The human nature of culture and education (original) (raw)
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Learning to be Human: teaching, culture and human cognitive evolution
Psychology has taken an evolutionary turn of late. This paper acknowledges the importance of adopting an evolutionary perspective in attempting to understand human cognition and development, but it suggests that the model adopted by many evolutionary psychologists is incomplete. Learning, teaching and cultural transmission play vital roles in the distinctive human life pattern, but have received inadequate attention in the literature. Drawing upon primatological, anthropological and psychological data, this paper offers an articulation of ‘cultural learning’, which, it is claimed, is a peculiarly accurate and resilient form of social form, made possible by the uniquely human capacity for an intersubjective engagement with the mental and intentional lives of other people. The paper discusses the character and appearance of imitative, collaborative and instructed forms of learning within early childhood, and tentatively identifies implications for child development and contemporary schooling.
Cultural learning and creation
Human children become cultural beings by learning to participate in the cultural activities and practices going on around them. Household pets grow up in the midst of these same cultural activities and practices, but they do not learn to participate in them in anything like the same way as human children. Even chimpanzees and bonobos raised in human homes and treated like human children still retain, for the most part, their species-typical social and cognitive skills without turning into cultural beings of the human kind. This difference suggests that humans are biologically adapted, in ways that other animal species are not, for becoming cultural beings by tuning in to what others around them are doing, and thereby learning from them. Moreover, on occasion, young children even create with others smallscale cultural activities and routines involving one or another form of collaboration, or even collaborative pretense. Such cultural creation would also seem to be unique to human beings, and of course cultural creation leads to ever new cultural environments in which human cognitive ontogeny takes place.
The cultural origins of cultural learning.pdf
Cumulative cultural evolution is what 'makes us odd'; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article, I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as 'cultural learning' because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only 'grist' but also 'mills' that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make 'fact inheritance' possible (mills).
Cultural Models of Teaching and Learning
2010
Among the Western intelligentsia, parenting is synonymous with teaching. We are cajoled into beginning our child's education in the womb and feel guilty whenever a "teaching moment" is squandered. This paper will argue that this reliance on teaching, generally, and especially on parents as teachers is quite recent historically and localized culturally. The majority of the world's people follow a laissez faire attitude towards development that relies heavily on children's natural curiosity and motivation to emulate those who're more expert. Peers are often seen as the preferred role models and mentors for younger children. The paper will discuss the implication of prevailing folk models for children's adaptation to modern forms of schooling.
Culture, infancy and education
European Journal of Psychology of Education, 1989
The English word infant is derived from the Latin infans meaning «without speech». In German (Saugling) and Duch (zuigeIing), an infant is somebody who sucks (at the breast). The French equivalent (nourrisson) reflects that it is an organism which has to be fed. In Czech (kojenec) it is derived from the verb kojit meaning to nurse. Thus, when speech is acquired and feeding can be carried out independently, the period of infancy begins to give way to early childhood. In some non-Western cultures, other sorts of markers may be used to denote this transition which rely more on social phenomena than on maturational or chronological indicators. For example, the Kipsigis of western Kenya define the transition primarily in relation to the birth of the next child (Harkness & Super, 1983). Cultures also differ in terms of defining what are the critical features of development during infancy (leVine, 1977) and thereby what behaviours are preferentially encouraged (or discouraged) by the caretakers (Super, 1981). It is important to appreciate differences in the culturally-constructed meaning of infancy as they provide a better understanding of the variations that manifest themselves in panhuman forms of early educational practice. The crucial, and largely unanswered, question relates to the functional significance of these variations: in what ways do they share common concerns and in what ways do they constitute adaptations to the local environment of the culture? The answers have important consequences for the acceptability and efficacy of any international programs of aid concerned with parental and child health. While there are some notable exceptions, most research concerned with cultural comparisons of infant behaviour and development is simply not up to providing appropriate answers. Understanding the nature of the initial phase of human nurture has suffered from a neglect of the early environment of education in such comparisons. Variousjustifications have been offered for carrying out cross-cultural research on infancy (or what Leiderman, 'Iulkin & Rosenfeld, 1977, prefer to term comparative child development studies). For the present purposes, four reasons or aims can be identified.
Culture and Early Childhood Learning
2010
Topic Culture Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development 5 ©2010 CEECD / SKC-ECD Cole M, Hakkarainen P, Bredikyte M CULTURE Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development 6 ©2010 CEECD / SKC-ECD Cole M, Hakkarainen P, Bredikyte M
O. Braddick (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of psychology. Oxford University Press.
There is growing appreciation of the role of culture in children’s psychological development (also called human ontogenesis). Cross-cultural methodology in psychology has increasingly been used to explore to cultural differences in children’s development. At the same time, a ‘cultural psychology’ has emerged, in which the constitutive role of culture in human development is emphasized. Although there continues to be much debate over how to define culture it is generally agreed that different human social groups have distinct cultures, and it is common to assume that cultural differences lead to differences in the trajectories of children’s development. This is true, but it is also the case that culture is a universal requirement for development. Every child is born into a family and community with a language, customs, and conventions, and in which people occupy institutional roles with rights and responsibilities. These facts define universal requisites of human psychological development: these include the acquisition of language, the development of a social identity, the understanding of community obligations, and the ability to contribute to the reproduction of the community. Researchers are exploing the character of the capacities which children bring to these developmental tasks: the apparently species-unique ability that has made possible vast human societies.
Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2011
Education is broadly defined as the set of processes by which each generation of human beings acquires the culture in which they grow up. By this definition, education is part and parcel of our biological makeup. An analysis of education in hunter-gatherer bands indicates that young humans are designed, by natural selection, to acquire the culture through their self-directed play and exploration. Research at a modern-day democratic school designed to facilitate self-education demonstrates that our hunter-gatherer educative instincts are quite adequate for education today, given an appropriate educational environment. The ideal environment for such education—found both in hunter-gatherer bands and at the school studied—is one in which young people (a) have unlimited free time and much space in which to play and explore; (b) can mix freely with other children of all ages; (c) have access to a variety of knowledgeable and caring adults; (d) have access to culturally relevant tools and ...