Education

In traditional societies, where children do not go to school, the primary method of socialization is usually apprenticeship. Whereas school teaches rote learning and the manipulation of abstract concepts, apprenticeship is on-the-job training that teaches skills. Fathers teach their sons farming skills, and mothers teach their daughters household skills by letting them help with simple tasks, gradually introducing them to more difficult chores. Children are always present: They listen to adult conversation and quarrels, participate in celebrations, observe births, deaths, and marriages, and the comings and goings of neighbors and family servants. The women we interviewed did not teach their children about caste differences; instead, children learned about expected behavior by observing the adults. Observation and practice, rather than reading and memory, are the methods of learning in apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship · Conversation · Cooperative learning · Developmental psychology · Geography · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Political science · Reading (process) · Rote learning · Socialization · Teaching method · Communication · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Psychology