In most human societies, children have spent much of their time exploring and playing within independent peer cultures. This term reflects two important features of human childhood. First, the groups consist entirely of other children. Second, they are functionally and culturally distinct from adult society; they exist alongside but apart from the world of adults.
Thank you for this review! I was just reading about this book the other day and this essay felt really helpful, I'm going to try to read Lancy's book.
The one theoretical perspective that has really helped me nuance my own view is David Geary's distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary skills/knowledge. Biologically primary knowledge are the kinds of things that humans have been doing for so long that evolution has selected for the necessary skills/instincts (let's not squabble about words) to learn these without instruction. Examples are oral language, motor skills, reading facial expressions. Biologically secondary knowledge are the kinds of knowledge that humans have invented recently, they are part of our culture but not our biology, so to speak, and we are not able to learn these skills in the same "natural" way. Examples are reading and writing (some few kids do learn it almost by themselves, but those are a small minority), math, physics, that is, the main school subjects. Geary explains all this much better, and I highly recommend checking out this literature, because I think he makes clear and explicit something that is overlooked in a lot of the literature on school and learning.
"Children’s natural interest in novelty and their motivation to learn their
culture may get them started in school but is not likely to maintain long-term
academic learning. One possibility may be to capitalize on the fuzzy boundary between primary and secondary domains during the early years of schooling and children’s motivation to learn culturally important knowledge and to use these to build academic self-efficacy and other beliefs that will help to maintain effort in school learning in later years. There may be an excess reliance on “internal” motivation for academic learning, at the expense of focusing on the utility of the learning. If we assume that children are inherently motivated to learn in academic domains
and learn as effortlessly as they learn in folk domains, then we risk undervaluing the importance of focus and effort for secondary learning. Without an explicit assumption that learning will require effort, we put children at risk for making attributions (e.g., they do not have the ability to learn the material) that may undermine their engagement with school when academic
My impression is that school starts when writing starts. All of the *old* situations that people have talked about school talk about the scribe class of some early civilization sending their sons to writing class. The "class" part of it is imply (as Scott Alexander stresses) just doing the job in a labor-efficient way, having one teacher and ten students. But the nature of learning how to write seems to have been the same since writing was invented. And it seems to me that there are a lot of other things that "we" think children need to know/do that are like that. ... Indeed, it seems like everything that's taught in school is something that requires a foundation body of *factual* knowledge that you can't really teach by example. ... Perhaps a mini-example is doing crossword puzzles. Once someone knows several thousand words and their official spellings, you can then do coached learning-by-doing to teach them how to do crossword puzzles. Something similar happens with reading, writing, mathematics (at all levels), geography, ...
Ever read John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History Of American Education"?
Like anarchists, the critics of schooling have a point - it isn't natural, as are a lot of the things humans do. This is one reason why cats watch humans with such endless amusement. They do all sorts of silly things.
Schooling also in the end relies on naked force. That is also something that the anarchists correctly point out.
The question then is - so what is the alternative, and how do you get there? Power is one of those things that won't just go away, even if you don't wield it, someone else will.
The problem with Gatto, as I see it, is his way too conspiratorial read on this history. I think he makes a lot of good points, and I actually agree with him often, but his style and some of his explanations makes it easy to dismiss him.
As for the problem of power and what happens when you try to take away structures to dismantle power, nobody has written better about this than Jo Freeman, in the essay The tyranny of structurelessness: https://coco-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/tyranny.pdf
I read the Freeman piece and thought "Well, thank you, Captain Obvious!" but it apparently isn't all that obvious.
The problem is power, and the problem with power is that once it comes into being, it doesn't go away. Even if you don't use the power, someone else will, and you may not like what that someone else does with it.
Given just how many people romanticize freedom, it's not too surprising that there's quite a few people who forget these kinds of power dynamics. But yeah, I agree with you, it should be pretty obvious.
Well, you probably could create a society where nobody wields the power of school-prison. The trouble is that the *other* power, the power of economically more productive societies to (a) seduce away your most productive people, (b) take your land, (c) enslave your people really, really doesn't go away.
Unlike the noble cat, whose power stems from her wit and provenance, from her independence, the power of the human, like the grovelling dogs they like so well, stems from regimentation and conformity, from the pack.
As a software engineer who works from home, sometimes I try to get my kids interested in my job. But by default it seems completely incomprehensible to them, they can’t participate in any way or understand what’s going on. Kids can start learning these concepts but I honestly don’t even remember how the basics are taught. It seems like more and more jobs are complicated enough that you can’t just learn them directly from your parents.
Funny story about western education intersecting practicality. At cub scouts, the kids in the den were tasked with measuring the distance and time of their pace and then estimating how many paces and how much time it would take to hike a quarter of a mile. Two kids immediately got to work on the problem. Several others just looked confused. And one asked "why are we doing homework?" School *does* teach life skills, but because school itself is divorced from life, kids don't make the connection.
I love David Lancy and his ideas are part of my parenting paradigm, but as you note at the end, once you get into abstract skills that cannot simply be copied, you need school. Tahitians didn't learn to travel between remote islands by copying; they had navigation school. Aztecs went to school as well. It is also true that universal school was a response to child labor laws, and high school is a lame equivalent of "manhood" camp; an attempt to keep teenagers busy and therefore less destructive.
I think our way of raising children in Western society -- by talking to them a lot and playing with small children -- has ruined their ability to learn by observation. At least, my older two are incapable of this. To be fair, they spent their toddler and early-school years in a "neurodiverse" brain fog, so maybe they missed the window for developing that skills. When I say "watch and learn" they simply cannot. They even struggle with the idea of giving something more than a few seconds of attention before asking for help. I'm pretty sure their education (and my own alacrity to attend to their problems) has ruined them this way. And when the skill in question is something like tying one's own shoelaces, there's a limit to how long you can wait for them to figure it out.
I tried the "Hunt Gather Parent" thing with them, but they lost interest in helping about as soon as they became functionally capable of being helpful. As you note, this sort of upbringing enables lazy males. I think it's very telling that every example given in "Hunt Gather Parent" of a child (over the age of 5) being helpful is a girl. Boys need to be actively and forcibly civilized, either by the hierarchy, the patriarchy, or aggressive parenting. There's a reason these same indigenous societies have manhood rituals. The closest equivalent we have here is Boy Scouts.
I also do not understand how you are getting most of your work done with a 4yo helping. My 4yo insists on doing everything with me, as a result I cannot get anything done with him around. He is the single most destructive force in my garden, well-ahead of the squirrels and cabbage moth worms. He single-handedly wiped out my entire set of spinach starts by helpfully watering them into oblivion one day when I wasn't around. If I'm painting the kitchen, he doesn't want to just watch, he wants to paint, and he is a stubborn one. As a result, I find myself sending him away more often than I really want to. Please share your secrets.
>>they lost interest in helping about as soon as they became functionally capable of being helpful
I suspect this is universal, more or less. When kids are not motivated by their desire to learn, they need new sources of motivation. Lately I have been successful in pitching the kids (males aged 19, 10 and 8) against each other. I state that we have to wash up and clean the kitchen after dinner every day and the boys do the job of bantering over who is being lazy rather well.
>>My 4yo insists on doing everything with me, as a result I cannot get anything done with him around.
>>Please share your secrets.
The secret is a color coding system of work: Red for work that is dangerous, messy or requires a lot of focus, so toddlers need to be kept away. Yellow is for work where toddlers can be a the worksite, but only with the flexibility of two caretakers being present. Green is for work that is compatible with being the sole caretaker of toddlers (although it tends to take a bit longer with toddlers present).
On this scale I put painting in the red category. That is, work that toddlers shouldn't even watch at close range. I brag that can do woodworking with toddlers present, but I also can't do painting under such conditions.
"...once you get into abstract skills that cannot simply be copied, you need school."
Kittens all learn how to be cats through imitation and play. That said, I am yet to see many advances in the sciences these days coming from untutored geniuses.
I happen to follow Sudbury Valley / Democratic and unschooling because this is a long interest of mine. The Sudbury Valley school did a retrospective in which they interviewed former students to see how they were doing in life. Let's just say there were very few scientists among the graduates.
I also have followed these education subcultures for years now, and I have been trying to dig into what I felt was missing, since I've become more and more skeptical about the romantic idea that kids will learn just about anything if you just give them freedom.
The idea behind Sudbury Valley is similar to unschooling, but with all age children together. Kids only learn what they want to learn. The teachers are there to enable the learning that the children want to do. Some kids there went til age 12 without learning to read. Some had been previously diagnosed as dyslexic. It's a very interesting setup.
I would love to be a fly on the wall. The proponents insist that kids behave better in multi-age herds, with the older kids being nicer to the littler, and competing less with their own cohort. However, they have also noted that for the most part kids grsvitate to playing with kids their age. Anecdotally, they're seems to be a culture that includes practical jokes. However, in a democratic school you can 'sue' another kid over misbehavior so that should theoretically keep gross misconduct in check.
Do kids need "schooling" in behavioral norms? You definitely need a school culture, and it takes a while to build that, but I'm hesitant to call this learning schooling, since this kind of behavioral skills is something that most kids could pick up if they're given time and a conducive environment.
The book is called "Pursuit of Happiness" because the argument is that although the graduates are not "high achievement" if you mean "upper middle class income" they are arguably doing things that bring more joy than a "bullshit email job" that pays better. I have thoughts about that. Which is to say, I would point out that income frequently correlates with happiness. However, most kids arrive at a "democratic" school after all but flunking out of a regular one. Perhaps they fare much better than if they had become dropouts from public school.
If you like the idea of kids learning as they want, unschooling is a related topic. Peter Gray is a vocal psychologist who is a fan. I have not been convinced. In fact, the more I look into the "no school" paradigm the more convinced I become that school is essential to succeeding in the modern world.
I just finished reading "The Absorbent Mind" by Maria Montessori. Highly recommend. I suspect it has much more of what you are looking for in the way of "ok, but HOW do educate children instead?"
I haven't read it. The one thing that makes me skeptical is the lack of a break-through for Montessori education. Sweden is scattered with Montessori schools, but they don't seem to be much more than a way for parents to show how conscious they are. That can of course be the fault of the Swedish government more than of Maria Montessori. But I'm stuck with the suspicion that she failed to address some important part of human nature while overstressing other parts.
Reasonable to be skeptical. I picked up on this part of your essay:
"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."
While contemporary iterations of "Montessori" schools are all over the map in terms of how closely the adhere to the principles outlined in her original work, the results she obtained when developing her method were remarkable mostly for how the delivered the type of self-organizing, cohesive pursuit and maintenance of order that you are looking for in "the chore curriculum." And the results were obtained among groups of kids that would have been considered underprivileged at the time.
Here are the reasons that I suspect her approach has not broken through to widespread adoption:
1) You kind of have to start from the beginning. After 6 years old, the potential for her methods to deliver her results are greatly diminished as she herself readily admits. The problem with this criticism is, perhaps, that it proves too much: after 6 years old, there don't seem to be any methods yet discovered that reliably deliver superior results. That's not a message most of us want to hear (myself included).
2) It requires teachers/guides that are oriented towards facilitating growth through disciplined, patient application of indirect methods. There's no room for a "teaching to the test" mentality. It directly opposes the vision of a teacher that possesses knowledge that she gives to children which can be expected to respond correctly in an immediate and scheduled fashion, yet still demands a high level of conscientious attention to detail towards the preparation and supervision of the environment (of which the children are a part). The successes of a child can be gradually recognized but never definitively claimed by a teacher, while the failures often can be laid at the feet of the adult. Again, who among us "wants" that role?
3) It is explicitly spiritual. I like Joscha Bach's view that holds "software" as the re-discovery of "spirit" in the modern world, and while I can translate the terms into my idiom when I read, it wasn't the language the Montessori used when writing. She writes of God, the Soul, spirits and communion. I think those are load-bearing concepts within her approach, and if you try to implement the methods while denying their relevance, you will lose access to crucial components of error detection and correction.
In sum, I think you, Tove, could get a lot out of Montessori as a vision of how you could structure education for your children. I doubt that Randi Wiengarten or most that are currently employed in education would or even could.
Another brilliant essay. The value of western education (which is mostly futile torture) is that it provides a path for the future outsize contributors to start doing their thing.
Tusen Tack! Very fine review, showing so much more than the original book did! Even a link to the Great Alexander Scott, a text I am too happy to read again! I am definitely getting huge value out of my paid subscription to your substack - sad, the book offered less than that. I had the hope it would offer more in the way of quotes from anthropological field-work, did it disappoint on that front, too? - I agree, modern does not equal "Western" (actually Scott wrote about that, too - once, will edit when I find where) , e.g. Chinese 'Kindergartens' seem to be very modern and very, very far from any western concepts: "Chinese preschool really does seem to consist of sitting still. Unless given different orders, all students were required to sit in their seats with their arms at their sides, and their feet flat on a line of tape on the ground. This is not an easy task for three-year-olds." (quote of a SSC-review of "Little Soldiers")
I think Learning Without Lessons was good enough in terms of references to anthropological field work. That was the factor that made me consider it readable after all. Plus it wasn't as sprawling as The Anthropology of Childhood, which I didn't manage to read through.
In primitive societies, children mostly learn from other children, away from adults.
Source:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/children-as-agents-of-cultural-adaptation/F14F6E1809BEB70894B14FB8B5A51E91
Knowledge is produced and transmitted by children in what is known as "peer culture".
https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-children-play
In most human societies, children have spent much of their time exploring and playing within independent peer cultures. This term reflects two important features of human childhood. First, the groups consist entirely of other children. Second, they are functionally and culturally distinct from adult society; they exist alongside but apart from the world of adults.
Yes. However, David Lancy stresses that children in primitive societies only tend to play versions of what they have seen grown-ups doing.
Thank you for the David Lancy reference. That looks like some good reading.
I really like the phrase "the chore curriculum".
Thank you for this review! I was just reading about this book the other day and this essay felt really helpful, I'm going to try to read Lancy's book.
The one theoretical perspective that has really helped me nuance my own view is David Geary's distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary skills/knowledge. Biologically primary knowledge are the kinds of things that humans have been doing for so long that evolution has selected for the necessary skills/instincts (let's not squabble about words) to learn these without instruction. Examples are oral language, motor skills, reading facial expressions. Biologically secondary knowledge are the kinds of knowledge that humans have invented recently, they are part of our culture but not our biology, so to speak, and we are not able to learn these skills in the same "natural" way. Examples are reading and writing (some few kids do learn it almost by themselves, but those are a small minority), math, physics, that is, the main school subjects. Geary explains all this much better, and I highly recommend checking out this literature, because I think he makes clear and explicit something that is overlooked in a lot of the literature on school and learning.
Here's just one article by Geary about this issue: https://emergingtrends.stanford.edu/files/original/cf056b65a125104f2afde19d11e3f8554f5874c0.pdf
From the article:
"Children’s natural interest in novelty and their motivation to learn their
culture may get them started in school but is not likely to maintain long-term
academic learning. One possibility may be to capitalize on the fuzzy boundary between primary and secondary domains during the early years of schooling and children’s motivation to learn culturally important knowledge and to use these to build academic self-efficacy and other beliefs that will help to maintain effort in school learning in later years. There may be an excess reliance on “internal” motivation for academic learning, at the expense of focusing on the utility of the learning. If we assume that children are inherently motivated to learn in academic domains
and learn as effortlessly as they learn in folk domains, then we risk undervaluing the importance of focus and effort for secondary learning. Without an explicit assumption that learning will require effort, we put children at risk for making attributions (e.g., they do not have the ability to learn the material) that may undermine their engagement with school when academic
material becomes difficult."
Here's another interesting take on this distinction: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691822001251
Expecting a small child to sit at a desk quietly for several hours everyday for years is absolutely insane. Especially for boys.
My impression is that school starts when writing starts. All of the *old* situations that people have talked about school talk about the scribe class of some early civilization sending their sons to writing class. The "class" part of it is imply (as Scott Alexander stresses) just doing the job in a labor-efficient way, having one teacher and ten students. But the nature of learning how to write seems to have been the same since writing was invented. And it seems to me that there are a lot of other things that "we" think children need to know/do that are like that. ... Indeed, it seems like everything that's taught in school is something that requires a foundation body of *factual* knowledge that you can't really teach by example. ... Perhaps a mini-example is doing crossword puzzles. Once someone knows several thousand words and their official spellings, you can then do coached learning-by-doing to teach them how to do crossword puzzles. Something similar happens with reading, writing, mathematics (at all levels), geography, ...
Ever read John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History Of American Education"?
Like anarchists, the critics of schooling have a point - it isn't natural, as are a lot of the things humans do. This is one reason why cats watch humans with such endless amusement. They do all sorts of silly things.
Schooling also in the end relies on naked force. That is also something that the anarchists correctly point out.
The question then is - so what is the alternative, and how do you get there? Power is one of those things that won't just go away, even if you don't wield it, someone else will.
The problem with Gatto, as I see it, is his way too conspiratorial read on this history. I think he makes a lot of good points, and I actually agree with him often, but his style and some of his explanations makes it easy to dismiss him.
As for the problem of power and what happens when you try to take away structures to dismantle power, nobody has written better about this than Jo Freeman, in the essay The tyranny of structurelessness: https://coco-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/tyranny.pdf
I read the Freeman piece and thought "Well, thank you, Captain Obvious!" but it apparently isn't all that obvious.
The problem is power, and the problem with power is that once it comes into being, it doesn't go away. Even if you don't use the power, someone else will, and you may not like what that someone else does with it.
Given just how many people romanticize freedom, it's not too surprising that there's quite a few people who forget these kinds of power dynamics. But yeah, I agree with you, it should be pretty obvious.
"Humans say that they want liberty, but what they really want are kindlier masters." - Sallust
Well, you probably could create a society where nobody wields the power of school-prison. The trouble is that the *other* power, the power of economically more productive societies to (a) seduce away your most productive people, (b) take your land, (c) enslave your people really, really doesn't go away.
Unlike the noble cat, whose power stems from her wit and provenance, from her independence, the power of the human, like the grovelling dogs they like so well, stems from regimentation and conformity, from the pack.
As a software engineer who works from home, sometimes I try to get my kids interested in my job. But by default it seems completely incomprehensible to them, they can’t participate in any way or understand what’s going on. Kids can start learning these concepts but I honestly don’t even remember how the basics are taught. It seems like more and more jobs are complicated enough that you can’t just learn them directly from your parents.
Pick up a practical hobby that your kids can participate in with you
Funny story about western education intersecting practicality. At cub scouts, the kids in the den were tasked with measuring the distance and time of their pace and then estimating how many paces and how much time it would take to hike a quarter of a mile. Two kids immediately got to work on the problem. Several others just looked confused. And one asked "why are we doing homework?" School *does* teach life skills, but because school itself is divorced from life, kids don't make the connection.
I love David Lancy and his ideas are part of my parenting paradigm, but as you note at the end, once you get into abstract skills that cannot simply be copied, you need school. Tahitians didn't learn to travel between remote islands by copying; they had navigation school. Aztecs went to school as well. It is also true that universal school was a response to child labor laws, and high school is a lame equivalent of "manhood" camp; an attempt to keep teenagers busy and therefore less destructive.
I think our way of raising children in Western society -- by talking to them a lot and playing with small children -- has ruined their ability to learn by observation. At least, my older two are incapable of this. To be fair, they spent their toddler and early-school years in a "neurodiverse" brain fog, so maybe they missed the window for developing that skills. When I say "watch and learn" they simply cannot. They even struggle with the idea of giving something more than a few seconds of attention before asking for help. I'm pretty sure their education (and my own alacrity to attend to their problems) has ruined them this way. And when the skill in question is something like tying one's own shoelaces, there's a limit to how long you can wait for them to figure it out.
I tried the "Hunt Gather Parent" thing with them, but they lost interest in helping about as soon as they became functionally capable of being helpful. As you note, this sort of upbringing enables lazy males. I think it's very telling that every example given in "Hunt Gather Parent" of a child (over the age of 5) being helpful is a girl. Boys need to be actively and forcibly civilized, either by the hierarchy, the patriarchy, or aggressive parenting. There's a reason these same indigenous societies have manhood rituals. The closest equivalent we have here is Boy Scouts.
I also do not understand how you are getting most of your work done with a 4yo helping. My 4yo insists on doing everything with me, as a result I cannot get anything done with him around. He is the single most destructive force in my garden, well-ahead of the squirrels and cabbage moth worms. He single-handedly wiped out my entire set of spinach starts by helpfully watering them into oblivion one day when I wasn't around. If I'm painting the kitchen, he doesn't want to just watch, he wants to paint, and he is a stubborn one. As a result, I find myself sending him away more often than I really want to. Please share your secrets.
I can relate to several things you write:
>>they lost interest in helping about as soon as they became functionally capable of being helpful
I suspect this is universal, more or less. When kids are not motivated by their desire to learn, they need new sources of motivation. Lately I have been successful in pitching the kids (males aged 19, 10 and 8) against each other. I state that we have to wash up and clean the kitchen after dinner every day and the boys do the job of bantering over who is being lazy rather well.
>>My 4yo insists on doing everything with me, as a result I cannot get anything done with him around.
>>Please share your secrets.
The secret is a color coding system of work: Red for work that is dangerous, messy or requires a lot of focus, so toddlers need to be kept away. Yellow is for work where toddlers can be a the worksite, but only with the flexibility of two caretakers being present. Green is for work that is compatible with being the sole caretaker of toddlers (although it tends to take a bit longer with toddlers present).
On this scale I put painting in the red category. That is, work that toddlers shouldn't even watch at close range. I brag that can do woodworking with toddlers present, but I also can't do painting under such conditions.
"...once you get into abstract skills that cannot simply be copied, you need school."
Kittens all learn how to be cats through imitation and play. That said, I am yet to see many advances in the sciences these days coming from untutored geniuses.
I happen to follow Sudbury Valley / Democratic and unschooling because this is a long interest of mine. The Sudbury Valley school did a retrospective in which they interviewed former students to see how they were doing in life. Let's just say there were very few scientists among the graduates.
I also have followed these education subcultures for years now, and I have been trying to dig into what I felt was missing, since I've become more and more skeptical about the romantic idea that kids will learn just about anything if you just give them freedom.
You might have heard about Peter Gray, a strong defender of the Sudbury approach. I've interviewed him twice, and the second time we got a little more into the potential limitations of this approach: https://larsogpaal.libsyn.com/episode-138-peter-gray-on-reconsidering-what-we-know-about-schooling-and-learning
Link?
Well, the book is here: https://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/pursuit-happiness
The transcripts of an alumni panel is here: https://sudburyvalley.org/article/lives-alumni
The idea behind Sudbury Valley is similar to unschooling, but with all age children together. Kids only learn what they want to learn. The teachers are there to enable the learning that the children want to do. Some kids there went til age 12 without learning to read. Some had been previously diagnosed as dyslexic. It's a very interesting setup.
But the kids are still schooled in behavioral norms? Otherwise I guess it would be difficult to keep them together in a building.
I would love to be a fly on the wall. The proponents insist that kids behave better in multi-age herds, with the older kids being nicer to the littler, and competing less with their own cohort. However, they have also noted that for the most part kids grsvitate to playing with kids their age. Anecdotally, they're seems to be a culture that includes practical jokes. However, in a democratic school you can 'sue' another kid over misbehavior so that should theoretically keep gross misconduct in check.
Do kids need "schooling" in behavioral norms? You definitely need a school culture, and it takes a while to build that, but I'm hesitant to call this learning schooling, since this kind of behavioral skills is something that most kids could pick up if they're given time and a conducive environment.
Interesting. Thanks.
The book is called "Pursuit of Happiness" because the argument is that although the graduates are not "high achievement" if you mean "upper middle class income" they are arguably doing things that bring more joy than a "bullshit email job" that pays better. I have thoughts about that. Which is to say, I would point out that income frequently correlates with happiness. However, most kids arrive at a "democratic" school after all but flunking out of a regular one. Perhaps they fare much better than if they had become dropouts from public school.
The reviews here are thoughtful:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/548038.The_Pursuit_Of_Happiness?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=febvwAIjVT&rank=1
If you like the idea of kids learning as they want, unschooling is a related topic. Peter Gray is a vocal psychologist who is a fan. I have not been convinced. In fact, the more I look into the "no school" paradigm the more convinced I become that school is essential to succeeding in the modern world.
I just finished reading "The Absorbent Mind" by Maria Montessori. Highly recommend. I suspect it has much more of what you are looking for in the way of "ok, but HOW do educate children instead?"
I haven't read it. The one thing that makes me skeptical is the lack of a break-through for Montessori education. Sweden is scattered with Montessori schools, but they don't seem to be much more than a way for parents to show how conscious they are. That can of course be the fault of the Swedish government more than of Maria Montessori. But I'm stuck with the suspicion that she failed to address some important part of human nature while overstressing other parts.
Reasonable to be skeptical. I picked up on this part of your essay:
"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."
While contemporary iterations of "Montessori" schools are all over the map in terms of how closely the adhere to the principles outlined in her original work, the results she obtained when developing her method were remarkable mostly for how the delivered the type of self-organizing, cohesive pursuit and maintenance of order that you are looking for in "the chore curriculum." And the results were obtained among groups of kids that would have been considered underprivileged at the time.
Here are the reasons that I suspect her approach has not broken through to widespread adoption:
1) You kind of have to start from the beginning. After 6 years old, the potential for her methods to deliver her results are greatly diminished as she herself readily admits. The problem with this criticism is, perhaps, that it proves too much: after 6 years old, there don't seem to be any methods yet discovered that reliably deliver superior results. That's not a message most of us want to hear (myself included).
2) It requires teachers/guides that are oriented towards facilitating growth through disciplined, patient application of indirect methods. There's no room for a "teaching to the test" mentality. It directly opposes the vision of a teacher that possesses knowledge that she gives to children which can be expected to respond correctly in an immediate and scheduled fashion, yet still demands a high level of conscientious attention to detail towards the preparation and supervision of the environment (of which the children are a part). The successes of a child can be gradually recognized but never definitively claimed by a teacher, while the failures often can be laid at the feet of the adult. Again, who among us "wants" that role?
3) It is explicitly spiritual. I like Joscha Bach's view that holds "software" as the re-discovery of "spirit" in the modern world, and while I can translate the terms into my idiom when I read, it wasn't the language the Montessori used when writing. She writes of God, the Soul, spirits and communion. I think those are load-bearing concepts within her approach, and if you try to implement the methods while denying their relevance, you will lose access to crucial components of error detection and correction.
In sum, I think you, Tove, could get a lot out of Montessori as a vision of how you could structure education for your children. I doubt that Randi Wiengarten or most that are currently employed in education would or even could.
That sounds very interesting, actually. I will take a look at it.
Another brilliant essay. The value of western education (which is mostly futile torture) is that it provides a path for the future outsize contributors to start doing their thing.
Tusen Tack! Very fine review, showing so much more than the original book did! Even a link to the Great Alexander Scott, a text I am too happy to read again! I am definitely getting huge value out of my paid subscription to your substack - sad, the book offered less than that. I had the hope it would offer more in the way of quotes from anthropological field-work, did it disappoint on that front, too? - I agree, modern does not equal "Western" (actually Scott wrote about that, too - once, will edit when I find where) , e.g. Chinese 'Kindergartens' seem to be very modern and very, very far from any western concepts: "Chinese preschool really does seem to consist of sitting still. Unless given different orders, all students were required to sit in their seats with their arms at their sides, and their feet flat on a line of tape on the ground. This is not an easy task for three-year-olds." (quote of a SSC-review of "Little Soldiers")
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/
I think Learning Without Lessons was good enough in terms of references to anthropological field work. That was the factor that made me consider it readable after all. Plus it wasn't as sprawling as The Anthropology of Childhood, which I didn't manage to read through.