REVIEWS
LISTEN as Dr. Grove discusses How Other Children Learn with Steve Pearlman for a forthcoming “Parentology” podcast.
Reviews and critiques of How Other Children Learn.
Review on the website Midwest Book Review
A seminal study that will be of special value to readers with an interest in the anthropology of education in five traditional societies, How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning is informatively enhanced with the inclusion of two Appendices, thirty-two pages of Notes, and a six page Bibliography.
An extraordinary work of original scholarship and unreservedly recommended for professional, college, and university library Educational Psychology collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, educators, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.
Review on the website Veni Vidi Scripto
How Other Children Learn. A deep, thoughtful and provocative book that shows in detail how five traditional societies not affected by modern values and ways of life raise their children and oversee their learning. How Other Children Learn is not a book for everyone, but certainly a book to make parents think, especially in view of outrages across the country in so many boards of education today.
How Other Children Learn is filled with information, citations, other references, great stories about five different societies, and much to think about. How Other Children Learn isn’t a book you take to peruse on the beach. But it is a fact-filled education in parenting, children’s learning, and the future as we teach our children. It’s certainly worth far more than the price of the paperback version. I recommend it.
Review on the website Motherhood Moment
What parent doesn’t want their children to willingly pitch in and complete routine household chores? In his eye-opening new book, How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning, Cornelius N. Grove, Ed.D., explores five “traditional” societies where children do just that on their way to becoming mature adults. Yet they spend little or no time in classrooms. How do those children learn? How do their parents parent?
Dr. Grove defines traditional societies as those unaffected by industrialization and urbanization and untouched by modern values. They still can be found in small villages and camps where people engage daily with their natural surroundings (including raising or finding their daily food) and have little or no experience of classroom instruction.
Why seek fresh insights from these societies?
“One reason is that doing so reveals that, in traditional societies, children very largely learn on their own how to become family- and community-minded adults,” Dr. Grove said. “A second reason is because it’s insightful for modern parents to find out how traditional parents deal with their children. You’ll be astounded by how uninvolved they are!”
Anchored in the published research of anthropologists of childhood, How Other Children Learn takes a close look at the following five societies: the Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa, the Quechua of highland Peru, the Navajo of the U.S. Southwest, the village Arabs of the Levant and the Hindu villagers of India. Each society has its own chapter, which overviews that society’s background and context, then probes adults’ mindsets and strategies regarding childhood learning and socialization for adulthood.
The book concludes with two summary chapters that draw broadly on anthropologists’ findings about dozens of traditional societies and offer examples from the five societies featured in the book. The first summary chapter reveals how children in traditional societies learn to willingly carry out family responsibilities and suggests how American parents can attain similar outcomes. The second contrasts our middle-class patterns of child-rearing and school-attending with traditional societies’ ways of ensuring that their youngsters have opportunities to learn and develop into mature, responsible adults.
“Like their traditional peers, our children have a natural capacity to learn on their own and with other children by freely exploring, imitating adults and engaging in all sorts of activities serendipitously occurring in their community,” Dr. Grove added. “How do our children’s opportunities to freely explore and engage with others compare with those of traditional children? With school, extracurriculars and screen time, ours have very few.”