Kids Can Learn Without Instruction

Don’t show this to your kids, because they might cry. But guess how much time children in “traditional societies”— indigenous groups pretty much off the grid—spend in direct instruction, the way American kids do in school?

- By Lenore Skenazy

About 90 seconds a day. University of Utah anthropologist

Karen Leslie Kramer, who has spent 30 years studying Maya villagers in the Yucatan and Pume hunter-gatherers in South America, came up with that estimate. “The opportunities for learning are everywhere,” Kramer says. “It doesn’t have to be in a formal environment. Kids are like sponges—they just absorb what’s around them.”

Kids in traditional societies spend plenty of time playing, away from the adults. But they are also often among the grown-ups, watching what they do, eavesdropping, and helping out.

Then they take that information and use it to build skills such as weaving. “In many traditional societies,” Kramer says, “one of the important things to learn is how to weave, because, without plastic, we rely on [woven] containers for so much of what we do.”