How Other Children Learn

To gain comparative insights into middle-class Americans child-related values and practices, Groves How Other Children Learn examines childrens learning and parents parenting in five traditional societies. Such societies are those have not been affected by modern urban, industrial values and ways of life. They are found in small villages and camps where people engage daily with their natural surroundings and have little or no experience of formal classroom instruction. The five societies are the Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa, the Quechua of highland Peru, the Navajo of the U.S. Southwest, the village Arabs of the Levant, and the Hindu villagers of India. Each society has its own chapter, which overviews that societys background and context, then probes adults mindsets and strategies regarding childrens learning and socialization for adulthood. The book concludes with two summary chapters that draw broadly on anthropologists findings about many traditional societies and offer examples from the five societies discussed earlier. The first reveals why children in traditional societies willingly carry out family responsibilities and suggests how American parents can attain similar outcomes. The second contrasts our middle-class patterns of child-rearing with traditional societies ways of enabling children to learn and grow into contributing family and community members.