conditioned behavior and the genes
You don't have to do anything special to get kids to pick up speech and spoken languages. But to get kids to read and write, you need to drill them. That's because we evolved to speak and have built-in systems for learning how to doing so, but reading and writing are behaviors that we invented rather than evolved, and we don't have a genetic readiness to soak in written language through osmosis, like we do with speech. in a nutshell, that's how you can roughly tell which behaviors are built-in by evolution and which are added on by culture. Some behaviors come easy or (on the reverse) are hard to suppress. That's our instincts at work.
Some things come naturally, such as falling in love. They resist conditioning. Parents in Israeli kibbutzim were disappointed that their children didn't fall in love with their other kids in the kibbutz, as they expected their kids to do. The kids, however, preferred to fall for kids from other kibbutzim. The kids of a kibbutz were raised together, and their incest-avoidance instincts had kicked in. We're programmed not to pair bond with close relatives, and the kids had instinctively categorized the others in the kibbutz as kin. The phenomenon of love is notorious for thwarting social expectations. Your genes equipped you with powerful feelings associated with love precisely to allow you to resist social pressure and find the right mate for you.
Fighting with siblings; favoring some children over others; lying, cheating, and stealing; and (as kids) being afraid of strangers are easy behaviors to learn and hard ones to stamp out. Assessing probabilities, formulating logical syllogisms, and laboring at some job all day are hard to learn and easy to get wrong. Eating sweet and fatty things is easy to learn if they're at hand. Turning down tasty food to stick to a diet is hard.
Social constructivists posit a human brain subject to social conditioning. In reality, the brian is built to respond to social conditioning, but on its own terms. We'll gladly allow ourselves to be conditioned to speak the language everyone else is speaking. We'll resist the conditioning aimed at keeping us from the free life we're built to seek out.
Some things come naturally, such as falling in love. They resist conditioning. Parents in Israeli kibbutzim were disappointed that their children didn't fall in love with their other kids in the kibbutz, as they expected their kids to do. The kids, however, preferred to fall for kids from other kibbutzim. The kids of a kibbutz were raised together, and their incest-avoidance instincts had kicked in. We're programmed not to pair bond with close relatives, and the kids had instinctively categorized the others in the kibbutz as kin. The phenomenon of love is notorious for thwarting social expectations. Your genes equipped you with powerful feelings associated with love precisely to allow you to resist social pressure and find the right mate for you.
Fighting with siblings; favoring some children over others; lying, cheating, and stealing; and (as kids) being afraid of strangers are easy behaviors to learn and hard ones to stamp out. Assessing probabilities, formulating logical syllogisms, and laboring at some job all day are hard to learn and easy to get wrong. Eating sweet and fatty things is easy to learn if they're at hand. Turning down tasty food to stick to a diet is hard.
Social constructivists posit a human brain subject to social conditioning. In reality, the brian is built to respond to social conditioning, but on its own terms. We'll gladly allow ourselves to be conditioned to speak the language everyone else is speaking. We'll resist the conditioning aimed at keeping us from the free life we're built to seek out.