Culture, Learning, and the Chore Curriculum

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Culture, Learning, and the Chore Curriculum

• David F. Lancy
• Program in Anthropology

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• Among well-educated families throughout the
  modern world, there is the compelling directive
  to stimulate infants intellectually to
  appropriately scaffold their burgeoning cognitive
  development. Such stimulation continues in early
  childhood and segues into formal instruction in
  pre-school. Scientific and applied literature in
  human development explicitly supports this
  perspective and warns of adverse consequences to
  the child of under-stimulation. This presentation
  will survey a wide body of work among pre-modern
  societies which fails to uncover evidence of
  infant or childhood stimulation or instruction
  and fails to affirm western benchmarks for
  cognitive development. In more recent
  researchcarried out in a cross section of
  agrarian and foraging societiesthere is little
  compelling evidence that childhood is a period of
  intense skill acquisition and practice. On the
  contrary, children acquire adult competencies at
  a very slow, episodic pace, they learn them
  through play and through social learning. Folk
  theories of childhood stress the folly of trying
  to accelerate development or instruct children
  who dont yet have any sense.

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Taekyo
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Invisible Babies

• Birth Huts
• Seclusion
• Cradleboard
• Swaddling
• Manta pouch
• Silence well-being

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swaddling immobilizes the child. Parents can
hang the bound infant up on a nail and go about
their business, secure in the know-ledge that he
cannot crawl into the fireplace or fall down a
well. A swaddled baby, like a little turtle in
its shell, could be looked after by another, only
slightly older child without too much fear of
injury, since the practice of swaddling
madechild care virtually idiot proof.Calvert,
Karin. 1992. Children in the House The Material
Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900. Boston,
MA Northeastern University Press.
Swaddling
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Uzbek Cradle
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Ideal Quiet Child
Among the Punan Bahthe baby ishardly
considered human the child is like an unripe
fruit, it must ripen, only then will you
know the taste of it. Nicolaisen, Ida. 1988.
Concepts and learning among the Punan Bah of
Sarawak, In Acquiring Culture Cross cultural
studies in child Development, Edited by Gustav
Jahoda and Ioan Lewis, (pp. 193-221). London, UK
Croom Helm.
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(Denver, Colorado)
Training Toddlers to Become Students

• Executive functions (EF), also called cognitive
  con-trol, are critical for success in school and
  life. Poor and minority children lack these
  skills but they can be taught. Core EF skills
  are

• (1) inhibitory control (resisting habits,
  temptations, or distractions), (2) working memory
  (mentally holding and using information), and (3)
  cognitive flexibility (adjusting to change).
• Diamond, Adele, Barnett, W. Steven, Thomas,
  Jessica, and Munro, Sarah 2007. Preschool program
  improves cognitive control. Science,
  3181387-1388.

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China
Ghana
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(Gbarngasuakwelle, Liberia)
They are Un-educable
On Ifaluk Island, before the age of two, children
have no thoughts or feelings they just eat and
play. Since they lack sense or morals, it is
useless to get angry or to try and control their
behavior. Children do not acquire adult-like
intelligence repiyuntil they are about five or
six years old. Burrows, Edwin G. and Shapiro,
Melford E. 1957. An Atoll culture. Westport, CT
Greenwood Press.
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(Liberia and Malawi)
The 5-7 Transition

• From the ethnographic record the notion emerges
  that children, before the age of five, roughly,
  arent worth teaching because they are too
  immature to really absorb important lessons. It
  isnt until ages 5-7 that children really begin
  to tune their radar to the world of adult
  competencies and to begin to emulate their
  parents and more competent older siblingsin
  earnestand not just in make-believe.
• Weisner, Thomas. 1996. The 5-7 transition as an
  ecocultural project. In The Five to Seven Year
  Shift Reason and Responsibility The Passage
  Through Childhood, Edited by A.J. Samaroff and M.
  M. Haith, (pp. 295-326). Chicago University of
  Chicago Press.

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(Fish Market Hodeidah, Yemen)
Chore Curriculum-
Marketing
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(Liberia)
Chore Curriculum-
Marketing
(Mexico)
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(Local market Otavalo, Ecuador)
Chore Curriculum-
Marketing
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Chore Curriculum-Farming

• Among the Bamana in Mali four-year-old Bafin
  has already grasped the meaning of sowing and is
  able to perform the various movementshe is
  entrusted with an old hoe as well as with some
  seeds so that he can gain some practice in this
  activity. Howeverhe has to be allocated a
  certain part of the field where he neither gets
  in the way of the others nor spoils the rows they
  have already sown. Also, the others have to keep
  an eye on his attempts and point out his mistakes
  to him from time to time. As a rule, his rows
  have to be re-sown. At harvest..three-year-old
  Daolebegins to pluck beans from the tendrils.
  After he has filled the lid with a handful of
  beans, his interest fades. He carelessly leaves
  the lid with the beans lying on the ground and
  goes looking for some other occupationFive year
  old Sumaèlalooks out for a corner not yet
  harvested and picks as many beans as will fill
  his calabash.he keeps on doing this for more
  than one and a half hours.Eleven year old Fase
  has been busy harvesting beanssince morning. He
  works as fast ashis father and grown-up
  brotherand only takes a rest when they do.
  Fase is a fully competentwith regard to
  harvesting beans. He even takes on the role of
  supervising his younger brothers and checks their
  performance from time to time.
• Polak, Barbara. 2003. Little peasants on the
  importance of reliability in child labour, In Le
  travail en Afrique noire Représentations et
  Pratiques à lépoque Contermporaine. Edited by
  DAlmeida-Topor, Hèléne, Monique Lakroum, and
  Gerd Spittler, (pp. 125-136). Paris, France
  Karthala.

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(Niger)
Chore Curriculum-Herding
(Ladakh)
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(Mary, Turkmenistan)
Chore Curriculum-Herding

• Spittler, Gerd. 1998. Hirtenarbeit. Köln Rüdiger
  Köppe

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(Lake Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan)
Chore Curriculum-Crafts
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(Khiva)
Chore Curriculum-Crafts
(Bokhara, Uzbekistan)

• Crown, Patricia 2001. Learning to make pottery in
  the Prehispanic American Southwest.
• Journal of Anthropological Research 57(4).

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(Western China)
Chore Curriculum-Crafts
(India)
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(Kewa Tribe, Papua New Guinea)
Task Demands-Time Frame

• Among Kewa horticulturalists, children are
  competent gardeners by 9.
• Mer Island children are fairly proficient reef
  foragers by 6.
• In Tibet, mixed herds tended by 6-7 year-olds.
• 10 year old Aka pygymies have mastered some 50
  foraging skills.
• Ache forest dwellers can recognize a kuere or
  signs of human or animal trails by age 8.
• Ache hunters do not become fully proficient until
  their 30s or 40s.
• Mongongo nut processing efficiency peaks in the
  30s for women living in the Okavango delta.

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Implications for Schooling
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School vs. work

• The Touaregs refuse to send their children to
  school even though attendance is compulsory. Some
  even go so far as to purchase potions from the
  shaman to make them appear stupid. Others claim
  that only poor parents without the means to
  employ children in herding or fruit harvesting
  send them to school.
• Spittler, Gerd. 1998. Hirtenarbeit. Köln
  Rüdiger Köppe
• Among the Lowland Mayathere is currently almost
  no opportunity to work in jobs that require an
  education, and parents would benefit little from
  investing in their childrens educationThe
  limited amount of training necessary to be
  successful at maize production coupled with the
  unavailability of skill-based wage labor result
  in a low payoff to parents to forgo their
  childrens work and formally educate or train
  them.
• Kramer, Karen L. 2002. Variation in juvenile
  dependence Helping behavior among Maya children.
  Human Nature 13(2) 299-325.
• Pandya describes the Indian government's
  institution of a public school in an Ongee
  Andaman Island village. In a multi-year
  account, we learn how the community struggles to
  find something useful or meaningful in the
  curriculum that's been imported in toto from
  Hindu-speaking, urban India. After twenty years
  five boys who had been in the school off and on
  for about eight yearscould not read or write
  The villagers are left completely without
  recourse as the foresttheir home and their
  livelihoodis rapidly cut in large-scale logging.
  
• Pandya, Vishvanjit 2005. Deforesting among
  Adamanese Children. In Barry S. Hewlett and
  Michael E. Lamb, Hunter Gatherer Childhoods
  Evolutionary, Developmental, and Cultural
  Perspectives. Pp. 385-406. New Brunswick, NJ
  AldineTransaction.

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Implications for Cognitive Development

• Argument advanced that most of the cognitive
  skills proposed by western psychologists, like
  Piaget, are not at all universal. Instead, these
  skills are promoted by schooling and the
  academically-oriented, information-rich child
  rearing practiced in bourgeoisie Euromerican and
  East Asian societies. Where non-western societies
  promote the mastery of large bodies of
  informationsuch as a foragers knowledge of wild
  food sourcesthis would provide a similar press
  to cognitive development.

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Conclusion

• Predominant theory and popular opinion regarding
  child development is entirely dependent on a
  single core assumption. The assumption is that
  childhood is a period during which an enormous
  volume of critical information and skill must be
  acquired. But that assumption is tenable only
  where formal, academic education is highly valued
  and where families, communities, and governments
  willingly accept the enormous costs entailed. In
  societies where childhood is dominated by the
  chore curriculum, the nature of development,
  especially cognitive development, will be quite
  different.