Aprendizaje de vuelta al mundo

desescolarizados March2018
No.2

1st
digital publication
of Alternative
Education

FOR
LEARNING
Otra iniciativa de
 EDITOR'S NOTE
BY MARIANA LUDMILA
The first issue of the magazine tried to
bring you, who are responsible for
other's people education, a brief
introduction to an overview that will
help you to project what our children
could find by the year 2030 or 2050,
when they reach their working age and
their time to take care of their familly.
Surely you noticed that in that issue we concentrated
information on digital education, robotics, programming,
Artificial Intelligence, Exponential Systems, Social
Entrepreneurship, Creative Thinking, Design Thinking,
among other topics, which we know are expected to have
greater relevance in the future.
Now, as you may have noticed on the cover of this second
issue, we will concentrate on the passion for learning. You,
as an educator, may feel that you have absolute
responsibility for the education of the people in your care,  Are we ready?
especially if you practice home-based education, but being
an educator is far beyond from focusing only on teaching.
In this issue, you will find some ideas that will help you
change the perspective about the educator as the person
who teaches, to switch it instead to the educator as a
trainer of self-directed learners and eternal lovers who
build their knowledge.
To begin to break paradigms, the interview with Professor
Sidney Strauss can give us a good shake on preconceived
models of teaching and learning.
My wish to you is that from the new mental models we get,
we will be able to generate new strategies to meet,
understand and promote the passion for learning with
which all human beings are born naturally. Our children
could very much benefit from it.
You have in your hands a powerful new idea that has the
potential to transform the next dynamic of knowledge. It is
also in your hands to take advantage of them.
The future is self-directed and begins with you.
ISSUE 2 DESESCOLARIZADOS INTERVIEW

CHILDREN'S TEACHING

Q. - In the educational context, everyone  One version is that he immediately wrote an article in a
is interested in finding out about how the column he authored in Argentina’s La Nacion about children’s
teaching. The second version was that the conversation
brain learns, but you have concentrated
stayed with him and, after mulling it over, he understood its
your research on what some might think is significance and then wrote about it in a
the opposite aspect… how the brain publication of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Both
teaches. versions might be the case.
Either way, the idea of studying teaching, what he
sometimes calls the other side of the moon, struck him as an
S.S. - That idea, Mariana, was not mine. It was two
important idea.
Argentinians who thought of it: my good friend, Antonio
Antonio and I have remained good friends from that fateful
Battro, along with another good friend of mine, Mariano
meeting, and we have managed to be in touch by email and
Sigman. The idea was inspired by a conversation I had with
have also met over the years in Argentina,
Antonio a number of years ago. And that also connects
Antonio and me to Howard Gardner. I’ll digress a bit but it
I told Antonio that I was working on expanding work on
will all come together in the end. Or at least I hope so. I first
teaching to include many aspects of the cognitive sciences in
met Howard Gardner in 1976. He was a professor of
the hope that each branch would unveil aspects of the
education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and
mystery of teaching. Although I would like to take credit for
I was on sabbatical from Tel Aviv University at MIT. A
having the brain sciences included in studying teaching, it
number of years later, I don’t recall the year, Antonio and I,
was Antonio who suggested it.
who had never met before and didn’t even know about each
He took my idea about teaching as a natural cognitive ability
other, were invited with others for brunch on a beautiful
and moved it to the brain sciences. And he suggested that
summer Sunday at Howard’s and Ellen Winner’s, Howard's
we can think of teaching in terms of brain coupling where
wife. As is usual for brunches at Howard’s and Ellen’s, after
the teacher’s brain teaches the learner’s brain and vice versa.
the meal and lively conversation, all the guests took a walk
He spoke with my friend Mariano Sigman, a brilliant
around Fresh Pond which is close by their home.
neuroscientist (and much more than that) about this and
On our walk, Antonio and I spoke, and I told him about my
Mariano understood that the area of teaching has been very
work on child’s teaching. Like almost everyone else, he
under-studied despite its centrality to human lives. Mariano,
responded to it by speaking about children’s learning
along with very talented people in his laboratory (Andrea
because that is what has been studied extensively until I
Goldin and Cecilia Calero) conducted the very first study on
reminded him that I was studying children’s teaching, the flip
how the teacher’s and learner’s brains couple (or don’t)
side of what causes learning. I remember that literally
leading to learning (or not) among learners. This was a path-
stopped him in his tracks.
setting study and others are now following in their
footsteps.
At this point, my recounting of this story hits a fork in the
This is a very important piece in our attempt to understand
road. Antonio has told me two versions of what followed our
teaching.
conversation.
DESESCOLARIZADOS

Q. - How did you come up with the idea to

research teaching?
S.S. - I had been looking at issues of children’s cognitive development and
learning for a number of years. In fact, my PhD thesis was on the topic of
Piaget’s and Bruner’s theories of development and learning. In addition,
because of my abiding interest in educational implications of my work, I
worked on curriculum development for elementary school science. I
understood that we had to know what the origins of children’s knowledge
and understanding are so that we could best address them in curricula.

WHAT I AM ABOUT TO TELL YOU HAS IMPORTANCE

FOR HOMESCHOOLING. CHILDREN HAVE WHAT IS
SOMETIMES CALLED MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT, SAY,
SCIENCE CONCEPTS.
For example, think of the following: you take a rifle and point it parallel to
the ground that is flat, and you also hold a bullet next to and at the height
of the rifle’s barrel. You fire the rifle, and at the very moment, the bullet
exits the barrel you release the bullet that was in your hand. The question
asked to children, and adults is: will the two bullets hit the ground at the
same time or will one hit it first. And if one hits it first, the child is asked
which one will reach the ground first. Think about this for a moment.
Most people, including adults, think that the bullet released from the hand
will land first because the fired bullet travels parallel to the ground until, in
their words, its momentum gets sapped, and it is only then that it begins
dropping towards the ground.
The dropped bullet doesn’t have that momentum so it will hit the ground
first. Some say that the fired bullet will hit the ground first because it is
traveling faster than the released bullet. Few people give the correct
answer which is that they will hit the ground at the same time because
there is only one force acting on both of them, gravity, and that gravity
equally on both of them. The fired bullet begins falling the moment it exits the barrel and it falls at the same speed
as the dropped bullet.
Children answer in the ways I just mentioned and few
have a correct understanding of the problem at hand.
This is what a curriculum developer is confronted with,
and he has to find ways to address children’s incorrect
understandings. It is important to mention here that
children’s misconceptions are
there because our intuitions lead us to understand the
world in a particular way. And these intuitions are deep
and powerful. Given this, how do you construct
curriculum materials to guide children to another
understanding when you are up against a
powerful intuition that is in place for a good reason?
The same question can be asked about homeschooling.
What activities do you want to give your children so
that they will come to have a better understanding of
whatever it is that you are teaching them?
To answer this question, let me first tell you what I
think would not be helpful.
It is not enough to give children everyday experiences
with their world. They have had them from the moment
they were born. Exposing them to puddles that
evaporate or to how high a basketball goes when you
throw it against a floor at different levels of force will
generally not be helpful for understanding. All the
extensive everyday experiences they have had in the
natural world hasn’t helped them gain a correct
understanding of these phenomena. If this is the case,
why would you want to give them more of the same?
W E D O N ’T T E A C H N A T U R A L I K U I N S C H O O L S B E C A U S E I T W I L L B E L E A R N E D E A S I L Y
WITHOUT INSTRUCTION. BUT WE DO TEACH NON-NATURAL IKU PRECISELY BECAUSE IT
W O N ’T B E U N D E R S T O O D W I T H O U T I N S T R U C T I O N .
Teaching these phenomena often requires a specially-
made world, a carpentered world that is different from
the natural world that surrounds us.
Another tip about what would probably not be useful is
to try to teach ideas, knowledge, understandings (IKU in
shorthand) that are natural for humans. An example of
natural understanding comes from the grammar of
spoken language. Our brains have been designed,
through evolution, to come to learn the grammar of
spoken language which is extraordinarily complex. We
don’t have to teach children how to speak a language, or
languages, grammatically. It’s enough that they are
exposed to the language. The brain is built in such a way
that virtually every child can learn a spoken language’s
grammar effortlessly without it being taught.
In contrast, children must be taught written language
for it to be learned. Showing children words in a book
you are reading to them will not lead to them learning
how to read. Reading is a rather late-comer in our
200,000-year odyssey as humans. Written language is
around only 5,200 years old. Our brains did not evolve in
a way that written language is natural the way spoken
language is. The brain bolts various parts together for it
to learn how to read. What can we learn from this? The
content of schools is non-natural IKU. And because it is
not natural, it is hard to learn. Do you remember how
you, your children and/or grandchildren learned to read
and how difficult it was? That is the case for school
content, and not just reading.
What we teach in schools is hard-won counter-intuitive
IKU that has been developed over the millennia by
scientists, scholars, mathematicians, philosophers and,
others. And it is that counter-intuitive IKU that you will
probably be some of what you’ll be teaching your children
at home. So what could be ways to teach your children
these very hard-to-learn IKU? A first step of one way
may be to have them become aware of their intuitions.
You can give them something to work on but before you
tell them what ways to solve the problem are, you might
want to ask them what they think. In effect, you’re asking
them to be reflective about the knowledge they have. My
guess is that because you’ll be asking about something
they probably didn’t think about, their intuitions, it is
unlikely that they will know what their understandings
are. This is a first step to get them to think about both
their own IKU and thinking. The latter is called meta-
cognition. It’s about thinking about your thinking. And
because that’s not natural, as well, you will have to guide
your children to be meta-cognitive. If you do it enough
times, without driving them crazy by overdoing it, you will
be encouraging your children’s habits of mind in that
direction. What you’ll be helping them with is to be
reflective about what they know and how they think. If
successful, you have given them a gift for life.
After your children have come to get a reflective grasp
on their IKU and thinking, you could let them tinker
around with their ideas and then you could suggest
another way of thinking about the topic under discussion.
As opposed to the usual way of teaching where you tell
your children what answers are, the likelihood is that they
will now better understand the content and/or their
thinking because you enabled them to be meta-cognitive
about their intuitions. They will be in a position to
compare them to what you are presenting as an
alternative. And they are likely to understand that you’re
presenting an alternative because they now understand
what your alternative is an alternative to their intuitions.
Q. - Is it then, natural for humans to
teach and share knowledge? And what
about kids? You say that it is natural for
human beings to teach from a very young
age. Can you elaborate?
S.S. - My pleasure. But before that, I want you to think
about how incredibly complex teaching is. When teaching,
we adults take into account so many factors:
what the learner knows about what you’re teaching so as 
PAGE 22
not to aim your teaching too high or too low,
what the learner’s emotional state is (is he
anxious or confident about the material?), is the
learner motivated? How has the learner’s IKU,
emotions and motivation changed as a result of
your teaching? What should your next teaching
be about given your answers to the last
question, and much more. In short, teaching is
remarkably complicated. Now I can turn to its
being natural for humans.

I have been claiming that sharing knowledge

through teaching is natural to humans. There
are many avenues to support this claim and,
because of space restraints, I will mention only
a few: its universality, its reaching back to our
ancient ancestors, its uniqueness in the animal
kingdom and very young children teach.
If teaching is a natural cognitive ability on the
part of humans, it should not be restricted to
one group or another. It should be universal,
what is termed species- typical. There is no
controversy about whether people in modern
societies (such as Mexico, Argentina, France,
Italy, Canada, Japan, China) teach. It is also non-
controversial that there is teaching in pastoral
communities that do subsistence
farming. There is controversy, though, about
whether teaching occurs in nomadic hunter and
gathering (HG) societies. The number of people
in each HG group is around 25-35, and they are
nomadic as they search for prey and plants that
change given weather changes. In around 90%
of the 200 millennia of human existence, we
were HGs. In my opinion, work by Barry Hewlett
and his colleagues indicates quite clearly that
teaching is found in HG societies. If correct, this
universality points in the direction of teaching
as being a natural cognitive ability on the part
of humans.
There is growing evidence that our very ancient
ancestors taught. These ancestors were not
modern humans but who were part of our
lineage. For instance, in the stone age (called
the Paleolithic period), around 2.5 million years
ago (yes, two and a half million years ago), when
modern humans didn’t exist but Homo habilis did,
we find their stone tools. Modern cultural
archeologists study tools created back then.
PAGE 15

THEY HAVE WAYS OF DETERMINING IF STONE TOOLS

PRODUCED BY OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS WERE
DONE BY EXPERTS, EXPERIENCED HOMO HABILIS OR
NOVICES IN CREATING TOOLS FROM ROCKS.

They have ways of determining if stone tools produced by
our ancient ancestors were done by experts, experienced
Homo habilis or novices in creating tools from rocks. To
give a hint at what’s involved in creating stone tools, the
creator of the tools must choose an appropriate rock
that can be used as a hammer and another rock that can
be hit which chips off, with the chips becoming the basis
for a tool. The chipped stone has to be of a certain type
and hit at a particular place, angle and strength with the
rock hammer so as to chip off a part of the rock that will
serve as the tool. This is called knapping. When modern
adults are taught how to knap, it takes considerable
time, years, before they become expert. It is also the
case that it is highly unlikely that someone can learn to
 knap by observation and imitation alone. Teaching is
almost surely necessary for that to happen. If we want to
claim that teaching is a natural cognitive ability for
humans, we should expect it to be available before modern
humans, and it seems that this is the case.
AND, AS A LAST POINT TO KEEP YOU
CURIOUS ABOUT THIS, IT IS THOUGHT
THAT OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS, HOMO
HABILIS, DID NOT HAVE A SPOKEN
LANGUAGE. IT CAN BE ASKED, THEN,
HOW THEY TAUGHT OTHERS HOW TO
KNAP.
A third line of reasoning about why teaching is a natural
cognitive ability is that, in the animal kingdom, teaching
is unique to our species. This does not mean that other
animals don’t teach. They do. What it does mean, though,
is that human teaching is different from teaching found
among non-human animals. It is species-unique.
As an exercise, think about which animals you think
teach. Many think that all animals teach or at least an
overwhelming number of animals teach each other.
Before I reveal which animals teach, let’s see what
scientists think about that.
In a now-classic journal article, Caro and Hauser (1992)
asked if non-human animals teach. In order to arrive at
an answer, you don’t just say yes or no. You need a
definition of teaching that could apply to non-human
animals. Their definition was based on evolutionary
theory and observations of animals in the wild
(ethology). The definition of the non-human animal
teacher included neither an intention to teach nor an
understanding of the learner’s understanding of the task
at hand, such as chimpanzees fashioning a tool (a twig
with its leaves pruned) for inserting into a termite nest
where termites crawl up the twig to then be eaten.
The definition has several parts. One is that the teacher
acts differently in the presence of a naïve animal than
when in the presence of an animal that knows what may
be taught. If the presumed teacher acts the same way
with a naïve and knowledgeable animal, it would be hard
to make the claim that teaching is happening.
A second part of their definition is that, when teaching,
the teacher loses something or at least doesn’t gain
something immediately. Think about this: when a
cheetah mother brings dead prey to her cubs for them
to eat, she is compromised regarding her survival. She
doesn’t eat the prey and, as a result, loses survival-wise.
As an aside, this kind of behavior and other behaviors of
“altruism” on the part of non-human animals (and
humans, as well) was problematic for Darwin, as he
admitted in his writings.
The third part of their definition is that a learner either
learns something he could not have learned without
being taught or learns it more quickly than had he not
been taught.
At this point, you are probably curious as to which
animals teach according to this evolutionary-theory-
based definition. But before I tell you, given this
definition, think again about which animals you think
teach.
For the moment, there seem to be four non-human
species that teach and, unexpectedly, none are primates
(monkeys – with tails and great apes – without tails:
chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans). The
four are: (1) meerkats which are part of the mongoose
family, (2) a bird called a pied babbler, (3) some felines,
such as cheetahs and house cats, but not lions because
lions hunt in groups, called prides, and the young can
observe how prey are attacked and killed as opposed to
cheetahs that raise their cubs in isolation.
 THE LAST SPECIES (4) IS,
SURPRISINGLY, A LOWLY ANT CALLED
A TANDEM RUNNING ANT.
The third support for teaching being a natural
cognitive ability was that human teaching is
species-unique, meaning our teaching is different
from that of non-human animals. We humans have
an intention to teach, and we take into account
the learners’ understanding of what is being
taught, their emotional state, motivation and
more. All of these important parts of human
teaching are absent in the definition of teaching
for non-human animals. In this sense, then, human
teaching is unique in the animal kingdom.
The fourth support for teaching being natural for
humans concerns children’s teaching. If very young
children teach, which we saw is remarkably
complex, and do so without having been taught
how to teach, this would suggest that teaching is
indeed natural for humans. Work I have done with
my colleague, Margalit Ziv, shows that children
age 3½ already teach, and they do it mostly
through demonstrations with explanations
accompanying the demonstration; children age 5
teach contingently, meaning that they adjust their
teaching to the learner’s changing knowledge
state that changed because of the teacher’s
teaching; and children age 5 teach mostly through
explanations with demonstrations accompanying
the explanations.
In and of itself, it may seem remarkable that
children age 3½ teach. But
teaching is unlikely to appear magically at age
3½. It almost surely has preparation
before that age.
Very few researchers have studied teaching
among children below age 3½, and that may be
due to a possibly hidden assumption that teaching
requires language. However, children at age 1 year
who are preverbal (they do not speak but
they understand language) do communicate
socially, and they do that by pointing.
Research conducted by Ulf Liszkowski and his
colleagues in Hamburg, Germany indicates that
preverbal 1-year-old infants have some of the
basics of teaching in their command. They
recognize a knowledge gap; they act to close it;
they correct mistakes and even anticipate others’
mistakes and act to ward them off before
they are made. All of these are at the heart of
teaching.
Briefly, regarding recognizing a knowledge gap
and acting to reduce it, Liszkowski did the
following. He showed an array of objects on a
table to a preverbal 1-year-old infant and talked
about each of them. He then inadvertently (but
really on purpose) knocked one off the table, say,
a key. The infant saw it fall to the floor. After
a short time, he looked around and asked the
infant where the key was, and the infant
pointed to its location.
You might think that nothing extraordinary
happened here. After all, the experimenter didn’t
know where the key was, and when he asked the
knowledgeable infant where it was, the infant
pointed to it. At first glance, nothing much of
importance seems to be happening here.

You might think that nothing extraordinary happened here.
After all, the experimenter didn’t know where the key was,
and when he asked the knowledgeable infant where it was,
the infant pointed to it. At first glance, nothing much of
importance seems to be happening here.
But notice that there is a knowledge gap. The infant knew
something that the experimenter (presumably) didn’t, and
the infant acted to reduce the knowledge gap by pointing to
it. So as to test this idea further, the experimenter
conducted another experiment where he dropped the key,
but this time he saw where it fell. When the experimenter
asked infants where it was, many fewer infants pointed to
its location. That may be the case because there is no
knowledge gap here because both the infant and the
experimenter knew where the object was.
For the moment, it appears that there is a developmental
trajectory for children’s abilities to teach. There are
cognitive precursors for teaching among preverbal infants
age 1; children age 3½ teach through demonstrating; and 5
55
-year-olds teach by explaining. All of this lends credence to
the idea that teaching may be a natural cognitive ability.
I presented four supports for the claim that teaching is a
natural cognitive ability: teaching’s universality, its
appearance in our ancient ancestors, human teaching being
unique in the animal world and teaching is found in toddlers
and it has precursors among infants. In concert, these
supports seem to support the claim that teaching is a
natural cognitive ability among humans.
Q. - Why is it that you have been visiting so
many countries, mainly India? Can you
share some details on what you do?
(related to learning and if possible self-
directed learning?
I have visited India five times in the past 2 years and have
been working there with Bhavani Rao from Amrita University
and her team in the AmmachiLabs. They are working with
women in remote villages to empower them by giving
knowledge and skills that allow them to be gainfully
employed in tailoring, masonry, plumbing and other
professions. Along with that, the women are taught life skills
about gender equality and their empowerment, for example,
by having skills of a trade that allow them to be employed,
thus increasing the family income. When a woman marries a
man, she moves to his house which is often in another
village, and they often live with his family in the same home.
In the village society, men are the traditional breadwinners
and, as a consequence, problems arise between women, their
husbands, and his extended family. I’ll get back to that later.
How did we meet? I was fortunate to be invited to a small
conference at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the
splendorous surroundings of the Vatican, and among the
participants were three women from Amrita University in
India. Their work fascinated me and, when we all returned
home, I wrote to Bhavani Rao.
She wrote me about problems they were having in villages,
such as tailoring experts not showing up at appointed times
to teach village women skills and knowledge for
employment. Given my interest in peer teaching, I suggested
she encourage the women to teach each other, where a
woman who is knowledgeable about, say measurement, could
teach the other women about it and another woman who had
knowledge about how to create seams from strips of cloth
could teach that to the others. And it worked.
My suggestion led to
a switch in thinking.
Instead of thinking that only experts could teach novices,
the AmmachiLabs people came to understand that the
village women could teach what they know and that their
combined efforts could lead to their ability to tailor a
saree or make an outhouse or indoor plumbing. Because of
that success, I was invited to visit the AmmachiLabs and to
see villages close up. And, as they say, the rest is history.
But this history is having an unusual trajectory. Something
completely unexpected happened when I went to India. It
was there that I met Amma, a spiritual guru and a national
treasure, who is the guiding inspiration for an ashram that,
among other things, houses Amrita University. I was
exposed to her thinking and her messages of love,
empathy and compassion.

Because of my profound interest in teaching, I began to
mull over and understand how these emotions and
connectedness are deeply intertwined in teaching.
I may have come to that realization in time, but I am
certain that listening to Amma’s talks spurred that
thinking.
So far, this is what I have come to understand. In addition
to mind-to-mind coupling in teaching, there is heart-to-
heart coupling. At the heart of teaching is altruism which,
under certain circumstances, may be natural to humans.
Research on altruism in toddlers has been done without
reference to teaching. On the other hand, embedded in
teaching is altruism, empathy, responsibility, trust,
respect, friendship and more.
When one teaches and, (it must be added) when it goes
well, something special happens. A closeness, akin to and
possibly beyond friendship, is formed between the teacher
and learner. Folded into teaching are emotional
bidirectional connections the learner and teacher feel for
each other.
Involved in this bidirectional giving to and receiving from is
moving from unequal to equal relations regarding both IKU
and power (without abusing the power of the initial giver,
the teacher). Teaching, which is fundamentally giving, also
involves a willingness to share with another person and
other person’s willingness to take, to accept what is being
shared. In addition, the teacher has responsibility for
another person, a learner. This involves a commitment to
achieve both the mutual goal of the learner’s learning and
the well-being of the learner as teaching and learning
transpire. And this commitment to another’s well-being
includes mutual empathy the teacher and learner have for
each other. Moreover, teaching involves acts of respect for
each other and for what each is doing in teaching and
learning. All of this in concert makes teaching feel like it
possesses a spark of spiritual communion with another.
To place this on another plane, teaching involves what has
been termed prosociality. As best as I know, teaching
hasn’t been considered in the literature around prosociality.
And what, you may be asking, does this have to do with
homeschooling? I am suggesting that we understandably
think of our home-schooled children as learners.
They learn in school, and that’s what we have taken on
ourselves when we teach them at home. What I am
suggesting here is that we can also think about our
children as teachers. When they teach others, they come
to understand what they teach at a deeper level, as
mentioned in an article I wrote for the first edition of this
journal. But something unexpected happens when they
teach. They come to develop keener interpersonal 
The Italian Prelations that
can serve them well in life.
By encouraging your
children to teach, you are
probably fostering the very
positive interpersonal
relations I just mentioned.
Q. - Some of what you have to tell us is surprising.
Until now, I have been asking the questions. I’d like
to ask you if there is anything else you would like to
add?

I know I have been wordy, so I will make my final remarks short. I am very
excited about how I view our ancient/new field of teaching and maybe
this enthusiasm came through in my words. In addition to its being an
area that gets at very deep issues about our human existence, it has
important implications for schooling, whether in schools or at home. I
tried to convey how some of the ideas I presented can be used for
homeschooling. I hope they came across and will be useful for those
reading these pages.

And, last, I would like to thank you, Mariana, for giving me this
opportunity to present my ideas. To end this interview,
 I WOULD LIKE TO WISH THE BEST OF
LUCK TO ALL THOSE
COURAGEOUS PARENTS WHO
DECIDED TO TAKE THE ENORMOUS
RESPONSIBILITY TO TEACH THEIR
CHILDREN AT HOME.
YOU ALL HAVE MY DEEP ADMIRATION.
SIDNEY STRAUSS

PAGE 20