ABSTRACT
In an early anthropological study of an isolated Turkish village, Helling (1966) noted the prevalence of a parental teaching style based on demonstration, imitation, and motor learning rather than verbal explanation and reasoning. As a husband-wife team, they observed informal teaching-learning activities and reported, for example, the case of a father “teaching” his son how to cut wood by just doing it himself, to be imitated, with no explanation. The Hellings returned to the same village 20 years later and did not observe any appreciable change in this nonverbal orientation to “teaching by doing” (G. A. Helling, 1986, personal communication). Recently a colleague did some observations in the same general area and found that some things had changed. In particular, all the children attended school. Nevertheless the typical parental “teaching” style had not changed much. I commonly tell my students at a Turkish university about Hellings’s original observation and ask them whether it sounds familiar. They come up with more examples, usually not from their own lives but from what they have observed among “peasants” or “former peasants,” now urban shanty town dwellers.
