Although most American children attend formal educational programs between age 5 and 18, hundreds of millions of people around the world approach learning, particularly early childhood education, in very different ways. In his book “How Other Children Learn,” Cornelius N. Grove, Ph.D., explores the way children grow up in five “traditional” societies, contrasting the ways children in these societies learn with the educational approaches typical in American families and public schools.

Invited by Grove’s publicist to write about his book, I was intrigued. I’m a homeschooling parent and the daughter of a retired special education teacher. I’ve also covered pedagogical advances in reading and math in the Bethlehem Area SD as part of my work for this paper. Unfortunately, most of Grove’s “insights” were either old ground or of dubious applicability to American children.

Grove defines “traditional societies” as “those that have not [yet] been affected by ‘modern’ – urban, industrial – values and ways of life.” Families in these societies are typically personally involved in food production for themselves, and do not participate in classroom-based education. They generally have small municipality (“settlement”) sizes, low literacy rates, low geographical and social mobility and strong extended family ties.

Grove notes the following characteristics of learning in these societies: The absence of deliberate adult instruction; children’s attention to their immediate surroundings (what a modern American might call “being present”); children’s use of observation and trial-and-error; and children’s freedom to learn on their own and with other children.

The Aka, a hunting- and-gathering people of central Africa, are the first group Grove profiles. Aka children hunt small game on their own during the dry season, forage for yams and termites during the wet season, and play at being adults, building their own small huts and pretending to gather food for imaginary children.

Although the children’s mimicry of adult behavior may seem at odds with classroom instruction, it’s not actually very different from an American child mixing pancakes with a parent, or folding small pieces of laundry. Learning through play, also practiced by the Aka, is a core tenet of Montessori and Waldorf programs –popular in the U.S. – and finds analogues in pretend cash registers in American homes and credit union programs sponsored by American schools. More to the point, in American societies like the Amish and Mennonites, where advanced math and science are not considered essentials for young people’s education, children learn a great deal of the skills they need for adulthood through experiential learning rather than classroom instruction. (In Pa., for example, Amish children are not required to attend formal schooling programs beyond eighth grade.)

This is the source of the problem with idealizing any aspect of a society that is radically different from our own: Normative value judgments are often being made, but presented as mere positive statements about the way things are done by other people, in other places. The Aka, for example, have a very high child mortality rate; the fact that their 4-year-olds learn to use real machetes must be seen against the backdrop of (according to UNICEF) 10 percent of children dying by age five, and 2.6 percent of the survivors die before their 15th birthday. Dying from a machete injury is not more likely than dying from pneumonia, malaria or a diarrheal disease. Grove himself admits, “Because of the high rate of child mortality due to infectious and parasitic diseases, most couples raise as many children as they can.” A different calculation – conscious or unconscious – is being made by parents in Aka society.

And skills that must be taught (rather than learned by observation), need not be taught, if these skills are not deemed desirable. For example, although walking and talking are natural to humans, reading is not a natural process, so it’s no surprise that more formal education occurs in societies that place a high value on literacy.

A hunting and gathering lifestyle may be morally superior to modern American life, although the Aka – who spend virtually all their time in the dry season procuring food, must still labor for the neighboring Ngandu on their manioc farms in the wet season to earn machetes and pottery – may not be the best argument for the superiority of this way of life. Without making an ethical judgment, though, it’s difficult to draw many lessons about education from societies with goals that differ so widely from our own.