ABSTRACT
One significant aspect of cultural evolution is the extent to which a culture is learned without explicit teaching and the extent to which it is taught, complete with rule books, manuals, grammars, and the whole paraphernalia of formulated and coded statements. This chapter discusses one aspect of the borderline between teaching-that is, the explicit handling of materials that have been encoded for transmission and the kind of learning in which the learning child or adult is on his own in organizing new experience. It deals with two problems: the type and the degree of intervention in the transmission process by persons, objects, and symbolic notations. The complementary position of the teacher requires the careful provision of experience of process and product, the inclusion of abstraction, symbolization, and patterned analysis, and the more generalized experience of the uncoded and as yet uncodable elements through which the adult learner, like the child, can learn by empathy, imitation, and identification.
