KQED News Mind/Shift – Alison Gopnik
“How does mastery happen? For most of human history, learning in middle childhood meant apprenticeship, not school. Children learned to master skills informally inside the family, or outside the family, more formally and later. Most people were foragers or farmers, and foraging and farming children learned by helping out— they still do. Children also learned more specialized skills by becoming apprentices to master tradesmen and artisans. Preschoolers show some of the beginnings of apprenticeship when they imitate the people around them. Anthropologists and cultural psychologists, not to mention parents, see how even very young toddlers are drawn to imitate everything that they see their elders do, from machete handling to pancake making. But while preschoolers are essentially playing at those adult skills, school-age children begin to genuinely master them.”(more)