Mother Nature’s Pedagogy: How Children Educate Themselves

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Abstract

For this chapter we must distinguish between schooling and education. Schooling is the deliberate use of special procedures to teach preselected skills, concepts and beliefs (a curriculum) to students. Education is a much broader concept. It is the entire set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires the skills, knowledge, rituals, beliefs, lore and values—in short, the culture—of the previous generation. Education is cultural transmission. From a biological perspective, schooling is new, arising in the most recent eye-blink of our evolution. It became common for large segments of the population only a century or two ago. Education, in contrast, is as old as our genus and is an integral part of our biological makeup.

Keywords

Cultural Transmission Moral Community Mother Nature Democratic School Biological Makeup 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PsychologyBoston CollegeChestnut Hill, MAUSA

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