More broadly, how do children’s culture get taught and spread from age group to age group, and why do they persist long after the children themselves become adults and have long forgotten them? Seems like no matter how many decades have passed, children still know Patty Cake, Mama jokes, they play tag and hop scotch, they make paper airplanes. Is it really as simple as 5th graders teaching 3rd graders ad infinitum?
In: Culture
>Is it really as simple as 5th graders teaching 3rd graders ad infinitum?
Surprisingly, yes! Nicaraguan Sign Language was actually entirely developed from school kids. Prior to deaf schools being established, deaf people were isolated from each other in Nicaragua. They had no one to communicate with. When deaf schools started bringing kids together, they wanted to communicate with eachother.
Because no sign language existed in that country, the kids just made it up! They passed it onto to younger children, who added to it and refined it, and then passed it on to younger kids, who continued to expand and refine. It didn’t take long either -10 to 20 years. It took a long time for the hearing adults working in the schools to really understand what the kids were doing on the playground. Because of this, Nicaraguan Sign Language is of particular interest to linguists. A similar, but less extensive thing happened on the US. For a period of time, educators and professionals believed sign language was bad and deaf children should be taught exclusively to lip read and speak English. So a lot of kids during that time learned sign language on the playground.
In a similar, less extreme way, this is why nursery rhymes and children’s stories can have regional variations. Like, where I grew up (in the late 80s and early 90s), I learned the ever-popular nursery song as “a tissue, a tissue, we all fall down.” In the US, I believe its typically “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” In other countries, the ‘a tissue/ashes’ part is other words or sounds.
Games can another good example, too. School children might play jump rope or elastics, but the specific rhyme they play to can be pretty regional, sometimes having deviated from the original so much so that it no longer makes sense but still gets passed on that way.
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