all, the Amish are Westerners. Thereby, they show that another way of being a Westerner is possible.

David Lancy doesn’t seem very interested in Western culture at all. Throughout the book he conflates the concepts Western and modern and in my opinion, he misuses the WEIRD concept. The acronym WEIRD, standing for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, was launched by Joseph Henrich in his 2020 book WEIRDest People in the World. Heinrich’s point was to stress how particular educated Western culture actually is compared to the cultures of the majority of people who have lived and who are alive today. For that reason, I found David Lancy’s use of the WEIRD acronym to describe modern Japanese education³ bordering on concept sabotage. It doesn’t matter how educated, industrialized, rich and democratic Japan becomes. It is still not a Western society. This is not just a matter of semantics. Education is very different in East Asia compared to the Western world. Which is because being Western is not synonymous with being modern.

Maybe that obliviousness of the particularity of Western society lies behind David Lancy’s lack of interest in the Amish. But for those of us who are both Westerners and skeptical of education, the Amish should be one of the first groups to study. So while reading Learning Without Lessons I really missed detailed studies of how Amish children learn the chore curriculum. It is interesting that children can learn to craft a bow without being actively taught. It would be even more interesting to know to what degree children can fit into the culture of highly civilized, well-functioning societies without being taught. After all, no one wants a child who grows up to learn diverse skills just by observing, but also engages in drive-by shootings as soon as they enter their teens.

What about child prison?

This takes us to a question that David Lancy doesn’t address in depth: Why is formal education a feature of all civilizations? Lancy’s careless application of the WEIRD concept to modern education all over the world makes the impression that formal schooling spread over the world much by accident, through Western cultural imperialism. But widespread classroom education arose in China and Japan independent of Western society. Western society has many peculiarities. The idea that there is a value in classroom education for children is not one of them. Rather, that idea seems to be intrinsically linked to the degree of complexity of a society. When a certain level of complexity is attained, the demand for a class of people with knowledge and skills other than what can be easily imitated arises. More or less, the more complex a society, the higher the percentage of people who are supposed to undergo formal education.

The only thing that David Lancy really tries to prove, is that children can learn quite a few skills without being actively taught. More or less, his message is that children do not become incompetent idiots just because no one teaches them. He doesn’t try to answer the question why teaching has become so ubiquitous in spite of that fact. Readers have to guess on their own.

One of my guesses is Scott Alexander’s explanation to why school exists: Above all, school is child prison. Schools are strikingly inefficient at actually teaching children. And few people really care about that. Because we all know, on some level, that the point of school is a gigantic prison project to deal with an unruly and underemployed part of the population.

David Lancy describes what good things children can learn from just hanging around the world of grown-ups. But what bad things do they learn as well? Another anthropologist, Jacques Lizot, gives some clues from a Yanomamö village:

“There are three boys and a little girl; Kerama is the smallest of them all. The children make fun of one another; they accuse one another of having a big asshole. Each shows the other the anus he attributes to him. The ring formed by thumb and index finger no longer suffices to indicate the size; soon they need their arms. When he runs out of arguments, Haotoiwe spreads his buttocks and shouts at the others, who have banded against him:

Here! Here’s my asshole that farts on you!”⁴

I in no way claim that school has eliminated discussions on that level among Western children. But it definitely is an attempt to crowd out that kind of interaction through keeping the children busy and disciplined.

Neither did the Yanomamö school of life only produce very diligent teenagers: From the same book we learn about a teenage boy who is reluctant to get married because he finds it comfortable that his mother provides him with food and firewood at home. As everyone who has read about small scale societies knows: Males in such societies tend to shun work compared to males in more civilized societies.

School is inefficient at teaching children skills. It numbs their minds and stifles their creativity. But at least it stops children from becoming street smart. Ideally, school shelters children from reality so they don’t learn about the reality of human nature. That way, they will be easier to fit into society as grown-ups. Not mainly because school has made them competent, but because school has made them incompetent in pursuing their own interests.

This pattern is true for most people. The majority of children just learn a few basic skills of literacy and numeracy and lingua franca from school. Most other things they are forced to learn they place on the shelf of irrelevant information and forget as quickly as they can. Then they go through life pragmatically fitting in and doing whatever people around them do, just like their ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago.

But a minority of people actually learn something in school or from books. Things that can’t be picked up from practical imitation. And some of those people become the engineers that make our society a modern high-tech society. Others provide a bit of perspective that at least partially prevents society from falling down into increasingly irrational traditions. If schools were abolished, those people wouldn’t know about the better way of doing things. And since you never know which child will become one of the few who actually do something constructive with their bookish learning, every child has to be tortured with books to some extent.

Can there be a more humane way of keeping all children from learning the wrong thing and making the few children who actually like theoretical knowledge learn the right things? I’m sure there is. And I think this will be one of the subjects of the cultural evolution of the future. Modern societies haven’t yet learnt to raise children in a sustainable manner. The potential is enormous.

What to do for the Third World?

David Lancy devotes one of the last chapters of the book to charity and modernization. He explains that indigenous people who withhold modern education from their children are often acting rationally in a way. If they teach their children the chore curriculum, at least that child will be competent in the ways of their traditional society. Indigenous children who go to school often fail to learn enough to be employable in the modern economy. An economy that might be severely suppressed anyway due to high levels of violence and corruption.

This contradiction made me think of my father, who runs a charity in a remote village in Guatemala. My father is a former metal worker and he set up a school that teaches metal work to children and grown-ups. People who are more than 20 years old pay a small fee, but the courses are free for children. He also teaches children basic literacy and numeracy skills if they want to, and some English.

Photo of a student at Vivamos TDT in action

Trying to find my father’s charity, called Vivamos TDT, on the internet proved to be tricky. The only traces that exist are a Facebook page in Spanish and a homepage that is no longer being updated. He is not into public relations, really. In any case, I wonder if this kind of venture could be what David Lancy would prefer: A Westerner who takes his practical skills to the Third World, rather than an abstract idea of the general value of schooling that might or might not be true. It doesn’t solve the basic problem: That Guatemala has a vibrant and competitive extractive sector that keeps its primitive productive sector under tight oppression. But if First World citizens want to contribute anything to such downtrodden productive economies, then setting up a workshop where people can observe and try some modern manufacturing methods on their own might be the thing to do. After all, the concept builds on thousands of years of tradition.

1. David Lancy, Learning Without Lessons: Pedagogy in Indigenous Communities, 2024, 12 percent of e-book

2. David Lancy, Learning Without Lessons: Pedagogy in Indigenous Communities, 2024, 16 percent of e-book

3. At 62 percent of e-book, the following paragraph can be read:

“WEIRD families in Japan go a step further 4 : The home-study desk bought by most parents for their children symbolizes the hovering care and intensity of the mother’s involvement: all models have a high front and half-sides, cutting out distractions and enclosing the workspace in womb-like protection. There is a built-in study light, shelves, a clock, electric pencil sharpener and built-in calculator. [One] popular . . . model included a push button connecting to a buzzer in the kitchen to summon mother for help or for a snack. (LeVine and White 1986, 123)”

This is not Western-style childrearing. It is a parody of East Asian-style childrearing.

4. Jacques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomami, 1976, 16 percent of e-book.