Culture
In Indigenous Mayan communities of the Americas, children learn how to partake in adult activities through nonverbal communication. Children are able to learn in this manner due to their exposure to adult activities at a young age. At a young age, children intently observe and listen in on adult activities, and this helps provide them with a running knowledge on how to participate. As a result, when children take on adult activities for themselves the first time they do not need verbal communication in the form of directions from adults. They can learn how to do the adult activity themselves through physically participating in it. In fact, talk acts only as a supplement to engagement in an activity. For instance, when a child engages in adult activities, spoken communication can be used to explore ideas or discuss need-to-know information. Otherwise, caregivers and adults primarily help guide their children through an activity using non-verbal communication such as visual demonstration, gestures, gaze and touch.
Read more about this topic: Nonverbal Communication
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and culture of their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.”
—Henry David David (1817–1862)