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.This principle is well understood in primary education, but it ismuch easier to put into effect in the home than in the school.Becauseschool activities tend to be divorced from the rest of living, teachersoften have to devise rather artificial learning devices.For example, theteacher may introduce a threading activity to encourage hand eyecoordination.At home, the mother may have taught the child to windup a vacuum cleaner flex in a figure of eight.Her intention was simplyto teach the child the proper way to complete the cleaning job.Never-theless, she has also incidentally helped to develop difficult motor skillsin a context where the child is highly motivated to learn, because of herwish to behave like an adult.A final significant characteristic of the learning environment of thehome is the close, and often intense, relationship between mother andchild.This may at times hinder learning we saw how stories and gameswere often interfered with by the child s demands.It does, however,keep the child near her mother and in consequence able to learn fromher, and it allows the child to express her questions, puzzles andanxieties freely.The mother s concern for her child means that she willalmost certainly have definite educational expectations, which she islikely to pursue with whatever energy she has available.The curriculumof the home differs from one mother to another, but each is likely tohave very high expectations in one or other area whether this is generalknowledge, logical thinking, reading, baby care or social skills.It was amatter of great personal concern to most mothers in our study that theirchild should acquire the skills, knowledge and values that they believedto be important.It is this parental concern that converts the potentialadvantages of the home into actual advantages.The learning potential of the home is therefore not a necessaryattribute of all family settings.It may be reduced if the family is verylarge, or isolated from the community.It may be reduced if a closerelationship does not obtain between mother and child, or if the motheris so preoccupied with her own problems that she has little interest in212 Young children learningher child.Equally, it seems likely that the learning potential of the homewill be reduced if a child is looked after by a childminder or nanny whodoes not have a strong educational concern.The working-class home as a learning environmentThe characteristics of the home environment which we have discussedare present in working-class as well as middle-class homes.The working-class mothers were just as concerned to teach their children as themiddle-class mothers were.There was, however, some evidence of adifference in values, attitudes and educational priorities in homes ofdifferent social class.The working-class mothers seemed to place lessstress on introducing their daughters to a wide range of general knowl-edge, information and vocabulary, encouraging them to be explicit, andanswering their questions.On the other hand, some placed more stresson helping their daughters to acquire domestic and mothering skills, andunderstanding the role of money and work in the family s activities.They tended to favour more traditional approaches to teaching literacyand numeracy.Although they spent just as long as the middle-classmothers playing with their children, the working-class mothers were lesslikely to use play as a vehicle for education.These differences seemed to us to amount to a difference in languagestyle and educational approach, rather than to a language deficit inworking-class homes.All the basic language usages were observed in allthe homes; the social class difference was in the frequency of the usages.Further, the differences we have described refer to group averages.Within each social class group, there was a wide range of languageusage.The child as a thinkerOur analysis of the conversations at home led us to an enhanced respectfor the intellectual activities of four-year-olds.Although the homeprovides a very powerful learning environment, children are by nomeans passive absorbers or recipients of this environment.On thecontrary, their own intellectual efforts are an essential part of thelearning process.Even with the most attentive mothers this process wasnot always easy.In all the homes many questions went unanswered,Young children learning 213much was left implicit, misunderstandings were often undetected by themothers, full explanations were rarely given, and many explanationswere definitely misleading.Armed only with their curiosity, logic andpersistence, the children tackled the task of making sense of a worldthey imperfectly understood.Because of their inexperience they couldrule out few inferences or explanations as implausible: almost everythinghad to be treated as possible until shown to be otherwise.We believe that persistent intellectual curiosity is a particularly prom-inent feature of four-year-olds.This is because of the flexible andincomplete structure of their conceptual framework, and also because ofthe children s growing awareness of the many confusions and misunder-standings that occur
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