Hi Mary-- Your quote from Illich struck me forcefully enough so that I am
breaking my resolution to finish an overdue piece of writing to make a
brief comment.
School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result
of teaching.
Easy to dis that idea, isn't it? We didn't learn to speak, or sneak cookies,
or do gender from deliberate teaching. Jean Lave's article a few years back
in MCA was an extended attack on that axiom.
However, I think the knee jerk attack fails to differentiate the importance
of content on the question of what is learned how. The number of people
who learn to read or calculate the square root of minus one without the
deliberate setting up of environments to ensure that they do is diminishingly
small. The Vai offered an interesting case vis a vis literacy, where kids
would pick it up from very informal and casual interactions around letters
received at the farm while they were chasing birds (for example). And
little Japanese kids often pick up a lot of kana from daily life in a
kana saturated environment. But the Vai acquire alphabetic literaciews
in settings arranged (badly!) to make that happen and Japanese kids may
never learn enough Kanji to be considered fully literate, as in literate
enough to read an adult novel.
Hmmmmm.
miike
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