An anti-education book review

In his 2024 book Learning Without Lessons David Lancy takes aim at the modern education system from an anthropological point of view. The book aims at demonstrating a number of assumptions.

1. In the world as a whole, children learn more from looking at and copying people who are older than them than from verbal instruction. They learn through what David Lancy calls the chore curriculum, as opposed to the modern core curriculum. Parents in traditional societies tend to do little to actively instruct their children. Instead their children instruct themselves, sometimes in defiance of their parents who consider them too young.

2. Children are mostly eager to work, if they are allowed to do it the traditional, copycat way.

3. Children mostly dislike lesson-based school and need to be forced into it.

4. Modern societies are crowded with misunderstandings about how children learn, erroneously stressing the importance of teaching even infants and fetuses.

Having raised six children to various ages (currently 2 to 19), I in no way doubt that David Lancy is right on those points. I believe that more or less every parent would agree with me that one of the most challenging parts of raising toddlers is the conflicts that constantly arise when the toddler wants to do things themselves although they are unable to. Which parent hasn’t carried a bag in an uncomfortable position so a toddler can “help” carrying it? And we have probably all noticed how difficult it is to explain to a child which shoe to put on which foot and how to fit a jigsaw puzzle together. And why can’t toddlers just learn how to build Lego houses in a bonded pattern so it doesn’t fall apart so easily? I try to teach them and they don’t learn.

The reason for that kind of “stupidity” is explained in David Lancy’s book: Kids don’t learn mainly from condensed instruction but from seeing elders doing things repeatedly. If I fitted jigsaw puzzles and built Lego houses as a part of my everyday routine, surely they would learn, just as they know how to put dishes in a dishwasher or use a screwdriver.

I also know that providing children with the opportunity to watch grown-up activities is the easiest way to keep young children calm. When I’m doing something practical like cleaning, carpentry or gardening, the children tend to be remarkably well-behaved and fight little with ...