So When Do the Children Learn?

J. I. Rodale is best-known for being the father of the organic gardening/farming movement in the U.S. vis-a-vis his relationship with Sir Albert Howard in Britain and the magazine (Organic Gardening) he started, farm and research center he founded in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and the many books he wrote (as well as the large publishing company that bears the Rodale family name today).

One of his books (now out of print) was The Healthy Hunzas (Rodale Press, 1949). It was an overview of the research that had been done up to that point on the Hunzas (officially, the Hunzakuts), an isolated (at that time) people in the mountainous regions of northern Pakistan who enjoyed incredible longevity (100+ year life-spans) and freedom from disease. Rodale did not visit the Hunzas personally but wrote his book drawing on the research of others. (Some of which, in the opinion of modern health researcher John Robbins, was perhaps overstated, or romanticized—Robbins included a chapter on the Hunzas in his book Healthy at 100 [Random House, 2006]. His chapter is titled "Hunza: A People Who Dance in Their Nineties: Where cancer, diabetes, and asthma are unknown" which suggest that not all the research was overstated, as Robbins himself says.)

All that by way of introduction to this passage from Rodale's book on the education of Hunza children in antiquity. (My understanding is that, unfortunately, the Hunzas have become infected with Westernization in the modern era; this quote refers to what was true in the early 20th century and previously.)

In Hunza, people are not as educated as we [Westerners] are. About 99 percent of the Hunzas are illiterate in our sense of the word. Only the children and grandchildren of the Mir and the Wazir [Hunza rulers] and a handful of others attend the Government school. In the summer the children, from tiny tothood on, are with their parents in the fields. Some of them mind the baby or perform simple easy tasks. They learn to do weeding and gathering of manure at an early age. They are brought up with kindness; they play games while they are working, when time permits. They are well-behaved; they rarely interrupt their elders in speech. The learn the facts of life from infancy. They do not have book-learning because they have no books, but from listening to the conversation of their parents and grandparents they absorb an education of their own.

In the wintertime, while the mothers and fathers are busy around the house, the grandfather or grandmother will keep the young ones busy by telling fairy tales and stories and by describing events that occurred in preceding generations. Thus every child learns his genealogy for eight or nine generations back. In this fashion he is taught religion, morals and ethics. There is no sending children away to boarding schools. The parents want them by their side. They become friends.

I was greatly amused when I read Mrs. Lorimer's account of the time when she was describing the costly English school system to a Hunza woman and related how the child has to be in school from the age of five to fourteen.

"So when do the children learn?" asked the woman. Naturally, she was concerned with the fact that the children must learn how to till the earth.

"So when do the children learn?" Amazing question.

Learning about family, history, religion, morals, ethics, fantasy and imagination, kindness, deportment in conversation, and how to produce food that keeps one healthy for a century or longer—sounds like the Hunza children were pretty well educated without the benefit of institutional schooling.

Let's hear it for homeschooling.