How Asabano Children Learn; Or, Formal Schooling Amongst Informal Learners (Report‪)‬

The term socialization refers to the process of bringing up the next generation through a set of practices that mediates between the cultural worlds in which humans live and our biological and psychological attributes. Despite the culturally variable nature of human development and socialization, and the lengthy history of cross-cultural research on children and child rearing (e.g., Hogbin 1931 ; Mead 1930: Raum 1940), the study of human development has been based largely on research conducted on middle-class, Euro-American children (LeVine and New 2008:1; Rogoff 2003:4). This deficiency serves only to narrow our knowledge of the full range of child rearing and socialization practices, and more insidiously, normalizes Euro-American development and socialization practices. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on child and human development from a cross-cultural perspective, focusing specifically on education and learning. Like anthropologist Hugh Brody (1987:xiii), I believe that 'we can best discover who we are by going to what we think of as the margins of our world.' As part of this effort, I discuss research conducted with Asabano of West Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Ethnographies from across PNG suggest that infants and children are afforded great freedom--seemingly to their own detriment--and are not consciously taught, for they are considered too 'soft' and to lack 'understanding' or 'thought' (see, e.g., Kulick 1992; Herdt 1987:93; Poole 1985:183; Schieffelin 1990:71). Asabano share similar beliefs, though unlike other Papua New Guinean groups, Asabano parents may actively thwart any attempts at learning, which makes it especially interesting to investigate the manner in which Asabano children learn.